ROANOKE, Va. — Open the pages of any sporting goods catalog and a full third of it’s pages will be splayed with all manner of camouflage clothing. Today’s high-tech fabrics and myriad of camo patterns make it hard for the average outdoorsman to know what he or she really needs.
You can get scent-blocking material with a charcoal liner in the jacket and pants. It’s possible to get underwear ready made to wick moisture from your body. Plus you can choose a style that will fit any temperature or woods conditions for any kind of hunt in any part of the world.
However, 30-years ago this was not possible. During that time there was a young thinker from Bristol, Virginia who had just earned a marketing degree from Virginia Tech and gone to work for the Alexandria, Virginia school system. Jim Crumley was an accomplished bow hunter and turkey hunter and knew any advantage that would give him a closer shot to either quarry was an advantage he’d strive to attain. However, also in those days the only camo hunters could buy was at the local Army surplus store. Most of it was leftover from the jungle wars of Korea and Vietnam.
“I was wearing the military-type tiger-striped camo pattern during the early 1970s when I was hunting,” said Jim Crumley. “I’d only hunted the mountains of Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland and during hunting season in late October when the leaves are off and you’re looking down through the woods the colors you see are battleship gray with all the poplars and white oaks.”
Crumley discussed this lack of adequate concealment for Appalachian hunting with a buddy who happed to be a Marine Corps colonel during a turkey hunt at Quantico Marine Base in northern Virginia.
“I’ll never forget he was chomping on a cigar when I asked him how come the military hadn’t designed a pattern to match the woods where we hunt.”
The answer was a very somber reply that the military had never needed to have a pattern for that part of the world—and hopefully never will. The military camo is based on places where ground combat is likely and so far there wasn’t any suggestion that combat on the home front would be a possibility. Armed with that knowledge, Crumley set out to fix things himself.
“I actually started to tie-dye old Dickie’s work clothes in brown and gray. I’d just tie them in knots like the crazies did back in the 60s,” Crumley recalled. “It actually looked really bad, it looked like somebody got sick on you.”
What the outfit lacked in beauty, it more than compensated for in concealment. Crumley says friends would laugh at him until he ascended into a tree stand and literally disappeared from view. It wasn’t long until there were several friendly requests for the homemade tie-dyed Dickie’s.
Jim says he knew he had the colors right, but it took a while longer to come to the realization of a pattern.
“It’s easier to make the human form look like a tree than it is to make the human form look like nothing. You can make it look like nothing by burying it in the ground, but you can’t shoot a bow that way. Whenever I let an arrow go or pulled a trigger on a gobbler my back was against a tree trunk. That’s when I said, ‘Okay! I take that gray and brown, but make it look more like the bark of a tree.”
Treebark camo was officially born. Jim used his contacts in the marketing world to find companies to put his pattern on fabric. He took out a second mortgage on his Alexandria, Virginia townhouse and borrowed money from several high school friends. He scraped together enough to make one thousand sets of hunting clothes in his TreeBark pattern, which left very little for advertising.
“I placed one ad in July of 1980 in Bowhunter magazine. In less than two months those thousand suits were gone by mail.”
Jim realized he’d hit a home run and began planning and expanding his new company. However, it still took several more years for him to realize just how big his idea had become.
“Although I knew this is pretty neat stuff and I retired from the school system to pursue it full time, it was four or five years later when the other camouflage guys started showing up that I realized, I really changed the whole situation here.”
Today, hunting has become a near fashion show with wilder patterns being introduced every years in an array of colors and arrangements, but it all began when a hunter knew there had to be a better way to hide and ran with an idea.