December 4, 2025 • 20 mins
Rob was joined by his close friend and former Cincinnati Reds teammate, Norm Charlton, where they discussed Norm's post-MLB life of hunting and fishing expeditions. Also in this segment, they touch on the current state of the MLB and it's superstars like Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Back on the rob Double Show with Ben Darnell in
Your Afternoon Drive. Nick Federico on the Ones and Two's
my roommate for many years in the minor leagues and
the major leagues. One of the nasty boys, Norman Wood
Charlton the third. How you doing, buddy, very good?
Speaker 2 (00:19):
What's going on up there in the cold country or
y' all cold at all?
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, we're cold. We don't like the cold that much.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
We just love it to be cold up there where
you guys are. That means we get ducks. It's warm
down here. We don't have any ducks.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Oh so the ducks fly down there so you could
kill them.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, we get cold up there and freezes, and y'all
have nothing to eat, and they got to migrate down
south where you know they're going on vacation. Well, it's
not much of a vacation for some of them.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
That's exactly why we called you. You're a man's man.
Let me let me just start with when did you
first start hunting? How old were you?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Well, so, DIBs, you've met one of my friends, lolled
yalload him. I think he fished with us when Galveston
that time. I remember in elementary school and my dad
coming getting and coming getting loll and I out of school,
I think in the third or fourth grade to go
goose hunting when the weather got really bad. I think
he brought us so he could shoot our limit. But
(01:12):
nonetheless he brought us.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Yeah, what are we doing? What's the season? What are
we doing right now?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
We're right in the middle of duck Hunting's duck season,
dove is still going on. Goose season is open, although
we don't do much goose hunting, and it's deer season,
so wintertime is a plethora of animals for us. We
can stalk our freezer in about two months and never
have to worry about eating again.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yep. Like when I tell stories about you, people can't
believe it there and I'm like, listen, you just don't
know him. He does things that you know, normal people
don't do. Tell people about when you used to catch
rattlesnakes for extra money to sell the venom to the vet.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, so they sell the vetom to the vet. We
lived outside of this town called Freer, about twenty minutes
from Freer, and Freer always had a deal called a
rattlesnake ground up so we would have a guy that
would come by every other Sunday and he would buy
rattlesnakes from us, either live or dead. They were worth
more live. So every every pickup truck we had on
the ranch, and granted this is a four thousand acre
(02:15):
working cattle ranch that we run Geer hunts on, I
had several young kids employed. So whenever they were doing
stuff around the ranch, filling feeders, fixing fence, whatever, they
had a cage in the back of the truck and
they had these you know, you've seen the guys picking
up litter out on the highway m hm with the
little Yeah, we had those in every truck and they'd
(02:37):
hear a rattlesnaker, they see a rattlesnake, they walk up
and grab him with those things, put him in the box.
The end of the day, they'd take him and put
him in a cage uh in the barn. They had
to give him water, they didn't really need to feed
him because they don't eat that much. And the guy
would come around and buy him by the pound every
two weeks. So, yeah, it was good for us. The
kids made extra money and we got rid of snakes
(02:59):
that wanted to bite.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
You teach our listeners how to handle a rattle snake,
give us the woods Guide tour. If I come up
on a rattlesnake, what should I do?
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Uh? Probably walk the other way.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
They don't mess with it.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, yeah, you know, like I said, in all of
our vehicles, we had a box that had you know,
it was a wooden box that had a door on
the top and it had mesh wire on the side
so the snake couldn't get out. And those songs that
we used are about five or six feet long. And granted,
most of our snakes don't get more than you know,
five feet, so they can strike about two and a half.
(03:39):
And so if you just happen to be hiking through
the woods up in Connecticut and you have a trash
picker up or in a box to put it in,
or a bag to put it in, then go ahead
and grab it by the middle. You don't want to
grab it by the head because you've got too much
to wiggle around. Just grab it by the middle of
the body came in the box. What you really want
to do is leave them alone unless you've got you know,
a hoe or a shovel or a acre or you know,
(04:02):
a gun or something to kill them. They're not worth
messing with taking the chance of getting bit, getting bit
by a snake, by a rattlesnake or a water mookson
or one of those snakes. It's not it's not fun.
