Grover c. 1907
May 6, 1905
http://www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/SportingLife/1905/VOL_45_NO_08/SL4508021.pdf Ex-President Grover Cleveland has received many lashings because he went fishing and duck shooting. It was charged at various times that these health-seeking excursions were intended as a cloak to cover dissipation. The ex-President has at last turned on his critics and in a magazine devoted to country-loving folk, he ably defends hunting and fishing and says he is proud of his own devotion to the sport, even though it has subjected him to petty forms of persecution. He adds:
"Thus when short fishing excursions, in which I sought relief from the killing vexations and perplexities of official duty, have been denounced in a mendacious newspaper as dishonest devices to cover scandalous revelry, I have been able to enjoy a sort of pleasureable contempt for the author of the accusation while congratulating myself on the mental and physical restoration I had derived from these excursions. So, also, when people, more mistaken than malicious, have wagged their heads in pitying fashion and deprecated my guiltiness of hunting and fishing frivolity in high public service, I have found it easy to lament the neglect of these amiable persons to accumulate for their delectation a fund of charming reminiscence of sport, while, at the same time, I have sadly reflected how their dispositions might have been sweetened and their lives made happier if they had yielded to the particular type of frivolity which they deplored."
