“Forrest always had an arsenal of funny
homespun jokes. I don’t know where he got
them, but he would keep me laughing when
we used to fly around putting on fishing
seminars,” recalls tournament great and
Ranger pro Denny Brauer. “The seminars
themselves and seeing how Forrest interact-
ed with people was really a valuable experi-
ence for me when I first started out. He
would always carry a notebook with him,
and if somebody asked him for a hat or to
check on something or anything like that, he
would get their phone number or address
and make a note to himself to follow up
when he had the chance. He treated every-
body equally important, and Forrest had a
way of making people feel like they were see-
ing an old friend when they went up to talk
with him.”
Closer to home, signposts that they
passed this way aren’t hard to find.
Besides the Forrest and Nina Wood
Preschool in Flippin, the Forrest and
Nina Wood State Park Access below the
Bull Shoals Dam and the Forrest L.
Wood Crowley’s Ridge Nature Center
near Jonesboro, there are the occasional
billboards along the local highways
that associate them with Ranger Boats.
Our hopscotching tour of White
River Country concluded, we return to
where we started: the Forrest L. Wood
Outdoor Sports Gallery off Highway
178. The museum sees double-duty as
an office and houses numerous awards,
trophies, souvenirs, curiosities and
photos of the presidents, governors,
celebrities and pros that Forrest and
Nina have known and befriended. This
treasury of memories also includes a
sizeable collection of Forrest’s buck and
bull elk mounts and plaques acknowl-
edging the couple’s inductions into var-
ious halls of fame, which take up most
of the floor and wall space in the two-
story building.
And the huge Ranger Boats plant is
across the road. If there’s one singular
memento of Forrest and Nina’s time on
this planet, Ranger is it. It reminds them,
and passersby, that in their hands it
became an earthmover and an empire
builder of a company that helped ele-
vate bass fishing into something special.
Former tournament great and current
TV show host Hank Parker has long been
one of Nina's favorite Ranger pros, but it
never kept her from fussing at him when she
felt it was deserved. At one tournament that
took place in the early ’80s, Parker weighed
in a limit, but explained to the weighmaster
that he might have had more weight had he
not had to deal with boat trouble that robbed
him of fishing time.
After he left the stage, he was confronted
by a concerned Nina, who asked him what
kind of boat trouble he had experienced.
“Well, my trolling motor kept going out
and giving me fits,” answered Parker.