I had a friend get bit back when we were younger,
and he got a scarf from his ankle all the
way to his knee and they had to take out
half of his calf. You know the treatment they used
(04:23):
to do. They cut an X on it and suck
the poison out, And they don't really do that anymore.
They want you to ice it now, get to the
doctor as quick as you can, and basically any tissue
that they can see that looks like it's affected, they
just remove it. So you end up like a giant
ice cream scoop taken out of your calf or something
like that. So in order for them to get you know,
(04:44):
all the bad stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I don't know. Did you see Steve Foster? He sent
me a picture of one of the Rockies pictures shot
a rattlesnake that came in the deer blind or even
a goosey goose blind? What what kind of animals do
you encounter when you're hunting. Have you ever encountered something
that I know you used to hunt wild pigs, avelina's
(05:06):
stuff like that. I mean, you're not just hunting nice creatures,
you're hunting stuff. And I know you've gone to Africa
to hunt and done stuff like that. Explain like maybe
one of the nastiest places you've been where you're like, man,
there's some crazy stuff out here.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Well, we were duck hunting one day here in the marsh,
and yes, we have alligators in the saltwater. You know,
I've been hunting all day with my dog and everything,
and it's not cold yet and they're cold blooded, so
when it gets really cold, they get looks larger and
we don't really have to worry about them. But it's
early season a couple of years ago, and it's warm,
and you know, I parked the airboat probably I don't know,
(05:43):
seven eight hundred yards away, so we're trying to trick
these ducks. I mean, these ducks aren't that smart, but
we've parked the airboat away so that they don't know
where they're and we're in a blind and we set
up in the dark. You know, I go park the
airboat and then I walk all the way back to
the blind and eight hundred yards and the dogs with me,
and we shoot ducks all day. And then I'm walking
back to the boat at the end of the day,
(06:05):
which you know, nine o'clock in the morning, and I'm like, huh,
where this guy come from. It's about a ten foot
alligator just hanging out over there by the boat. And
I'm like, I must have walked by him this morning.
I glad he wasn't. Andrey, But we see, we see,
we see snakes all the time. Water boksins, rattlesnakes, rattlesnakes
swim really good. We have a we have a snake
(06:26):
here called a blue indigo, which is a federally protected snake.
It is a constrictor. They're like dark dark blue on
the top and have a pinkish orangish belly. They're not poisonous.
They will bite you, but they're real real curious against
the law to kill them because they're feederally protected. They're
they're I don't know if they're in danger, but they're
(06:47):
There's not a whole lot of them. They eat rattlesnakes,
they eat the bad snakes, but because they're real curious.
They will like, if you have a ground blind, they'll
come up in your blind. They'll come places to get warm,
and they will literally come up and just like kind
of stand up like a cobra and look at you.
And when they figure out okay, they don't really want
anything to do with you, didn't the else slither on
(07:08):
and go on along the way. Chelsea and Laylan and
my son, we were driving along a tank damn on
about three or four years ago, and about a six
footer went across the deal in front of us, and
I jumped out and grabbed him by the tail and
picked him up. You're not supposed to handle him. I
picked him up and he wrapped around my arm and
he didn't try to bite me or anything. I grabbed
him real quick, and my wife was like freaking out.
My daughter was all about it. She's like, that's really cool.
(07:30):
I want to hold him, and so I wouldn't let
her hold him. But anyway, we encountered coyotes, hogs, and
you know, hogs aren't really dangerous. They're they're kind of
like any other animal or human. You you corner them
or put them in a really bad situation. Then they're
gonna come out fighting. But most of this stuff is
going to run from you the way you should run
(07:50):
from it.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Most of the time, when you were running that four
thousand acre cattle ranch, you got to you know, ten
for all those cows and stuff. And they're out there
with all of this stuff. How were you a to manage?
You said you had employees, but four thousand acres, Norm,
I mean, how are you able to keep your eyes
on all that?
