Union members carry on tradition of hunting, fishing

You’ll learn about the family members and friends who taught them to hunt or fish. You’ll learn about their passion for their sport and about their love of the outdoors. You’ll also learn how that union job is so important to maintaining a lifestyle that provides time and resources to be able to get out there and hunt or fish.

Jerry Hanson, Coon Rapids, is a member of Cement Masons Local 633 whose passion is chasing after his hounds who are chasing after a wily fox or coyote.

Hanson learned to hunt with hounds from his father, Gerald R. Hanson, who worked as a union diesel mechanic for Glendenning Motorways trucking company. “My dad was good at picking hounds,” Hanson recalls.

Union member Barbara Linton shows off a prize catch.

When Hanson was growing up in East Bethel in the 1960s, “we would turn the dogs loose and start hunting right from the house. At that time it was a rural atmosphere.” The neighbors knew the bark of each dog and “they had no qualms of a fox hound crossing the corner of their property,” he recalls. “It was a community atmosphere.”

Hanson began hunting with his dad as a grade-schooler, learning to work with the dogs and even going hunting on cross-country skis.

Hanson, now 58, graduated from St. Francis High in 1970, spent a year at St. Cloud State and then a year at Anoka Technical College. He is a former member of the Laborers union. He later found work for a masonry contractor.

When Hanson eventually joined the Cement Masons union in 1997, he said, “it was a better deal” than working non-union.

“After a while, I had the health benefits, I had a retirement program.” As a union Cement Mason, he found, the job site was safer, too. He earned more — overtime on Saturdays — and he soon was able to buy his Coon Rapids home.

“Your job is not your life,” Hanson emphasizes. “I’ve always thought your job is something you can do so you can live.”

Hanson shares his excitement about hunting with hounds, a sport which he believes is not well-understood.

You turn your dog loose, Hanson explains, then listen. “He’s running. He’s talking.” The dog’s bark will sound different when he or she picks up the scent, or sees the coyote, or gives chase, or whether the coyote is walking or running. The dog’s bark will signal the direction it’s heading.

The dog’s bark also will sound different if giving chase to a coyote or a red fox or a bobcat. The hunter needs to pay keen attention what his dog is saying. “The voice of the dog is the tie between the dog and the man,” Hanson says. “You get this working relationship with them.”

“I’m primarily a coyote hunter now,” Hanson says. “It’s not my preference. It’s what’s out there to hunt.”

Hanson notes that coyote are very abundant in Minnesota — game regulations permit hunting coyote all year — and controlling the coyote population benefits the deer population.

Hunting coyote is a challenge, Hanson says, for the coyote is “the smartest animal in North America.” When hunting coyote with hounds, Hanson notes, “you’re not hunting something that’s unaware… They’re a thinking animal. You can see it…You can take pride in being the hunter.”

While hunting dogs get to hunt only once in a while, Hanson notes, a coyote hunts every day and knows the terrain. “He’s dancing across the prairie.”

“I like to get out there and try to out-think the coyote,” Hanson says. “If you don’t, he’s going to keep his hide.”

Hanson is a former president of the Minnesota Trail Hound Association, which works promote hunting with hounds and to advocate for state game laws to promote good sportsmanship.

While Jerry Hanson is happy chasing after his hounds with a rifle in hand, another union member, Barbara Linton, finds she is most content to sit at the end of the dock with a fishing pole.

Linton, Bloomington, works at HealthPartners as a medical office assistant at a call center. She is a member of Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 12.

“Fishing is very relaxing,” says Linton, 61. “I call it my therapy.”

“I fish a lot at the end of the dock,” she relates. This spring, on Monday night of Memorial Day weekend — the opening weekend of bass fishing — “I had my line out. I knew I had something good.”

She caught a 3.6 pound largemouth bass, 18-1/2 inches long. “It was very fun to catch him.”

“He’s too beautiful a fish,” her friend Duane Nygren told her, encouraging her to release the fish. “I threw him back.”

“That’s a pretty nice bass,” she reflects — the biggest she’s ever caught. “And I’ve caught a lot of bass.”

“They’re good eating,” she adds, “early in the spring.”

“I fish a lot,” Linton relates, but she did not grow up fishing. She grew up in Richfield and graduated from Richfield High School in 1967.

She married Vergean Linton — a Coca Cola driver and Teamsters union member — had kids and bought lakeshore. Her husband taught her to fish.

But, she readily relates, “my husband baited my hook and took the fish off.”

Her husband died 20 years ago.
“When he died, if I wanted to fish, I had to take the fish off and bait my own hook,” Linton says. She didn’t fish for ten years.

When she eventually started fishing again, she confesses, she handled the fish with a rubber glove. Then she advanced to using her bare hands. “I was just kind of being gutsy,” she says. “It’s not worse than changing diapers and I did a lot of that for many years.”

She recalls reasoning: “I’m going to eat this, so why can’t I touch it?”

She met her friend Duane Nygren at a dance class a few years ago and began fishing a lot with him at his lake place — and he taught her how to take her fish off the hook.

“You have to learn how to take a fish off a hook,” she says. “It doesn’t come naturally.” And, she notes, “you don’t want to hurt them.”

Linton says sunfish are her favorite fish to eat — but bass are her favorite fish to catch, “because bass jump out of the water.”

Linton has four grown children and six grandchildren. She taught one of her daughters to fish. “We all sit at the end of the dock for hours and hours.”

“I’ve caught most of my fish at the end of the dock,” Linton says. “I fish into the end of October when the weather starts to turn on us.”

“It relaxes me. It’s really quite mindless because you’re watching a bobber. It takes all your frustrations away. You’re not thinking about any stresses with the rest of your life. It makes me happy and I love it.”

Over the years, Linton worked doing childcare in her home, as a housekeeper in a nursing home, then in medical insurance billing, and then 10 years ago began working at HealthPartners, which was her first union job.

“I would recommend being in a union,” she says. The pay is better, she says, and “I’ve never had such great benefits.”

“Anything you have a question about, you go to the union book and the union steward,” Linton adds. “The union — it kind of protects you.”

With her HealthPartners job, Linton is able to head north to the lake and fish just about every weekend.

Her friend Duane Nygren also is a union member in the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees.

“With the economy today, a person can really be thankful for working in a union,” Linton says. “I believe in them, that’s for sure.”

Steve Share edits the Labor Review, the official publication of the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation. Learn more at www.minneapolisunions.org