Ron Ahrens Keepin’ It in The Ozarks

Welcome to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. This is your host Bruce Hutcheon, and we’re going to visit with Ron Ahrens today. Keepin’ It in The Ozarks. Ron, welcome to the show.

Ron: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Bruce: Well, let’s talk about Keepin’ It in The Ozarks, and your team member there. What’s that all about?

Ron: Well, what it was when I retired from the post office I had finally gotten bored with retirement, so I started working at Lowe's. And one of the employees there at Lowe's was a team member on a local show and he branched out on his own and encouraged me to buy a camera, and so that's how I got started. So we got some more team members, and now we've probably got, I think, 12 on our team. So everybody hunts and everybody videos. You know it gets kind of boring behind a camera. So we want to give everybody a chance, and then you can have more kills on a show too, so that's kind of part of it.

Bruce: Well, talk to me about what your productions do, who carries them, and what's the important part of doing that show?

actually it's a local show at the Lake of the Ozarks

Ron: Well, right now it's web-based. It's on YouTube, and actually it's a local show at the Lake of the Ozarks. Our local channel at the Lake of the Ozarks contacted Justin and he started it all, Justin Sapp. And they want to start running his YouTube, on their show now. And then next year they want to start, actually putting a formatted show together to run on their channels. Then next to that we're going to on the Hunt Channel, and it's on YouTube and Amazon. It's a new web...I don't know how they actually...it's something to do with the internet. It's like a little...I don't know for sure what it is. Justin's got it all...I don't know how you would say it. You plug it into the TV. It's a thumb kind of thing and...

Bruce: So anyways, yeah. The production's going to be on YouTube or other digital channels, not specifically on the Pursuit Channel or the Sportsman Channel or the Outdoor Channel, but your own channel. Is that correct?

Ron: Right, right.

Bruce: Great.

Ron: Yes.

Bruce: Well, let's talk about your beginning in hunting. Where did your hunting tradition come from?

Ron: Well, I lived on a farm. I was born in Russell, Kansas, and I lived on a farm out in Missoula, Kansas. So I could actually hunt right outside my back door. It was awful nice, and my dad never did really take me hunting a lot, but he never told me, no. He was a farmer, a Kansas farmer so he worked all the time, and so that's how I got my start. There's a lot of pheasant and quail in Kansas. When I was young, there wasn't a lot of whitetail, to tell you the truth. I can remember what I would do is go out to the fields with my dad, when I was just a kid and I'd take a hammer, a pliers and a screwdriver. And when I'd get bored going around and around in the field, dad would just stop and let me off and I'd dig in the dirt.

I remember the first buck I ever saw in my life. It was I got bored, jumped off the tractor and there was a pond close by. So I was playing around the water there in the pond, and I went over to the dam and just looked, and there was a big buck at the bottom, and that was the first whitetail buck, I'd ever seen in my life. So that was pretty exciting to me. So I had to run back and dad went down there, and he wasn't there anymore, of course. But that's a memory I'll never forget.

Bruce: That's great.

Ron: So then I left the farm and went in the Air Force, and in the Air Force you travel quite a bit. I was in Oklahoma. I did some quail hunting, out in Oklahoma. Then I went back to Kansas, in Wichita, and of course then I got to go home, and hunt some more at home, there. And then I got transferred to Anchorage, Alaska, so we did a little bit of hunting up there in Alaska, and I'll tell you what. That was probably one of my biggest regrets in my life is that I didn't go h...