Speaker 2 (08:07):
I wasn't. I hired really good people under me that
really knew what they were doing. I knew a lot
more about the cattle industry than I did, and I
relied on their expertise. I paid them well and they
did a great job. It would be like me coming
into your radio show and going, Okay, this is how
we're going to do it, and you're like, no, no, no, no,
you don't know what you're doing here. Okay, guys, whatever
(08:27):
the hell you wanted, Well, yeah you can, but I mean,
you really want to be successful, so you know, you
might want to listen to the guys that are that
are kind of good at it.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
All right, tell our listeners normal, we're talking to Norm
Charlton thirteen years in the major leagues. One of the
best pitchers I've ever seen. My roommate for many, many
years and one of my best friends. You decided you
wanted to kill some alligators or were they crocodiles, and
you want to make alligators, and you wanted to make
boots out of them and belts and stuff like that.
(08:57):
Tell us about your experience with hunting gators.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
So hunting gators is really really cool the first come.
A couple of times you do it. After that it's
kind of boring. So you go and set out these baits,
and you put these baits on a on a cable
and you hang them above the water and you're using
typically you're using a chicken or a part of a chicken.
And the higher you hang the bait out of the water,
the bigger the alligator it takes to be able to
(09:21):
get up out of the water to get that bait.
So you put them four or five, you know, three
or four feet off the water. Hopefully you know you're
going to get a bigger alligator. You can only put
out one bait per permitt. That's why it was went
back when we were hunting them, so you don't really
want to. You don't want to catch a three foot
and burn up a permit. You only have so many permits,
so you'd like to catch, you know, the biggest ones.
(09:42):
And in this chicken is a big hook. So the
alligator eats the piece of chicken. He swallows the piece
of chicken. Not real humane, but now he's got a
hook in his stomach. So you walk up on the
shoreline through the brush or the pond dam or the
or the dish or wherever you're you know, wherever you
have set this thing, and you start pulling on the rope.
If they're dip the baits down, ninety nine percent chance
(10:03):
you got an alligator on it. So you start pulling
on this rope and uh, you would think, man, he
would be thrashing and doing that death roll and everything. Man,
he's got a hook in his stomach. He doesn't feel
real good, and it probably hasn't felt real good for
a while. So they usually come up pretty gingerly and
you usually shoot them right between the eyes, had about
three to six feet that's typically how close they get. Uh. Now,
(10:27):
at any time there if he decided, you know what,
I've had enough of this and he wants to lunch
at you and grab you as he probably could. That's
why you always want somebody just a little bit closer
than you are.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Great and Tip now Dips has shown us some video
here recently, and he calls you doctor Doolittle.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Now because you have all.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
The Now you're talking to the animals, these deer that
are your best friends, all of a sudden, you tell
us about all your dear friends.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Look, it's like a good restaurant. A guy's got a
good restaurant up there where you live. You guys go
back time and time and time again at a It's
just it's just mother, I mean, it's a it's a
fact of nature. We just you know, we we like
to eat and we like good food. Well, we have
a feeder there that goes off twice a day at
our at our ducking at our duck hunting and fishing lodge,
(11:16):
and so all of our clients can watch the deer.
And I go back there every time i'm there. They
know my truck, and you know, I'll whistle for them
and they'll come running up and I'll take a cup
of corn and I'll probably throw out four or five
pounds of corn on the road and those are the
videos you're seeing that. I mean, I've got am eating
out of a cup in my hand, I'm holding the
cup out and I've got a nice little ten point
(11:37):
buck eating out of the cup. I mean, they get
pretty used to them, you know, the creatures of habit
Nobody really messes with them, kind of only the The
only predators they have around there are people's dogs if
they let run around. I guess if they got too
close to the alligators. And we probably lose a couple
of deer every year to alligators, but not too many.
But yeah, there's a you know, it's it's pretty cool
(12:00):
being around all that stuff.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah, oh yeah, Well tell me about your kids and
your your daughter Leila. I mean, every time we see
her on Facebook, she's like raising prize rabbits and stuff
like that. Like, you know, you guys are also you know,
helping the environment. You're not just shooting stuff and eating
stuff and all that kind of stuff. You're like great
with the environment, especially your kids talk about it, because
(12:24):
that's got to be wonderful having having kids that respect
the environment and are trying to teach other people about
respecting the environment.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, both of our kids have been through four H
coming up and four H is uh like where they
raise animals and celibate auction. My daughter's got a grand
champion ten of three rabbits. Trent has a grand champion
pen of three rabbits. And look, look, there's no secret
to this. We buy the rabbits from the breeder. Uh.
