The leaf munchers
It wasn’t duck season yet, but I was like a child on Christmas morning when Woodruff County Judge Michael John Gray took me to the lodge for the Coca Cola Woods. I enjoy writing about this state’s historic hunting clubs, and this one is near the top of the list.
The name stems from the fact that Everett Pidgeon, whose family bought the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Memphis in 1909, acquired land in east Arkansas during a three-year period at a price of $1.20 an acre. There was one small cabin there at the time. Pidgeon moved a house from Snow Lake to serve as the first lodge.
“During that era, the property known as Morton’s to close family and friends was used as a hunting club on weekends and a place to entertain their Coca-Cola clients during the week,” Susan Schadt wrote in her 2012 book “A Million Wings.” “As its reputation for great hunting and good times spread among customers, friends and locals, it became referred to as ‘that Coca-Cola place,’ and before long the unofficial nickname was Coca Cola Woods.
“Typically a men’s-only retreat, Bobby Pidgeon Jr. has fond memories of trips to the camp with his grandmother before opening day of duck season transformed it into an all-male bastion. When he came of age to hunt, he ‘enjoyed camaraderie and fellowship with my dad’s friends, and also with my friends.’”
Dozens of framed photos line the walls of this club near the Bayou DeView. The clubhouse is modern, but the place still oozes history and tradition.
“During those early days, there were no blinds, so hunters stood in the water behind trees,” Schadt wrote. “Hunters followed a strict set of rules. There was no hunting after noon, and hunters weren’t allowed to walk ducks up. While ducks have certainly appreciated these considerations, they’re also drawn to the property’s natural features, including a creek that splits the back part of the property in half and extensive flooded green timber. Hunters from St. Louis to New Orleans came to enjoy this duck-filled paradise.”
The Pidgeon family sold the club to Harvey Robbins of Tuscumbia, Ala., in 1995, and it was renamed Harvey’s Duck Club. When Memphis businessman John Dobbs Jr. bought the property in 2009, he officially changed the name to Coca Cola Woods.
Dobbs summed up what Woodruff County means to visitors: “Historically it has been known for duck hunting, but more importantly, it has been known for the adventures and stories people tell. … Some people hunt ducks their entire lives and never see the things we see at Coca Cola Woods with the quality of ducks and camaraderie. As a man, sometimes it’s hard to identify this feeling. But when you’re out there, there’s a realization that you’re doing what you’re meant to do.”
The club was featured in Food & Wine magazine in 2019 when well-known New York chef and restaurateur Angie Mar came to hunt with Pat LaFrieda, a fourth-generation butcher.
“LaFrieda, the CEO of Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors, is with us in the swamp,” Adam Sachs wrote. “An experienced hunter, he’s responsible for a few of this morning’s kills (unlike your intrepid correspondent, who managed to jam his weapon by loading the ammo in backward). Shooting at Coca Cola Woods is about who you know. In this case, we’re here because LaFrieda knows Trey Zoeller, founder of Jefferson’s Bourbon, and Zoeller knows a friend of Dobbs.
“Zoeller is a voluble Kentuckian who has been called both the Marco Polo of bourbon and a heretic for his penchant for putting barrels of young bourbon in compromising situations—on a riverboat thrashed about by tropical storms, say, or in the hold of a shark-tagging cargo ship on years-long voyages crisscrossing the equator—to see how shifts in temperature and radical agitation accelerate the maturing process. Zoeller had gotten to talking to Dobbs about stashing a barrel of bourbon in a duck blind somewhere and forgetting it there for a couple of intensely humid summers and bleak winters—just to see what would happen to it.”
These are the type of people duck season brings to Arkansas each year: famous chefs, bourbon entrepreneurs and more. Gray and I drove over from McCrory after having talked during lunch about the importance of waterfowl hunting to Woodruff County’s economy.
A year ago, I checked two iconic clubs off my Arkansas bucket list when I spent the night and hunted at Wingmead near Roe in east Arkansas and at Grassy Lake near Fulton in southwest Arkansas. I’m not spending the night or hunting at the Coca Cola Woods, but at least I now know where it’s located.
In his story for Food & Wine, Sachs described it this way: “McCrory lies roughly 1,200 miles southwest of (and a universe removed from) The Beatrice Inn, Mar’s swaggeringly urbane chophouse on a cobblestone block in the West Village. In a candelit 19th-century townhouse, she serves Russian caviar on buttered brioche points. … It’s one thing to put the name of a farm or purveyor on the menu; it’s another to travel to a place to participate in the act of pulling these creatures out of the sky … and cook them in the place they’re from.”
Beatrice Inn closed in 2020. Mar opened Les Trois Chevaux the following year.
Dobbs told the chef: “When you’re in a field, you’re shooting birds many yards away. When you’re in the hole like this, they’re going to land right on top of you. I have 95-year-old guys who come to me with tears in their eyes. They say, ‘John, I’ve been hunting my entire life, and I’ve never seen ducks like this.’ … It’s the volume of ducks but also the way you’re really in their world.”
One hunter described hunting flooded green timber in east Arkansas as “a world not many hunters get a peek at. It dang near looks fictional.”
Dobbs is a grandson of James K. Dobbs, who owned automobile dealerships along with restaurant and airline catering businesses. John Dobbs Jr. earned a bachelor’s degree from Duke and an MBA from the University of North Carolina before returning to Memphis. In 1998, Dobbs Automotive Group was the third-largest automobile dealer in the country when it sold 22 dealerships to AutoNation for $200 million in stock.
His father, John Hull Dobbs Sr., died last July at age 91. According to his obituary: “John took the leadership role in Dobbs International Airline Catering at age 28 after his father died at age 66. Under John’s leadership, the catering division became the largest independent airline catering business in the world when Dobbs International was sold to Beech-Nut Life Savers in 1966.”
There’s a tradition of Memphis business leaders duck hunting in Arkansas. Before that, it was the cream of the crop from St. Louis who came to Arkansas to hunt. Wingmead, for example, was established in 1937 by Edgar Monsanto Queeny of St. Louis, the son of John Francis Queeny, who founded Monsanto Chemical.
Though duck numbers have declined, a winter visit to Arkansas is still something that some of the wealthiest people in American dream about.
Spencer Halford of Rolling Thunder Game Calls described it this way: “There’s nowhere else in the world that has flooded green timber. There’s nothing in the waterfowl world that I have seen that’s as beautiful as greenheads coming over the top of trees. Leaf munchers. That’s what we like to call them. Mallards that fly close, then look even prettier when they come down. Big trees, skinny water. That’s what makes Arkansas the duck capital of the world.”
In a 2020 interview, Halford offered advice to out-of-state visitors: “Act as you would at someone’s house after church on Sundays for lunch. You shake hands, you say ‘yes sir’ and ‘no ma’am.’ Be respectiful to the people and the land.”
Rusty Creasey, the longtime guide at Coca Cola Woods, added: “It’s not just about duck hunting. It goes back to morals and ethics. … Look around. No one takes their hat off anymore or gives a firm handshake. No one holds the door open for a woman. They set up 50 yards from someone else to hunt. They just don’t know. They weren’t raised like that. Those core values are lost not only in duck hunting but in the world.”