Yesterday we looked some of the people who have made modern archery what it is today. We continue that story today with a look at two more pioneers, Early Hoyt and Chuck Saunders.
Earl Hoyt
If Tom Jennings can be regarded as the father of the compound bow, Earl Hoyt is certainly its great uncle. His innovations and inventions over the years have shaped compound bow shooting into what it is today.
Hoyt developed an interest in archery when he was in high school. He toyed with shooting both then and after he got out of school, but never very seriously. Graduating from high school at the beginning of the Depression, he went to work as a carpenter for his father, who was a contractor.
He gradually moved into drawing house plans and designing houses. In those days, he says, only one archery magazine was being published, Ye Sylvan Archer . Earl read every issue until it went out of production during the war years.
Ye Sylvan Archer led Hoyt straight into the archery industry. As a way to make a little extra money, he made some arrows and advertised them in the magazine. They sold, but he was busy with his job in construction and with taking college courses and lost interest in archery.
After college, Hoyt went to work in the young aircraft industry. His interest in archery rekindled, and he began an archery club at the McDonnell Douglas Corporation.
"By this time I was making all my own equipment," he says. "Then I started making equipment for the other members of the club."
Finally he decided he wanted to build archery equipment full time and quit his job.
"For the first couple of years I thought it was a big mistake," he says now. "I had had a very good job, and it was pretty slim pickings for a while."
At the time he only made stick bows, and he puzzled over why all bows had a lower limb that was shorter than the upper one. Finally, drawing on his engineering background, he figured out that on early bows made of natural materials, the position of the arrow and the grip caused a greater strain on the lower limb than on the upper. Shortening the lower limb protected the bow from damage, and the design persisted into "modern" archery.
Armed with this insight, Earl made his first bow with equal-length limbs. At this point, bowmakers still were building "self" bows-- bows made of a single piece of Oregon yew or Osage Orange. For his second innovation in the industry, Earl figured out how to split a shorter piece of wood into two equal pieces, splice them end-to-end, and build a bow with virtually identical limbs.
In the 1940s, the introduction of fiberglass revolutionized bow building. Now limbs could be built of composite materials. And that gave Earl his next innovation. Until this time, all bows were just straight sticks with "broomstick" handles. Working with the new composite materials, Hoyt developed a pistol grip that made bows much easier to hold and shoot.
Hoyt's inventive genius found its full flower with the introduction of compound bows. He created and patented such developments as a fletching jig and the stabilizer. Many of his original designs continue in use today.
He sold the original company, still known as Hoyt Archery, in 1978. For several years he maintained a consulting relationship with the company. But he wasn't content with retirement, and began another company, Sky Archery. Through Sky Archery, Hoyt has continued his relationship with his original company, still producing components for some Hoyt bows and several other companies.
Chuck Saunders
Until his death a few years back, Chuck Saunders remained a vital and innovative force in the archery industry for many decades.
As a child on a farm in Iowa, Saunders was fascinated by Indians. He made his own bow, and took some reeds for arrows. At the time, that was the extent of his interest in archery.
But in his early 1920s, he lived in Chicago during the Depression. The park district where he lived held a cabinet-making class. The district furnished the equipment and had lumber available for sale; participants could make whatever they wanted to.
"I was down there one evening killing time," Chuck said in one of his last interviews. "I thought I might make a coffee table. And they had plans there for a bow."
He used the plans to create a bow of lemonwood. He learned to shoot it at a range adjacent to the workshop, and became fascinated with what he terms the "engineering problems" of archery. Building on nothing more than some high-school physics, he began building bows and experimenting with them. As he did, he became more and more convinced that he wanted to enter the archery business. So he invented a feather grinder, a little machine to shape feathers into the proper shape for fletching.
"It worked all right," Saunders said, "but I didn't like the dust." He did a few feathers for himself, and decided rather quickly that wasn't the part of the archery business he wanted to join.
The he began looking at backstops. He cut some cordgrass off the Iowa farm where he grew up, and began experimenting with making targets. After several weeks of puzzling over the best way to sew the cordgrass into a target, he hit upon the same basic method the company still uses today to wind a mat.
"On a handmade mat, you basically start at the center and make a long rope," he said. "Then you wind it until it gets big enough, and all the time you're sewing it together."
He remembered that he was driving a 1936 Pontiac on an overpass in Chicago when he suddenly realized there was another way to do it. He built a machine in the basement of the apartment building where he lived. Since he didn't have any electricity in the basement, he turned the machine by hand with a pipe wrench.
"I was so concerned that I wouldn't get the mat tight enough. When I was done it was just about like a dart board it was so hard," he recalled.
Saunders moved his machine back to Iowa, and placed an ad for his targets in Ye Sylvan Archer. The month before his ad was to run, he saw an almost identical ad by the Ben Pearson Company. He was crushed. But after four or five years, Pearson turned to other things and Saunders Archery had an exclusive product.
After World War II Chuck moved Saunders Archery to Columbus, Nebraska, to be nearer the cordgrass resource he was using; shortly afterward the firm began to diversify. Today Saunders Archery still is in Nebraska and still sells a wide variety of archery accessories.
These, then, are some of the grand men of archery, the leaders who have made the field what it is today. Without them, archery still would be a minor sport, a historic and esoteric art practiced only in physical education classes around the country. Instead, archery is a dynamic, growing activity not only in the United States but in many other countries around the globe.
Copyright (c) 1997 Carolee Boyles-Sprenkel. All rights reserved.
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