We put the rabbits in a cage, we separate them.
(12:55):
On the third day, we feed them the same feed
we've always fed them. At the end, we let the
breeder pick it's three he thinks is the best, and
we take them and show them. We give them fresh
feed and fresh for water every day, and we weigh
up a bunch. And that's about all there is to it.
I don't know that there's any trick to having grand
champion rabbits, but both my son and my daughter have
grand champion rabbits, which goes toward their car fund or
(13:17):
their you know, maybe their beer fun or whatever. They're
using it for things I don't need to know about,
but yeah, they Look, we do shoot a lot of animals,
and we do eat a lot of animals. Our freezer
is getting low now, but by the end of deer season,
our freezer will be stocked again. We will grind it
into hamburger. We'll make steaks out of it. Won't make
(13:38):
sausage out of it. We'll make link sausage, work, sausage,
hands sausage. We do all that. We are also not
a family that shoots stuff and kills stuff just to
kill it. I mean, if we kill it, we probably
eat it. We catch a lot of fish, We eat
a lot of fish. We don't. We're not one of
those people that, oh, that's an inferior deer, just shoot
(13:59):
it and leave it beside the road. We don't. We
don't do that. We we respect the game. We realize
that they're out there trying to make a living just
like we are. We shoot a lot of predators, coyotes, bobcats,
mountain lions if we see them, and and we would
eat the mountain and if we if we shot one,
supposedly they're really good. I've never had one, but the's
(14:21):
supposed they're really good. So and we do yeah, and
and and we do lots of stuff. You know, there's
a lot of people that deer hunt. When the season's over,
they quit feeding. Man, we fed year round. We've had
protein year round. We've had corn in the in the
winter time, which is carbohydrates, which helps all the animals.
Look when you sling that corn out of the ground,
it's not just the deer and the pigs they're eating.
(14:41):
You got blue jays and green jays, and cardinals and
sparrows and sandhill cranes. You got all sorts of birds
eating it. You got rabbits out there eating it. And
we don't kill any of that stuff unless we're gonna
eat it, So you know, we do a We're really
conscious about leaving the place better than than we found,
bit picking up our trash and taking you know, only
(15:03):
what we need any base it's we're good for our kids.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Can we get any baseball in on this or no?
Speaker 1 (15:08):
No baseball on this?
Speaker 3 (15:09):
O you guys, I want to know what your thoughts
on show her, especially with your time with each row
and just seeing him do the dual thing pitching and hitting.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
What do you think?
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Man? I never saw a big ruth play, But I
mean people make comparisons, and I don't know. Is it
too early for that? Uh? Too early? Is it too
early to call him the best player to ever play
the game? I mean he's only been here for forty
five minutes. But is he accumulating stats right now that
are going to make him the best player in the game.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
He also did fifty to fifty I mean for a
big duties.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Fast Yeah, it's I mean he I mean, are we
we have to be in the conversation right now of
him being the best player to ever play the game. Look,
this will really piss a lot of Americans that he's
a Japanese player. Well, do we have any Americans that
can do that? I say, we probably do, but we
(16:08):
never got the chance to do that. Most American players,
you know, over in Japan, they let you They let
if you're a good hitter, they let you hit, if
you're a good pitcher. They let you do both. Here
that doesn't really happen. There's very, very, very few guys
that have done that in the big leagues. Otani, Uh,
how we I mean, we play with a guy named
Brooks Keishnik that was a really good hitter at ut
(16:30):
he pitched and hit in the big leagues. I mean,
he would be sitting down in the bullpen and they
need a pitch hitter, they'd use him for a pinch hitter.
They're just not that many guys from America. They got
the chance to do that because they they either ran
us down one road or the other. I went down
the pitching road. I didn't have a choice. I couldn't hit,
But yeah, we could.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Hit at four o'clock.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
I couldn't.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
He couldn't.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
You could, I couldn't. You could.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
I could.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
I could get them on to move him over and
you could drive him in at four o'clock. But but uh, yeah,
I don't know baseball. Uh pretty I was pretty dead, said,
I'm not watching much of it, but because of the
rule changes and stuff it is, I'm glad to see
a World series where we're not starting the next tra
aning with a man on second base. I don't like,
I don't like, and I don't agree with any of
(17:17):
that stuff. But I think this World Series here, the
way it played out and the way it happened, I
think brought a bunch of people, me being one of them,
back into watching a little bit more baseball.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Hey, how good was Echiro?
