I first met John Ford Sr. about two days after he started working for the Maine Warden Service in 1970. He was a small-town boy from Sanford with warden ties who, at an early age, was able to occasionally accompany Verne Walker, Charlie Libby, and Don Gray as they patrolled their districts. In a small way, he was able to experience firsthand the many duties and activities of a Maine Game Warden.
I’d grown up with the Warden Service myself and had accepted it as a way of life. My father, Maynard Marsh, had been chief warden in the 1970s, prior to becoming commissioner. In later years, I also found myself occupying the chief warden’s position.
One of the veteran officers who knew John was well aware of his background and voiced skepticism as to his commitment. He said John would probably be back in Sanford before Christmas, which was coming right up.
I knew John’s stepfather, Verne Walker, who I regarded as a good district warden. I knew if John was following in his footsteps, he had a leg up on the others.
Back in those days it helped to get hired if you knew a game warden. Then the department gave you a .38 Smith & Wesson handgun, an old sedan, and a trunk full of new equipment and sent you off to work with a veteran warden in someplace you’d likely never heard of. If you were fortunate enough to last a year or two, you were sent to a basic school where you’d learn from men who’d been active game wardens for fifteen or twenty years.
Your office was your house, your wife was the unpaid secretary. Complaints were phoned straight to your home, not through a central dispatch system like today. If you were there, you answered the call. If you weren’t, your wife would call the store or the gas station where you might be patrolling and leave a message. There were no radios, no handheld portables; it was pretty primitive, but it all was about to change when John came aboard.
To the best of my knowledge, John had never set a trap and he wasn’t a big deer hunter, but he learned to take care of the traditional things while adapting to the new responsibilities, such as watercraft and snowmobiles and environmental issues. For many years, being a game warden was pretty simple. For one thing, the job description mentioned working a “nonstandard work week,” which was considered to be the time it took to get the job done. Often, that meant patrolling during the day and chasing night-hunters almost until the morning of the next day, and then you started the process all over. We did it not for the meager paycheck, but because we liked it.
John was assigned to Waldo County’s Burnham area, about fifteen miles northeast of Waterville, a busy place to be a warden. He was twenty-two years old and replacing a man whose house was shot up by some yahoos while his wife and young daughter were there. Nobody got hurt, thankfully, but we decided it would be best to put a single man in that district. John was eager to go anywhere and he was single, so he certainly fit the bill. It was his chance to prove himself or return to Sanford from whence he came. Obviously, he was able to prove himself.
The Burnham area had the largest concentration of deer per acre in the state, along with many families of low socioeconomic status. They were folks who lived pretty close to the land. They killed game in order to help them get by, and they were not always legal in their efforts. It was certainly a different assignment than most other places. For example, you’d go to the store to fill up your gas tank and the proprietor would quickly wait on you because he had to, but he wasn’t all that friendly. It seemed like he was in a rush to get you out of there before the regular customers came along.
Most wardens throughout the state came from a farm or forestry background, or they were hunters, trappers, or fishermen. But John was looked upon as a flatlander from southern Maine—I believe his biggest interest in high school was girls—and he was as green as they come as far as warden work. I’ll give you an example. Early in his career he was covering a car-deer accident when a state trooper contacted him to see if he needed photos. The State Police always sent someone to take pictures if there was a fatality involved. The deer was killed in this collision so John said, “Sure, send the photographer.” We still laugh about that incident to this very day.
But he was pretty sharp, too. Back then Mount Desert Island was overrun with deer, and the state was considering a substantial reduction of the herd, which was controversial to say the least. To help justify the project, the state got the University of Maine involved and conducted an experiment on how we could establish what time a deer had died. Some of the research was done in Waldo County, and John was very interested in that effort. He was willing to tackle a new method of enforcement. Wardens were used to writing summonses for incidents they saw happening right in front of them. But now, if they could tell how long a deer had been dead, they could officially charge a hunter with a crime going back in time. John bit onto this scientific discovery in a continuation of his persistent pursuit of night-hunters.
I will also vouch for his tenacity as an investigator. In the late 1960s, the state required all hunters to wear blaze orange in an attempt to reduce the many hunting fatalities that had reached forty or more in some seasons. But the practice was new and unpopular among hunters who seriously believed that no deer would ever get close enough for them to shoot if they wore the mandatory bright colors.
There was a hunter in John’s territory who was wearing an orange hat when he was shot in the arm by a man who mistook him for a deer. The wounded man was an opponent of the blaze-orange requirement and quite vocal about it. He yelled, “If I didn’t have that damned orange hat on, this wouldn’t have ever happened!”
John spent two years slowly putting the pieces together regarding this shooting, finally pinpointing the man who had committed the crime. The man who fired the shot said he’d be willing to confess in front of me but not in front of John because he was too embarrassed to admit his guilt in front of the warden he had befriended.
Back in the seventies, the law enforcement agencies in Maine—the State Police, sheriff’s deputies, game wardens, and many others—had little use for each other. I’m not sure why that was; it really made no sense. But John was different. Right from the start he spent time with the troopers and sheriff’s’ deputies because he knew and respected the fact that we all were doing the same thing. That level of cooperation paid off for law enforcement in Waldo County. When two state prison escapees ended up in John’s territory in the mid-eighties, the State Police were fully in charge of the operation, but at the morning meetings John was always at the table and was in the lead for the capture.
Throughout his career, we all knew John was keeping a diary of his adventures. Most wardens retained their daily work records, which could jog their memory about a person or place they wanted to keep an eye on. But I’m sure John’s were more copious and quite funny as well. As I look back upon it, I think the comedy was kind of a cover-up for the many stresses associated with being a game warden. I’m sure it was a great release for him—and I know it was for those of us who heard and enjoyed his many stories.
I understand John has included me in some of these stories. He’d better be extremely careful because I’ve got some really good ones about him, too, as do many of his peers.
John Marsh
February 2011
John Marsh was the Chief Warden of Maine from 1982 to 1988. He supervised 125 uniformed men and helped make significant policy decisions, including Maine’s first moose hunt. He also helped organize Maine’s search-and-rescue squads, which are now a national model. He served three terms in the Maine Legislature after his retirement. He lives in West Gardiner with his wife Judy, who still misses the presence of wardens in her life.