Jim McClarin: The Formative Years

“I was born in January ’46 in Buffalo NY while my parents stayed with my paternal grandparents. After that it was Fort Worth TX, then East Lansing MI where my dad attended Michigan State University majoring in animal husbandry and also taught an equestrianship course (he had served in the cavalry the last few years of its existence). I attended a University nursery school where one of my “teachers” marveled at how fascinated I was with wildlife. It was in Michigan at age five that I first heard of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. The family returned to Buffalo where I attended first grade. I still have jungle pictures full of wildlife I drew then and I remember wanting to become “a scientist,” which at the time to me meant only one thing: go find undiscovered animals in the jungle. Go figure!

“After first grade we traveled cross-country to stay with my maternal grandmother in Tuscon AZ, stopping and camping at various national and other parks along the way. I remember catching a multicolored horned toad at Bryce Canyon and marveling at the larger wildlife at Yellowstone. After a few months my dad landed an admistrative job with an aerospace company at Holloman AFB near Alamogordo NM. We lived in “Alamo” in a new flat-roofed stucco house in a housing development at the edge of a tract of desert that was full of lizards, cactus wrens, and other fascinating wildlife.

After third grade we moved 12 miles north to Tularosa NM we we rented an adobe house on a half-block of property that was loaded with fruit and nut trees, currant bushes, and other trees, shrubs, and flowers. It was like a jungle in the middle of the desert. We kept lots of animals: horses, donkey, dog, cats, Bantam chickens, Guinea pigs, and I forget what all else. With my friends and/or my sisters I went for lots of hikes out into the desert, always finding wildlife to observe if not catch. An army canteen of water and a few wieners to roast over a desert willow fire in an arroyo was typical. There was a lot more freedom to go off on adventures for kids in those days despite the stories about “bad people” that would circulate.

Paid vacation meant just one thing to my dad: camping in the mountains. We camped at various lakes and campgrounds but my dad always sought out the most isolated camping spots and typically we were alone with nature. We often fished but my favorite adventure was looking to see what I could find under logs and bark and rocks or along the edge of creeks and lakes. The early and continual exposure to wild and domestic animals over the years certainly influenced me and my sisters (not my brothers strangely), one of whom, Terry Jenkins, went on to become a zookeeper.

I think it was on one of our weekend family outings to the nearby White Sands National Monument that I first heard my dad talk about Bigfoot around the campfire. I recall no connection being made to real reports of sightings so it was pretty much mythical to me (just a campfire story) till years later.

Tularosa was a town of just a few thousand people, about half of whom were Spanish speaking. I began to pick up some Spanish there, both from my parents, who had each taken Spanish in school, and from my Hispanic friends. Over the years I slowly picked up more and more Spanish, including a couple of quarters in college, a very handy thing for my late-life adventures.

At the end of eighth grade the family, now six kids and a dog, moved to the Sacramento CA area where my dad had taken another administrative job at an aerospace company. We eventually settled on five acres in rural Orangevale. Here there were ponds and creeks and oak woods teeming with fish, frogs, turtles, and other wildlife and I developed a passion for reptiles that continued till age 20 when I left home to attend a four-year school (Humboldt State College, now University).