Two friends are gone but leave conservation legacies
Fred Wightman, Pat Daly each had impacts on Oklahoma conservation efforts
Conservation lost two champions this week. Just a few days apart, both left us too soon in life. Pat Daly, 72, was taken by leukemia on Thursday. Fred Wightman, 75, fell to pneumonia Saturday morning.
Both men committed to issues and projects and left their impact on this state’s woods, waters, and wildlife. The loss for conservation this week is enormous. Both were people I met in the course of my writing and who I would later come to call friends.
I write this on Saturday, Dec. 4, a few hours after Fred’s wife, Randi, posted on Facebook that he was gone. The news hit me like a stone to the chest.
As I write this, it strikes me that I have seldom uttered his name solo unless we were face-to-face. It was always “Fred and Randi.” (pronounced Rondy). My good friend, hunting guide and NatureWorks board member Jack Morris introduced us at my first NatureWorks banquet 13 years ago.
Fred had been a popular teacher and tennis and swimming coach at Central High School and Randi was the daughter of the late Harold Stuart, who I knew of at that time as the first conservationist honored with a NatureWorks bronze wildlife monument.
Fred and Randi carried on that tradition of conservation support as dynamic duo for waters and wildlife, and for other community causes as well. They were sponsor patrons of every monument erected, I believe, and they were regulars at the annual art show.
My wife, DeAnna, and I were still very new in town and hardly knew anyone in the room. Sitting with Fred and Rondi was a barrel of laughs. They made it anything but your typical rubber-chicken banquet outing. We counted them among our NatureWorks crowd favorites for years, which in many respects is to say we would enjoy seeing them at the annual local family reunion of local conservationists.
In 2018 the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation named the Wightmans Conservation Landowners of the Year for the prairie restoration work completed on their 1,750-acre Osage County ranch.
The ranch, and their solar-powered home on the hill overlooking the spread, are nothing short of incredible; the land and pond reclamation work performed was nothing short of Herculean.
Fred and Randi managed to duck the camera for that story and put ranch manager Pat Farragher in the spotlight for doing the hard work. But the more I talked to Pat the more it sounded like Fred and Randi were anything but hands-off landowners. They definitely got their hands dirty too—and scratched up and muddy.
They owned the place, their name was on the award, and they also did a lot of work, but they still pointed my notebook and camera where they personally felt the public recognition should go. They’re good folks like that.
A year or so more had passed when Fred invited me back to the ranch for hunting and fishing and wildlife photography. It was an incredibly generous offer, and one that allowed us more time together.
Fred loaded my Lab, Whiskey, and me into in an ATV and took us on a pond-to-pond tour of the place. He had a bum leg at the time so he sat in his buggy while we shared stories and laughs about fishing adventures. I made some casts, and caught a few fish too, thanks to Fred telling me where the fish waited.
He was truly happy to share his time, see the fish caught and release and share this special place in the world they restored. We talked often about the birds, especially the many bluebird houses, the quail, turkey and deer and what fish had been caught of late.
I especially will miss his sense of humor.
One day I drove the two-track up the hill from the ponds toward the Wightmans’ house and got “stuck” behind a crazy bobwhite quail that would not get out of the road. I slowly crept along as it ran in front of the truck until I thought it must be under the truck, and only then would the silly thing suddenly flush up in front of the grill.
But it would only fly about 10 yards and land in the road again. I honked and yelled and it only moved when my truck “pushed” it.
“You wouldn’t believe this goofy quail!” I told Fred when I finally got up the hill.
“Yes,” he chuckled. “We call him Fred.”
Speaking of goofy. As I think of my buddy Pat Daly I see a pair of his pants folded on a shelf here in my office, awaiting a hem.
Pat was parceling out gear he didn’t expect to use again of late, and he and posted that he had a lightly used quality upland vest and pants if anyone could use an upgrade. I mostly wanted the vest, but another of Pat’s buddies, Kelly Brown, beat me to it.
Pat sent a text to say I was just a hair slow, but noted that the guy I call “the other KB” was a bit short for the pants if I still wanted those.
At 6-foot-2, Pat was 5 inches taller than me, and honestly I think the other KB is no shorter than I, but it turned out Pat and I at least shared a similar girth.
And so Doubleshot Coffee Co., where he often occupied a table and set up a mobile fly-tying box, was the site of one of our last meetings. He bestowed upon me the too-long pants—and threw in a green camouflage dove hunting vest and a couple streamers he had just tied, for the next time I might toss a fly line at the waters of the Arkansas River.
I wish I could go back and change the circumstances, grab a coffee, and sit and talk with him. But I had more errands to run and Whiskey, still recovering from a trip to the vet, waiting in the back of my SUV on a warm day.
I first met Pat in 2017, when the Conservation Coalition of Oklahoma named him Conservationists of the Year and I wrote a column about him. I could not have imagined that four years later I would be working for the Coalition and writing an obituary for that impassioned, energetic man.
His passion for conservation was infectious even if sometimes he became a bit of a pain—but in a good way. He truly cared, and deeply. He did not let my phone line grow cold and he pitched stories even when he had to know there was no way I’d be able to write something.
Likewise, whenever I had questions about background on an issue or looked for fishing tips to share he always called back in short order and he was generous with his time.
As he waited on a Life Flight to MD Anderson late Monday he sent out a group text to his fellow Trout Unlimited Oklahoma Chapter 420 board members, of which I am one.
“Bummer,” he started the announcement he advanced leukemia, was waiting on a Life Flight and the outcome “doesn’t look great.” But he was sending the note to make sure someone would take over his TU holiday party planning duties and the arranging of guest speakers for the next few monthly meetings.
“Thanks all, doctor is here so gotta go. Ps I’ll be mostly off line, for quite awhile,” he wrote.
Leukemia took Pat from us on Thursday morning, Dec. 2.
Who on Earth would think of taking care of volunteer conservation group board details as they’re waiting for their Life Flight to a cancer treatment facility?
Pat Daly would, because he made a commitment.