Longtime Herald columnist who shared love of hunting, fishing with readers has died
Ken Hoopengarner, the Tri-City Herald’s outdoors writer for 28 years, died Sept. 17 at Kadlec Regional Medical Center in Richland following an illness. He was 72.
He had lived in Benton City for 22 years.
Hoopengarner, “Hoop” to friends and colleagues, brought an encyclopedic knowledge of hunting and fishing to his long tenure at the Herald.
He joined the paper’s sports department and later moved to the copy desk. In addition to penning some 900 outdoor columns, he edited news coverage, laid out pages and oversaw reporters working weekend shifts. He retired in 2007.
He was reliable, earnest and the kind of employee you want to have on hand during a crisis, said Ken Robertson, the Herald’s retired executive editor.
But Hoop really shined when he was writing columns about hunting and fishing, a topic he loved, Robertson said.
“He was very earnest guy and worked hard at his craft,” he said, adding readers kept on praising the column long after it ended.
Rick Larson, the Herald’s retired managing editor, remembered Hoopengarner as a strong writer and an avid outdoorsmen. The two fished together beginning when Hoopengarner first joined the paper and they spent a day on the north fork of the Walla Walla River.
Colleagues remembered a hardworking colleague who enjoyed sharing stories in the newsroom.
“Ken really loved the outdoors, and was great at both writing outdoors stories, as well as working on the copy desk. I loved hearing his stories about his dogs, and I’ll miss his sense of humor,” said Jeff Morrow, the Herald’s retired sports editor.
Bob Brawdy, the Herald’s longtime photo editor, credited Hoopengarner for introducing him to steehead fishing on the Grande Ronde River, which became an enduring Brawdy family tradition that now includes his own grandchildren.
“I appreciated him sharing his knowledge,” Brawdy said.
Hoopengarner tapped a vast network of outdoors expert sources — people like Phil Motyka, John and Jim Westland and countless Department of Fish and Wildlife officials — to ensure his readers were well informed before they headed into the outdoors.
‘Conscientious sportsman’
His columns were by turns folksy, helpful and celebratory and he didn’t shy away from thorny topics, including gray wolves and poaching. He rounded up the best places to fish, advised readers on how to stay safe and retold stories from readers about the mule deer they’d bagged, the fish they’d caught the birds they’d spotted.
“Now’s the time to string ‘em up at Ringold,” “Bird watchers flock to new refuge blind in Burbank” and “Manhunt on to catch serial elk poachers,” were typical Hoopengarner fare.
In a Christmas column ostensibly about gift ideas for sportsmen, he speculated that Santa Claus might be considered one of them. The jolly man must have at least tried ice fishing at the North Pole and of course, loves reindeer, he noted.
In a February 2007, he railed against an Idaho plan to issue kill tags for gray wolves, considered a threat to livestock and even humans after rebounding from near extinction.
An Associated Press story about the state’s plan to sell tickets for the price of a tank of gasoline “raised my hackles,” Hoopengarner wrote.
With 30 years of hunting and fishing experience at that point, he was no sign-waving animal rights activist. He was, he wrote, a “conscientious sportsman” who believed it would be a mistake to hunt wolves as trophies, likening the canines to the hunting dogs he bred and loved.
He retired in November 2007. In a farewell column two weeks earlier, he recalled his father, also known as “Hoop,” a World War II veteran who told him that early retirement was the best “damn” decision he’d ever made.
“Besides having had the pleasure of writing about the outdoors for all those years, my time at the Herald was marked by the passing of two great (aren’t they all) hunting dogs — Jake, a springer spaniel with a bloodhound’s nose, and Duke, an 85-pound chocolate Lab that preferred go through a duck blind than around it,” he wrote in his last column.
“I daresay that my hunting career, my job and my life would have been poorer without their drooling and tail-wagging, whether in a boat, duck blind or in the field.”
As he moved into retirement, he lamented that much of the best fishing and game hunting had shifted to private land, with fees too steep for ordinary Joes. But he cherished turkeys “running amok” across Washington state and branded himself a “turkeyaholic.”
Hoopengarner was born Kenneth Allyn Hoopengarner in 1951 in Cleveland, Ohio.
He enlisted in the Army in 1971 to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam.
He was sent there anyway, he noted in a recollection the Herald published on Veterans Day in 2014. He served at a communications center with the 1st Signal Division near Saigon. After the war, he spent the remainder of his time overseas in Okinawa, Japan.
He used his G.I. Bill benefits to attend college and buy a home and launch his career in journalism.
He married his wife, Susan, in 2013.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his brother and his wife, Don Hoopengarner, and Julie; their two children, Rebekah and Zackery; his uncle and his wife Bill McFarland, and Beverly, and their two children Ryan and Sean.
Compassionate Cremation Society in Richland is handling his funeral arrangements.
