Joe, I hope this is alright to post on your thread.

I took the liberty to copy this from another site. In Bill's own words a brief history of how he got his start in the archery industry and progressed.


Many moons ago I was a naïve Wisconsin kid fresh out of college with two burning ambitions – to work in the archery industry and to live in the mountains. From what I could see, the one opportunity in the country where I could realize both things was to go to work for Doug Kittredge and the Kittredge Bow Hut in Mammoth Lakes, California.

Mammoth Lakes was a scenic little ski town nestle at 8,000 feet into the Sierra Nevada Mountains about an hour south of Yosemite National Park. At the time, the Kittredge Bow Hunt was one of the largest mail-order archery houses in the country.

I had previously met Doug Kittredge through the Pope and Young Club, and I pursued him like a birddog after a quail until he finally offered me a job as a shipping clerk in his archery operation in the summer of 1976. Within a year, I was running the entire archery operation for Doug and served as the Bow Hut's General Manager from 1977 through 1985. I've got countless fond memories of those years and through Doug was introduced to many of the most influential people in archery at the time, including Fred Bear, Roy Hoff, Earl Hoyt, Jim Easton, Jack Howard, Rube Powell, Hugh Rich, Tom Jennings, Gail Martin, Jim Dougherty and many more. That experience firmly launched my career in archery.

In 1985, Doug sold the archery portion of his Mammoth Lakes operation to a firm in Visalia, California and I moved on to a sales job with PSE in Tucson, Arizona. About that same time, Easton bought a small but respected recurve-oriented company called Hoyt Archery from Earl and Ann Hoyt and moved that business to Salt Lake City, Utah. Easton ran me down in Arizona and subsequently hired me and a few others to get the new Hoyt off its feet. From 1986 to 1994 I served as the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Hoyt, building that company up from almost scratch to a real powerhouse in the archery industry. Then in 1994 Bear Archery approached me with an offer I just couldn't refuse and I moved to Gainesville to become their VP of Sales and Marketing, a position I held until 1998. At that point my wife and I, both weary of the corporate life, broke away and founded our own publishing company, launching a trade (business) magazine called Inside Archery which quickly became the number one trade magazine in the archery industry and later also Bowhunt America, one of the fastest-growing consumer bowhunting magazines in the country.

And all that happened because of the experiences and encouragement afforded me by Doug Kittredge while I worked for him at the Bow Hut all those years ago. I wouldn't trade those early years in Mammoth Lakes for anything.

I also remember the day when a guy walked in the doors of the old Bow Hut with a pristine 1959 Bear Kodiak that he wanted to trade toward a new bow. I bought that OLD bow from him for $50...and that first, old bow sent me down a path of appreciating and collecting vintage bowhunting gear that still plagues me today!

Bill Krenz
Colorado Springs

Good reading....  

Very nice

Great pics and read guys. Ordering from the Bow Hut brings back fond memories from my youth from money I earned picking cherries in the summer on my parents farm.  I remember getting a Keen-Kill broadhead sharpener from them that I never figured out how to get broadheads sharp with, but everything else was top notch.

thanks for sharing.

Thanks for sharing these nice information of a milestone person of the sport.

great pics.thanks for sharing,steve

another stalwart of our sport gone, he will certainly be missed.

I read many of his stories in different magazines. I always enjoyed them, he will be missed. Thanks for sharing .......

Prayers to his family...

Lanier

I remember seeing the picture of the coues deer in bowhunter mag.  I thought that was so cool that he took the animal with a recurve.  At the time I really did not realize how much of a trophy coues that animal is.  Always enjoyed his writing and photos are very classy.  Enjoy the eternal campfire with all the others that passed before you, brother of the bow.