First Place Category 13 – Excellence In Craft contest

“Coastal Bend Icon,” Corpus Christi Caller-Times, April 27, 2014  

By   David Sikes  

CORPUS CHRISTI – Sporting a shiny badge on his chest, a new set of khakis and an embroidered patch his wife had sewn on his shoulder, Carl Webb pulled over to the side of a road on his first day as a Texas game warden.

Hanging from his belt was a single-action .45 with a six-inch barrel he’d purchased from a pawnshop. With hat in hand, the dark-haired Webb approached a young Seadrift family that was fishing along the shore of Copano Bay with cane poles. Webb, with a face that nearly always seemed on the verge of smile, struck up a conversation with the father. The man’s wife and their two barefoot children stopped fishing to watch.

Nearby, Webb noticed a small package wrapped in white butcher paper from the local meat market.

The family was using tiny scraps of meat and beef fat for bait to catch pin perch or whatever they could. Webb suspected by their modest appearance they were fishing for their next meal.

“May I see your fishing license, sir,” Webb politely asked as he had been trained to do at the Texas A&M Game Warden Academy in College Station.

Looking at his feet, the man humbly explained he was out of work and had no money to buy a license. He was simply trying to feed his family one of the few ways he knew how.

This was Webb’s earliest and most memorable lesson on the practical definition of discretion as it pertains to the enforcement of game and fish regulations.

Webb dutifully explained the law to the gentleman. Then he shook the man’s hand, wished his family luck and walked back to his car. As he drove away with a full book of citation slips, Texas’ 204th game warden wondered whether he had chosen the right profession.

At the end of the day, Webb called his superior in Rockport to discuss his first day on the job and the self-doubt it brought.

“I told him if I was supposed to fine those folks, then maybe I’m not cut out to be a game warden,” Webb recalled recently over a cup of coffee at the home of mutual friend Jack Rohde. “I told the captain I couldn’t make any money as a game warden, because if I had given them a ticket I would have paid the fine myself.”

Webb’s boss told him not to worry. His job was to catch the bad guys.

“He told me I did the right thing,” Webb said.

That was in 1959. Webb spent the next 20 years catching outlaws and poachers who threatened the public resources of the Coastal Bend. His first big bust came soon enough when he caught a bunch of out-of-towners killing redhead ducks on Espiritu Santo Bay. Duck season was closed.

He found them in possession of 27 birds. They pleaded guilty before a Seadrift justice of the peace, who fined the men a hefty $1,300.

One of the violators seemed particularly concerned about whether the incident might result in negative publicity from the media. Turns out the man was a senior vice president for Ducks Unlimited, Webb said.

Nobody is certain how the story leaked. But Webb said details of his first bust appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

Afterward, an agent from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service offered the junior game warden a job in Albuquerque, N.M. He didn’t consider the offer for a moment.

EARLY LIFE

Webb had grown up on an Oklahoma farm. His mother died when he was 7. At 10 he moved to Benavides with his father. When World War II was raging overseas, Webb was virtually living alone and playing high school football for the Eagles. He was 15 and too young to enlist.

But in 1944, he lied about his age and joined the Merchant Marine Academy. As a cook on a tanker, he traveled to New York, South America, Cuba and other exotic ports of call.

When the war ended, Webb landed in Aransas Pass. He worked as a carpenter, helping to build the Union Carbide plant in Seadrift. He tried shift work at the plant and even raised pheasants for a while. Then in 1952, during the Korean War, he was called into service. Before he could jump out of an airplane with the 101st Airborne Division, he was sidetracked to Japan and the war ended.

Webb returned to the Coastal Bend, where he and a sister opened the Tivoli Drug Store and Restaurant. By 1958, Webb’s attention again turned to adventure, leading him to the Texas Game and Fish Commission.

Only two years a game warden and nature issued Webb his first transfer. Hurricane Carla destroyed his family’s Seadrift home, so he relocated to Corpus Christi, a hub of illegal gillnetting activity.

During Webb’s first tour of the Upper Laguna Madre, he spotted an illegal gillnet. The game warden from Kingsville told him there were 97 individual gillnetters in the area and two game wardens between Corpus Christi and Kingsville.

“It was a wild place back then,” Webb said. “And when I got there, every one of them gillnetters had a boat that could outrun mine. It was 100 horsepower versus 40 horsepower.”

First thing Webb did was ask for a faster boat to replace the 32-foot homemade tub that made outlaws laugh.

At the time, the game and fish commission was notoriously underfunded. Wardens were expected to use their own vehicles, while the state reimbursed them 6 cents a mile. When traveling on assignments they got $4 a day for meals and $8 for lodging.