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Phenomenal?
Speaker 1 (17:32):
I mean he's not a big guy, he's he's a
little dude. Like I I interviewed him. His wife is
as tall as he is.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Yeah, he's he's a little beauty guy. I'm gonna tell
you one thing. I don't know what he could have
done home run wise, if that's what he wanted to do.
That wasn't That wasn't his game. You know. He hit
the ball on the ground kind of like Bogs or
Gwen between second and third and ran like hell and
then he'd steal second, steal third. Dibbs. I, it's it's
(18:01):
hard to believe some of the balls he would hit
in VP when he says, Okay, I'm gonna go home
run this round, but he would. I mean the power
that he had, that granted is VP, but you don't
usually see a guy that's that little had the ability
to hit the ball in the upper deck in a
lot of stadiums. Yeah. As far as the player defensively,
(18:24):
I don't know. It's as good as it gets. Uh,
maybe as good a right fielder ever.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Due great arm still does. He's like fifty. He still
has a rifle for an arm.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Yeah. Man, he was a master of his craft. He
came in every day early. Uh. He had the Japanese
trainers work on him. They do acupuncture, they do this,
and they do that. He had this whole routine and man.
He never broke from it, and he played every day.
He played every day, which is something a lot of
(18:53):
you know, a lot of players didn't do. You know,
I heard a couple of guys Mike Blowers or Third
Basement in Seattle, said Filippi Alo was his manager, and
you know, I think a ball or double a when
he was with the Expos and Mike said, Manlip, I
really need a day off, and Felipe said, okay, that's cool.
Mike said, they posted the lineup part and goes, I'm
in it. He goes, I went in to Philippe's office.
He said, I need a day off. He said, every
(19:15):
day players play every day. Mike said, I get it.
I get it. It's your real plate every day. I mean.
The only time he had a day off, when Lou
forced him to take a day off, he didn't want it.
He came to the ballpark ready to play.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Just a phenomenal student of the game and speaks better
English than anybody on these phone promps. He was funny
in the beginning. He is hilarious, absolutely hilarious. Our ownership, obviously,
being Japanese in Seattle, did not want us to dress
him up when he dressed up the rookies. We put
his clothes. We put a Hooters outfit in his locker
(19:51):
in Baltimore. They took it out and they found his
clothes and put it back in. Well, we took his
clothes out and put the Hooters deal and they called us,
we can't do this gonna We're like, look, he's gonna
be fine with it. He wore it with pride and
he was like, Okay, it's tradition, I do it. And
he loved it. He loves and he couldn't wait to
dress the guys up next year. He is he's super smart.
(20:12):
He's super smart, he's super funny and dude, he's he's
really a good dude.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Well, thanks for giving us a few minutes, my brother,
I love you. Absolutely, give your wife and your kids
a hug from us.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Would you y'all do the same. And uh, we need
to do a time where we can talk about like
some of our other hunting exploitations. But you need to
come down here so you got the stories of your own.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
I know, I know, I will, I will once they
get rid of all this other stuff. Yep, have a
great thanks guys, all right, man, thank you y'all too
Back on the rob Double Show with Ben Darnell in
Your Afternoon Drive. Nick Federico on the Ones and Two's
my roommate for many years in the minor leagues and
the major leagues. One of the nasty boys, Norman Wood
Charlton the third. How you doing, buddy, very good?
Speaker 2 (00:19):
What's going on up there in the cold country or
y' all cold at all?
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, we're cold. We don't like the cold that much.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
We just love it to be cold up there where
you guys are. That means we get ducks. It's warm
down here. We don't have any ducks.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Oh so the ducks fly down there so you could
kill them.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, we get cold up there and freezes, and y'all
have nothing to eat, and they got to migrate down
south where you know they're going on vacation. Well, it's
not much of a vacation for some of them.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
That's exactly why we called you. You're a man's man.
