Fred Silverstein may be the country’s most experienced flooded-timber hunter. He has hunted the last 60-plus duck openers and has no plans of stopping—not when his camp is full of kids, grandkids, and in-laws who can’t wait to hunt beside him…
For the first time in years, things weren’t looking good for Fred Silverstein’s opening-day streak. Earlier that morning he’d borrowed a shotgun from the USO in Seoul, hitched a ride on an M35 deuce-and-a-half cargo truck, and whistled for a stop in the Korean countryside when he saw ducks dropping from the sky. Now he stood at the end of a dirt path, in front of a small stick hut, flapping his arms with his thumbs tucked into his armpits, and gesturing toward ricefields a couple of hundred yards away. The stooped, elderly farmer who’d answered his knock wasn’t sure what to make of the skinny Tennessee boy in Army fatigues, holding a shotgun and quacking like a duck. That was in 1962, and Silverstein hadn’t missed an opening-day duck hunt in 14 years.
As a kid, he hunted with his dad on Tennessee’s famed Reelfoot Lake. Through high school and college, he stalked the green timber and riverbottoms of west Tennessee and Arkansas. And as a soldier stationed stateside, getting a weekend pass to go home to duck country was no big deal. Then came the Bay of Pigs incident, and the 22-year-old Morse code specialist was shipped to the U.S. Army’s base outside Anjung-ri, South Korea. Duck hunting got significantly more difficult.
“He had to wonder what this idiot was doing,” Silverstein says, recalling that morning half a world away. “He pointed and said, ‘Go.’ At least, I took it as go, so off I went. No duck call, no decoys—but I was going to hunt. There was no such thing as a duck season over there, but it was opening day for me.”
If you give Silverstein credit for his South Korea opener, then this soft-spoken grandson of German immigrants, businessman (he still runs a large bathtub and shower manufacturing enterprise in west Tennessee), and lay rabbi has hunted 65 opening days in a row. He may have the longest, deepest, and most historic résumé of green timber hunting in America, especially in the lauded woods of Arkansas. He has hunted most of the most famous pieces of timber—Hurricane Hole, Bayou Meto, TNT, Bayou DeView. He has leased duck ground from the Cache River to the L’Anguille to the Hatchie River of west Tennessee. Silverstein hunted timber before anyone called it timber hunting. Before Duck Dynasty, $200 duck calls, and spinning-wing decoys. Before flat ground in Arkansas was worth more filled with water and ducks than soybeans and corn. Before hunting green timber was duck hunting’s big deal.
And at 74 years old, Silverstein is still hard at it. Most days during duck season, he’s in the woods with his extended family. The man knows the past and present of green timber hunting like few others. It’s the future that has him scratching his head.