The ever-thrifty Webb, with a wife and two children, often slept in the back seat of his car and always kept handy a supply of Vienna sausage and Spam so he could pocket the per diem.

In 1962, local game wardens got their first government-issued vehicle, a boat powered by twin 100s and an airboat that topped out at 70 mph.

Poachers beware. The state was becoming serious about illegal netting.

CHASE IS ON

Webb began chasing gillnetters at night, sometimes day and night. Outlaws were not accustomed to this. Most netters had never before used nighttime running lights on their boats, as required by law. They had nothing to worry about when they could outrun the good guys.

But now any boat out after dark without lights was subject to Webb’s determined reach.

Soon it became clear why an interviewer had asked whether Webb was afraid of the dark during his initial job interview. They also asked whether he was afraid of anyone. The answer to both was no.

Webb found himself in his element during the gillnet wars of the 1960s. His first big assignment came in 1961, when he investigated a known gillnetting operation out of Flour Bluff. The owner of a fish house drove a Lincoln Continental and ran a 100 horsepower shallow-running skiff.

The stakeout lasted 30 consecutive nights. It was a cat-and-mouse game that stretched from Flour Bluff to Baffin Bay. Webb recalls sitting in his boat behind a well head near Pita Island. It was 34 degrees at daylight.

Webb ran his boat to intercept the poacher, whose vessel was laden with nylon netting.

Webb knew the man. Their exchange was cordial, if not somewhat friendly.

“Well hello, Mr. Webb,” the unsurprised man said. “You want to help me load this gillnet into your boat?”

The fine was disappointing, $100 plus $17.50 for court costs.

One band of netters rented a house in Flour Bluff, not far from the Webb family home. Webb believes they would only set their nets when his car was in the driveway. So Webb outsmarted the simpletons by asking a friend to drive him to the boat launch. He confiscated two gillnets that evening.

The same band of poachers offered to buy the Webb family a new television set if the game warden would look the other way for 30 days. The market price of trout and redfish must have been high at the time.

Eventually, Webb installed a radio at his house, so his wife could forward poaching reports that were called in by phone. Webb spent much time patrolling the Laguna Madre, making his presence known. He cannot remember how many times he ran aground before learning the whereabouts of shoals and shallow spots.

He once removed more than 200,000 feet of illegal netting stretched between the King Ranch shoreline and the Intracoastal Waterway.

Another poacher stretched 2,228 feet of gillnet in the Laguna one foggy night. When he appeared before a judge, the man claimed he thought he had set his nets in Nueces Bay, where gillnetting was legal at the time. He even hired a lawyer to argue the case, Webb said. The judge didn’t buy it and fined him $500. The attorney took another $500 and Webb took the net. The man had had enough of Webb. He moved to Seadrift, Webb learned later.

In 1963, Webb took advantage of a Texas Parks & Wildlife program that trained wardens to be Conservation Officers. Webb was one of 20 officers chosen for the community outreach program. In exchange he got paid an extra $30 a month.

Thus began Webb’s public speaking career. He promoted conservation, fish and game management to Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis Clubs and to the ladies of the Ocean Drive Garden Club.

After a gripping presentation titled “The Trail of the Whitetail,” which Webb said was received well by the garden club, he got a call from one of the ladies.

She was peering through a telescope across Corpus Christi Bay when she spotted five small skiffs trailing a larger boat. She thought they were up to no good.

Indeed they were. The men had set out a strike-net and were illegally catching trout. By the time Webb arrived, they had caught and begun cleaning about 1,300 illegal fish.

They were not happy to see a game warden. Webb asked the five men to help him load their nets onto his boat. They refused.

He made them sit atop the stinky pile of netting for the boat ride to the T-head. The judge was lenient, charging them only $25 and $17.50 in court costs. Plus, he let them keep their net.

Two weeks later, the lady called again with a similar report. This time Webb came upon four men. A fifth he found hiding on the big boat. This time he gave them a choice, knowing the legal stakes were higher.

“If I have to load this net myself, then somebody’s going to jail,” Webb told the men.

Of course, they helped load the net. Nobody went to jail but the judge levied the maximum fine and Webb confiscated the net.

All this time, Webb’s son Cliff was watching, listening and learning lessons about crime and punishment through his father’s exploits. During the elder Webb’s Laguna Madre patrols, he sometimes would drop off his young son on a spoil island so he could fish on his own.

Webb takes no credit for Cliff’s angling prowess, which is well known in the region and beyond. He does, however, accept some credit for his son’s ethics.