Let me let me just start with when did you
first start hunting? How old were you?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Well, so, DIBs, you've met one of my friends, lolled
yalload him. I think he fished with us when Galveston
that time. I remember in elementary school and my dad
coming getting and coming getting loll and I out of school,
I think in the third or fourth grade to go
goose hunting when the weather got really bad. I think
he brought us so he could shoot our limit. But
(01:12):
nonetheless he brought us.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Yeah, what are we doing? What's the season? What are
we doing right now?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
We're right in the middle of duck Hunting's duck season,
dove is still going on. Goose season is open, although
we don't do much goose hunting, and it's deer season,
so wintertime is a plethora of animals for us. We
can stalk our freezer in about two months and never
have to worry about eating again.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yep. Like when I tell stories about you, people can't
believe it there and I'm like, listen, you just don't
know him. He does things that you know, normal people
don't do. Tell people about when you used to catch
rattlesnakes for extra money to sell the venom to the vet.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, so they sell the vetom to the vet. We
lived outside of this town called Freer, about twenty minutes
from Freer, and Freer always had a deal called a
rattlesnake ground up so we would have a guy that
would come by every other Sunday and he would buy
rattlesnakes from us, either live or dead. They were worth
more live. So every every pickup truck we had on
the ranch, and granted this is a four thousand acre
(02:15):
working cattle ranch that we run Geer hunts on, I
had several young kids employed. So whenever they were doing
stuff around the ranch, filling feeders, fixing fence, whatever, they
had a cage in the back of the truck and
they had these you know, you've seen the guys picking
up litter out on the highway m hm with the
little Yeah, we had those in every truck and they'd
(02:37):
hear a rattlesnaker, they see a rattlesnake, they walk up
and grab him with those things, put him in the box.
The end of the day, they'd take him and put
him in a cage uh in the barn. They had
to give him water, they didn't really need to feed
him because they don't eat that much. And the guy
would come around and buy him by the pound every
two weeks. So, yeah, it was good for us. The
kids made extra money and we got rid of snakes
(02:59):
that wanted to bite.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
You teach our listeners how to handle a rattle snake,
give us the woods Guide tour. If I come up
on a rattlesnake, what should I do?
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Uh? Probably walk the other way.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
They don't mess with it.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, yeah, you know, like I said, in all of
our vehicles, we had a box that had you know,
it was a wooden box that had a door on
the top and it had mesh wire on the side
so the snake couldn't get out. And those songs that
we used are about five or six feet long. And granted,
most of our snakes don't get more than you know,
five feet, so they can strike about two and a half.
(03:39):
And so if you just happen to be hiking through
the woods up in Connecticut and you have a trash
picker up or in a box to put it in,
or a bag to put it in, then go ahead
and grab it by the middle. You don't want to
grab it by the head because you've got too much
to wiggle around. Just grab it by the middle of
the body came in the box. What you really want
to do is leave them alone unless you've got you know,
a hoe or a shovel or a acre or you know,
(04:02):
a gun or something to kill them. They're not worth
messing with taking the chance of getting bit, getting bit
by a snake, by a rattlesnake or a water mookson
or one of those snakes. It's not it's not fun.
I had a friend get bit back when we were younger,
and he got a scarf from his ankle all the
way to his knee and they had to take out
half of his calf. You know the treatment they used
(04:23):
to do. They cut an X on it and suck
the poison out, And they don't really do that anymore.
