https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...iter-dies-at-94.html



Sheila Link, Sportswoman and Firearms Authority, Dies at 94

By SAM ROBERTSAPRIL 6, 2018


Sheila Link, a former college music major and bass player who transformed her life to pursue altogether different passions — firearms and the outdoors — becoming a noted authority on both, died on March 30 at her home in Palm Desert, Calif. She was 94.

The cause was pneumonia, her daughter, Teresa Link, said.

As a sportswoman, hunter and raconteur, Mrs. Link channeled her enthusiasms into leading gun-safety workshops and arduous survival expeditions along with writing books and magazine articles, including a column in Women & Guns magazine.

“Sheila Link’s legacy will be as a direct link between our pioneer foremothers, including Annie Oakley, and modern day American women gun owners,” Peggy Tartaro, the magazine’s executive editor, wrote in an email.

Mrs. Link wrote a column, “Gear ‘N’ Gadgets,” for Women & Guns from the magazine’s inception in the early 1990s until 2003.



She was also a frequent contributor to Outdoor Life, Field & Stream and Sports Afield magazines; produced a weekly radio program, “Call of the Outdoors,” which was broadcast for nine years beginning in 1974; and was the author of two books, “The Hardy Boys Handbook: Seven Stories of Survival” (1980) and “Women’s Guide to Outdoor Sports” (1984).

Her writing could be detailed and vivid. Reviewing gear for Women & Guns in 2006, she described a rifle this way: “The smooth laminated black stock, with silvery gray and dark-gray striations, complements the brushed stainless bull barrel, trigger guard, lever and sideplates.”

She was the first woman elected to the Outdoor Writers Association of America and was later its president.


In the early 1970s, Mrs. Link was enlisted by the National Rifle Association to be a spokeswoman and consultant with the aim of recruiting more women to join the organization and train them in firearms safety and outdoor survival skills. She was an N.R.A. life member since 1973, although her support for the group became more equivocal in later years, her daughter said.

Born in New Jersey, Mrs. Link might have seemed an implausible heir of Annie Oakley, the sharpshooter of the 1890s. But, then again, Oakley also lived in New Jersey.

Sheila Jean King was born on July 25, 1923, in Jersey City to the former Marian Hanlon and John McLeod King. Her father was an executive of what became Aramaco, the Middle East oil giant; her mother was executive assistant to the president of the McGraw-Hill publishing house.

Her family moved to California before she was 7, and within a few years she was furtively roaming the hills nearby and shooting at small game with a neighbor boy’s BB gun and .22-caliber rifle — until, that is, her father, who was not keen on hunting, objected. (Her brother, Jack, was murdered in Mountain View, Calif., when he was 14; the case was never solved.)

Raised on both coasts, she attended the Straubenmuller Textile High School in Manhattan (now part of the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex) and majored in music at the College of San Mateo in California but did not graduate. She later played with the San Francisco Civic Symphony.

She married Frederic Link, whom she had met in high school, where she learned to play the bass. (She was a lifelong member of the musicians’ union.) Her husband became a high school English and humanities teacher, and he later accompanied her on the drums at local jazz clubs.

Mr. Link preferred spectator sports to hunting, however. “The excitement of trying to hit a bouncing cottontail was unknown to him,” Mrs. Link wrote in 1968.

Mr. Link died in 2013. In addition to their daughter, Teresa, Mrs. Link is survived by two sons, David and Gregory; three grandchildren; and one great-grandson. Another son, Christopher, died in 2008.

Despite her love of music, it was ultimately overridden by her abiding attachment to the outdoors and her fascination with the power and precision of firearms, nurtured in her youth in California.

After she took her youngest son hunting when he was a teenager, Mrs. Link wrote, “the pleasure and enjoyment the outdoors has offered us has led to a deeper, more complete appreciation of all nature.”

In 1973, when she was back in New Jersey, she was featured on an episode of ABC’s “American Sportsman,” which followed her on a bighorn sheep hunt in British Columbia.

She also clambered over New Mexico mountaintops in below-zero temperatures in a grueling Survival Leadership Field Exercise sponsored by the N.R.A. and the Colorado-based Wilderness Institute for Survival.

“Properly understood and used,” Mrs. Link avowed in Field & Stream in 1976, “the wilderness can provide us with shelter, food and water — all that’s needed to survive.”

Mrs. Link wrote for Women & Guns about a wild boar hunting trip organized at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in 2010 for wounded servicewomen. On the trip, she met an Air Force nurse who was an avid believer in women’s armed self-defense.

“After a violent assault sent her to the emergency room, she filed suit, then got a concealed-carry permit,” Mrs. Link wrote.

She recommended that hunters use a steadying tripod device because “ethical big game hunters, in order to dispatch an animal as swiftly and painlessly as possible, always try to find some sort of rifle rest before taking a shot.”

Mrs. Link taught outdoor skills at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, N.J.; was a deputy conservation officer in that state and gave hunter education classes in California.

On one of Mrs. Link’s many cross-country journeys in the 1960s, Teresa Link recalled, she, her mother and younger brother were sitting alone at a rest stop out West having lunch.

“A car pulled up and a couple of scary looking men just sat there watching us,” Teresa Link said.

Her mother, by Ms. Link’s account, hurriedly packed her children into the car and drove off. The men followed. Suddenly, she stopped the car, pulled over, ordered her daughter to stay inside, grabbed a pistol from the glove compartment, strapped it on and stepped onto the road.

“She stood there staring them down, her hand on the pistol, for what seemed like ages,” Ms. Link said. “Then they skidded back onto the road and drove away. She always cited that experience as one of the reasons she was so adamant about the right to bear arms.”

Ms. Link added: “No one else in my family is pro-gun, and in her later years she distanced herself from the N.R.A. because she didn’t approve of the swelling number of ‘gun nuts,’ as opposed to hunters and outdoors people. But she loved shooting, and got a kick out of how many Hollywood actresses came to her classes.”

I had the privilege of knowing Sheila during my 35-year membership in the Outdoor Writers Association of America. We often talked at the annual conferences about her adventures. She was a classy lady.

Hate to say it, but I've never heard of her until reading this thread. She sure sounds like quite a gal!

I guided her and famous handgunner Bill Jordan turkey hunting in Alabama back about 1983 er so.

I had the privilege of taking her and Bill Jordan grouse hunting. One of the most fun hunts I have been on.

posted 08 April 2018 01:54 Hide Post
Hate to say it, but I've never heard of her until reading this thread. She sure sounds like quite a gal!

It says a lot about Sheila that two people on this forum hunted with her.