Pennsylvania Game News - February 2010 - 22

However, in 1953, tragedy struck, when a stroke hospitalized Ryman. After a two-month rehabilitation, he returned home, never to get better. He died in 1961, age 72, leaving Ellen to continue his legacy. She was just 50, and an extremely busy widow. During the early 1960s, Carl Calkins, a Ryman customer since 1931, returned to the kennel for a new puppy, only to discover Ryman gone and Ellen in charge. This Princeton engineer was in construction, but only so he could follow the woodcock flights from New Brunswick to Louisiana each autumn. Calkins had noticed pretty Ellen before his wife’s tragic death in 1958. Yet it was the new puppy, Ryman’s Bold Return, which brought them together. During a 1962 dinner date, Ellen confided how she’d been forced to sell some of the kennel’s breeding stock to pay medical bills, and how she hoped to get those dogs back and revitalize the kennels. Calkins recognized this opportunity and cashed out his construction fortune and home, and devoted himself to Ellen and the kennels. He spent $30,000 in three months to buy back 40 dogs critical to the kennel’s breeding program. Without him, the line would not have survived. Ellen and Carl married in 1963, and for the next 11 years — until 1975 — they operated the kennels, perpetuating five distinct Ryman varieties. Puppy prices began at $200, started dogs at $750, and finished setters, when available, at $950. In 1967, a passionate young Wilkes-Barre grouse and woodcock hunter called the Ryman kennel to schedule a visit — during his honeymoon. From the moment they pulled into the kennel driveway, the newlyweds, Ken and Nita Alexander, were smitten. Also, unbeknownst to them, their future was being cast. A year later, when Alexander returned for his second Ryman, he learned about the Calkinses’ impending retirement; how, if they couldn’t find a buyer for the kennels, the dogs would be destroyed. Understandably panicked, Alexander asked about buying the kennel. The Calkinses knew he couldn’t afford it, but admired his passion. During the next several years, they took him under their wing. They allowed him to acquire enough high quality Ryman blood to perpetuate his own kennels, and shared with him their knowledge on breeding selection, kennel operations, puppy rearing, etc. Shortly thereafter, Alexander began breeding dogs, Ryman-style, for the kennel to sell, but not for the public. In 1975, the Calkinses retired. They sold the kennels — including 70 remaining dogs and the right to the Ryman name — to Robert Sumner of Lewisburg, West Virginia, and gave Alexander a final dog, Ryman’s Grand Return, necessary to perpetuate the Ryman breeding pattern in his kennel. A week later, the 59-year-old Ryman kennel in Shohola Falls was bulldozed and seeded to grass. Between 1975 and 1977, the new Ryman Gun Dog Kennel, under Sumner, operated from West Virginia. Despite a real effort to conjoin Alexander’s breeding operation with Sumner’s kennel, negotiations failed, and in 1977, both went their separate ways. The Calkinses suggested Alexander, now free to sell setters to the public, open his own kennel— “DeCoverly,” to separate it from the Ryman name, yet maintain the bloodline link. In 1977, Sumner’s kennel folded, taking nearly seven decades of three peoples’ lives with it. At the same time, DeCoverly Kennels, with the largest remaining pool of original Ryman blood, emerged; the Calkinses remaining crucial to its operation through the mid-1980s. The Ryman setter did not end in West Virginia. The line was maintained through DeCoverly Kennels, under Alexander’s GAME NEWS

Pennsylvania Game News - February 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pennsylvania Game News - February 2010