Bob Marshall grew up in what is now called “Old Metairie,” a suburb of New Orleans.
“I was born in Mississippi, but conceived in New Orleans — so I’m New Orleans-bred but not born,” Marshall explained.
He learned hunting and fishing on his own.
“He (Marshall’s father) was so not into it. His idea of an outdoors adventure was the Santa Fe Opera,” Marshall said.
Marshall’s early outdoors experiences came with neighborhood friends who also had non-hunting and fishing fathers.
His first hunting was with a BB gun.
“We got songbirds and other varmints,” he said. “A buddy of my dad owned a restaurant. We would take our kill over there and accumulate it in the freezer. His cook would make a big gumbo.
“There were four or five in our gang, and three of them really like to fish. We would ride our bikes to the (Lake Pontchartrain) lakefront. We spent a lot of time there, and would fish with fresh shrimp or shad rigs. When I got some money I would buy a Bingo.
“We caught all sorts of fish: speckled trout, flounders, sharks, a lot of croakers and some white trout. We would camp out there — make a tent with a blanket.”
Always an avid reader, Marshall remembers fighting with his sisters over the newspaper. There wasn’t much published, he said, about the outdoors back then. Coverage in the Times Picayune limited to a once-a-week column by McFadden Duffy.
In his early teens he subscribed to Outdoor Life magazine.
“I found out how to kill elephants in Africa and catch walleyes and rainbow trout, but there wasn’t anything in it about hunting and fishing down here,” he said. “With my interest just naturally being in the outdoors, I kept that in mind.”
He developed some outdoors skills as a Boy Scout, but his horizons opened up when he became old enough to drive his dad’s vehicle. He and his friends began renting boats at liveries — Benny Larman’s at Irish Bayou, Tite’s Place in Slidell and Campo’s at Shell Beach.
“We usually didn’t have the money to rent a motor,” he said, “so we would just rent a boat and row.”
One summer, when Marshall was 14 or 15, his father commuted to the Mississippi Test Facility, now called the John C. Stennis Space Center. Every day for a month and a half, the elder Marshall would drop his son and his son’s friend, Vincent Pirano, off at Benny Larman’s.
Every day, the pair would row to where the tressels train bridge met the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain and fish. Besides using fresh market shrimp as bait on rods and reels, the youngsters set crab traps and bow hunted (“I learned about it in Outdoor Life,” he said) for channel mullet, black drum and sheepshead.
At 15 years old, he took a job at a Winn-Dixie grocery store.
“It cut into my fishing time,” he noted pensively, but he had more money with which to hunt and fish.
Then in 1967, he graduated from high school and college beckoned.