POACHING TALES

The elder Webb’s stories reflect the wild-west days of the Coastal Bend fishing culture. But he also carries with him some impressive stories of epic inland poaching.

A memorable bust occurred during a white-winged dove hunt. Webb watched a group of Louisiana men down more birds than the law allowed. They were hiding the birds with the intent to take them home.

By now, Webb had learned to bargain with outlaws to his advantage. According to Webb’s count, the men were 97 doves over their limit. But Webb suspected there were more.

“I asked them if there were any more birds,” Webb told me. “And I told them if I found them without their help, somebody was going to jail.

“I had those guys searching the spare tires, radiator, fenders, everywhere.”

The judge asked the men how much cash they had. And then he told them their fine equaled that amount.

Webb and his game wardens cleaned the birds and brought them to a Catholic orphanage. Back then Webb said needy folks in the community received most confiscated game and fish. And all of it was cleaned and dressed by off duty game wardens, Webb said.

Another longtime tradition was the annual YO Ranch orphans hunt, which was supported by local outdoors writer and close friend Roy Swann.

Webb said Swann wrote dozens of stories about the exploits of Webb and illegal gillnetting, many involving the Wild West antics of chasing poachers. But he tempered these tales with stories of charity and good deeds.

One story that Webb isn’t sure made the paper involved a late-night report from a King Ranch gatekeeper. The gateman said he heard numerous shots coming from the direction of a wild turkey roost on the ranch.

It was well past 10 p.m. when Webb arrived to investigate amid the sound of gunfire. He crawled under a fence toward the ruckus and stopped close enough for his voice to be heard.

“Halt, state game warden!” Webb shouted. “You’re under arrest.”

The shooting stopped. Then a commanding voice broke the brief silence.

“We’re United States Marines and you are surrounded, sir,” was the response.

Nobody thought to tell the gateman or the local game warden about the bivouac. Not a single turkey was injured in the mock battle, Webb said.

Webb forged a good relationship with King Ranch officials, who allowed wardens to use a boat ramp and a bunkhouse to make law enforcement more convenient in the remote reaches near Baffin Bay.

Webb became district supervisor in 1970, with authority over nine game wardens. His district ranged from the Guadalupe River to Three Rivers down to the King Ranch. In 1974 the district was expanded to include the Rio Grande Valley. Around that time the department provided a Cessna 210 airplane to help catch poachers on land and water.

The King Ranch also allowed Webb to burn thousands of feet of gillnets on the property. One such net destined for the ranch sat drying in Webb’s backyard for a time. Webb said a couple of bold Flour Bluff boys stole it one night.

Webb easily tracked the outlaws back to that Flour Bluff fish house. Webb visited the fish market and threatened to enlist the aid of every game warden in South Texas to shut down their illegal netting operation for good if he didn’t get his net back.

It was an idle, but effective threat. The net was in his backyard the next day.

WEBB’S LEGACY

Those who knew Webb back then — regardless of which side of the law they stood — respected his fair treatment of everyone, said longtime acquaintance Paul “Pablo” Wimberly, who was the liaison between Texas Parks & Wildlife and the Gulf Coast Conservation Association. Some young outlaws later became Webb’s friends and responsible adults.

“I just tried to treat people the way I wanted to be treated,” Webb said. “But if they broke the game and fish laws of Texas, I had a job to do.”

Webb retired in 1979 after 20 years of service. He said most of the outlaws had either changed professions or died by then, with a few die-hard exceptions. And soon a much brighter spotlight shone on legal and illegal gillnetting in Texas, which led to redfish and trout being listed as game fish. This meant if trout and redfish were wild-caught they no longer could be sold in fish markets. Webb views today’s game wardens as better trained, better informed, better educated and certainly better equipped. He doesn’t lament the simpler more reckless way it was during his tenure.

After retirement, Webb, now 86, went on to enjoy much success as a builder and owner of apartment complexes and as a small-business owner. He retired a second time at age 72. Webb’s son Cliff followed his father into the Laguna Madre to become one of the most celebrated fishing guides in Texas. Cliff’s son, CR, also offers charter trips on the waters his grandfather helped tame.

The grandfather of five and great-grandfather to CR’s 3-year-old daughter, seldom dwells on his adventurous past. Few contemporaries remain.

Nowadays he prefers showing off snapshots of the latest fish caught by the youngest member of the Webb family.

“When I see those pictures, it makes me think the work I did as a game warden was all worth it,” Webb said. “But it also makes me think there’s a lot of work to be done to keep those smiles coming.”

EIC First Place Winner, David Sikes, Category 13