Baseball LIFE D WORDS BY DAVID CLAYBOURN
Gone fishin ... and writin
Luke Clayton was a land survey chief with a wife and children when he got a promising idea while driving on a highway across Lake Bob Sandlin .
" There ought to be some way I could make more money ," said Clayton .
His idea was to combine his love of the outdoors with a love of writing .
So he went to a newspaper in his hometown of Mesquite and told the editor that he " loved the outdoors , hunting and fishing , what can we do ?"
He got a side job writing a weekly outdoor column in 1985 for $ 50 a month for that Mesquite newspaper .
" My first article was on Lake Fork fishing ," he said .
Clayton ' s been writing outdoor columns ever since and his words now appear in nearly 50 newspapers across the state . He ' s also branched out to other media . He ' s written or co-written four books . He ' s written for magazines such as Fur , Fish and Game , North American Outdoorsman , Crossbow Magazine , North American Bowhunter , North American Deer Hunter , Boar Hunter Magazine and even the Texas Almanac . He ' s done radio shows and a weekly TV show on Carbon TV and now his radio shows are going on podcasts that can be heard on Spotify , Pod Bean , Apple music , I Heart Radio and other locations .
Clayton developed a love for the outdoors while growing in the Dimple community near Clarksville and the Red River in Northeast Texas . His dad Fred Clayton owned a country store and later started a chicken farm that would include up to 14,000 broiler chickens at a time .
His father died when Luke was 13 so he and his mother moved to Mesquite and then to other cities . He attended school at Houston Lamar for a time but said he felt like an " outcast ."
He felt much more at home back then visiting his Uncle Papa Dinkins for a week at a time in South Texas .
That ' s where his love of writing started to take off .
" I would take a pencil or a pen and write on a Big Chief tablet ," said Clayton . " I ' d write four or five Big Chief pages telling what happened that day . Papa would mail it back home ."
He took a journalism class at Mesquite High School , where he graduated in 1968 . Writing was something that " seemed natural " for him to do .
" I ' m a pretty good storyteller ," he
GREENVILLE LIFE 22 SUMMER 2024