They want you to ice it now, get to the
doctor as quick as you can, and basically any tissue
that they can see that looks like it's affected, they
just remove it. So you end up like a giant
ice cream scoop taken out of your calf or something
like that. So in order for them to get you know,
(04:44):
all the bad stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I don't know. Did you see Steve Foster? He sent
me a picture of one of the Rockies pictures shot
a rattlesnake that came in the deer blind or even
a goosey goose blind? What what kind of animals do
you encounter when you're hunting. Have you ever encountered something
that I know you used to hunt wild pigs, avelina's
(05:06):
stuff like that. I mean, you're not just hunting nice creatures,
you're hunting stuff. And I know you've gone to Africa
to hunt and done stuff like that. Explain like maybe
one of the nastiest places you've been where you're like, man,
there's some crazy stuff out here.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Well, we were duck hunting one day here in the marsh,
and yes, we have alligators in the saltwater. You know,
I've been hunting all day with my dog and everything,
and it's not cold yet and they're cold blooded, so
when it gets really cold, they get looks larger and
we don't really have to worry about them. But it's
early season a couple of years ago, and it's warm,
and you know, I parked the airboat probably I don't know,
(05:43):
seven eight hundred yards away, so we're trying to trick
these ducks. I mean, these ducks aren't that smart, but
we've parked the airboat away so that they don't know
where they're and we're in a blind and we set
up in the dark. You know, I go park the
airboat and then I walk all the way back to
the blind and eight hundred yards and the dogs with me,
and we shoot ducks all day. And then I'm walking
back to the boat at the end of the day,
(06:05):
which you know, nine o'clock in the morning, and I'm like, huh,
where this guy come from. It's about a ten foot
alligator just hanging out over there by the boat. And
I'm like, I must have walked by him this morning.
I glad he wasn't. Andrey, But we see, we see,
we see snakes all the time. Water boksins, rattlesnakes, rattlesnakes
swim really good. We have a we have a snake
(06:26):
here called a blue indigo, which is a federally protected snake.
It is a constrictor. They're like dark dark blue on
the top and have a pinkish orangish belly. They're not poisonous.
They will bite you, but they're real real curious against
the law to kill them because they're feederally protected. They're
they're I don't know if they're in danger, but they're
(06:47):
There's not a whole lot of them. They eat rattlesnakes,
they eat the bad snakes, but because they're real curious.
They will like, if you have a ground blind, they'll
come up in your blind. They'll come places to get warm,
and they will literally come up and just like kind
of stand up like a cobra and look at you.
And when they figure out okay, they don't really want
anything to do with you, didn't the else slither on
(07:08):
and go on along the way. Chelsea and Laylan and
my son, we were driving along a tank damn on
about three or four years ago, and about a six
footer went across the deal in front of us, and
I jumped out and grabbed him by the tail and
picked him up. You're not supposed to handle him. I
picked him up and he wrapped around my arm and
he didn't try to bite me or anything. I grabbed
him real quick, and my wife was like freaking out.
My daughter was all about it. She's like, that's really cool.
(07:30):
I want to hold him, and so I wouldn't let
her hold him. But anyway, we encountered coyotes, hogs, and
you know, hogs aren't really dangerous. They're they're kind of
like any other animal or human. You you corner them
or put them in a really bad situation. Then they're
gonna come out fighting. But most of this stuff is
going to run from you the way you should run
(07:50):
from it.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Most of the time, when you were running that four
thousand acre cattle ranch, you got to you know, ten
for all those cows and stuff. And they're out there
with all of this stuff. How were you a to manage?
You said you had employees, but four thousand acres, Norm,
I mean, how are you able to keep your eyes
on all that?
Speaker 2 (08:07):
I wasn't. I hired really good people under me that
really knew what they were doing. I knew a lot
more about the cattle industry than I did, and I
relied on their expertise. I paid them well and they
did a great job. It would be like me coming
into your radio show and going, Okay, this is how
we're going to do it, and you're like, no, no, no, no,
you don't know what you're doing here. Okay, guys, whatever
(08:27):
the hell you wanted, Well, yeah you can, but I mean,
you really want to be successful, so you know, you
might want to listen to the guys that are that
are kind of good at it.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
All right, tell our listeners normal, we're talking to Norm
Charlton thirteen years in the major leagues. One of the
best pitchers I've ever seen. My roommate for many, many
years and one of my best friends. You decided you
wanted to kill some alligators or were they crocodiles, and
you want to make alligators, and you wanted to make
boots out of them and belts and stuff like that.
(08:57):
Tell us about your experience with hunting gators.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
So hunting gators is really really cool the first come.
A couple of times you do it. After that it's
kind of boring. So you go and set out these baits,
and you put these baits on a on a cable
and you hang them above the water and you're using
typically you're using a chicken or a part of a chicken.
And the higher you hang the bait out of the water,
the bigger the alligator it takes to be able to
(09:21):
get up out of the water to get that bait.
So you put them four or five, you know, three
or four feet off the water. Hopefully you know you're
going to get a bigger alligator. You can only put
out one bait per permitt. That's why it was went
back when we were hunting them, so you don't really
want to. You don't want to catch a three foot
and burn up a permit. You only have so many permits,
so you'd like to catch, you know, the biggest ones.
(09:42):
And in this chicken is a big hook. So the
alligator eats the piece of chicken. He swallows the piece
of chicken. Not real humane, but now he's got a
hook in his stomach. So you walk up on the
shoreline through the brush or the pond dam or the
or the dish or wherever you're you know, wherever you
have set this thing, and you start pulling on the rope.
If they're dip the baits down, ninety nine percent chance
(10:03):
you got an alligator on it. So you start pulling
on this rope and uh, you would think, man, he
would be thrashing and doing that death roll and everything. Man,
he's got a hook in his stomach. He doesn't feel
real good, and it probably hasn't felt real good for
a while. So they usually come up pretty gingerly and
you usually shoot them right between the eyes, had about
three to six feet that's typically how close they get. Uh. Now,
(10:27):
at any time there if he decided, you know what,
I've had enough of this and he wants to lunch
at you and grab you as he probably could. That's
why you always want somebody just a little bit closer
than you are.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Great and Tip now Dips has shown us some video
here recently, and he calls you doctor Doolittle.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Now because you have all.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
The Now you're talking to the animals, these deer that
are your best friends, all of a sudden, you tell
us about all your dear friends.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Look, it's like a good restaurant. A guy's got a
good restaurant up there where you live. You guys go
back time and time and time again at a It's
just it's just mother, I mean, it's a it's a
fact of nature. We just you know, we we like
to eat and we like good food. Well, we have
a feeder there that goes off twice a day at
our at our ducking at our duck hunting and fishing lodge,
(11:16):
and so all of our clients can watch the deer.
And I go back there every time i'm there. They
know my truck, and you know, I'll whistle for them
and they'll come running up and I'll take a cup
of corn and I'll probably throw out four or five
pounds of corn on the road and those are the
videos you're seeing that. I mean, I've got am eating
out of a cup in my hand, I'm holding the
cup out and I've got a nice little ten point
(11:37):
buck eating out of the cup. I mean, they get
pretty used to them, you know, the creatures of habit
Nobody really messes with them, kind of only the The
only predators they have around there are people's dogs if
they let run around. I guess if they got too
close to the alligators. And we probably lose a couple
of deer every year to alligators, but not too many.
But yeah, there's a you know, it's it's pretty cool
(12:00):
being around all that stuff.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah, oh yeah, Well tell me about your kids and
your your daughter Leila. I mean, every time we see
her on Facebook, she's like raising prize rabbits and stuff
like that. Like, you know, you guys are also you know,
helping the environment. You're not just shooting stuff and eating
stuff and all that kind of stuff. You're like great
with the environment, especially your kids talk about it, because
(12:24):
that's got to be wonderful having having kids that respect
the environment and are trying to teach other people about
respecting the environment.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, both of our kids have been through four H
coming up and four H is uh like where they
raise animals and celibate auction. My daughter's got a grand
champion ten of three rabbits. Trent has a grand champion
pen of three rabbits. And look, look, there's no secret
to this. We buy the rabbits from the breeder. Uh.
We put the rabbits in a cage, we separate them.
(12:55):
On the third day, we feed them the same feed
we've always fed them. At the end, we let the
breeder pick it's three he thinks is the best, and
we take them and show them. We give them fresh
feed and fresh for water every day, and we weigh
up a bunch. And that's about all there is to it.
I don't know that there's any trick to having grand
champion rabbits, but both my son and my daughter have
grand champion rabbits, which goes toward their car fund or
(13:17):
their you know, maybe their beer fun or whatever. They're
using it for things I don't need to know about,
but yeah, they Look, we do shoot a lot of animals,
and we do eat a lot of animals. Our freezer
is getting low now, but by the end of deer season,
our freezer will be stocked again. We will grind it
into hamburger. We'll make steaks out of it. Won't make
(13:38):
sausage out of it. We'll make link sausage, work, sausage,
hands sausage. We do all that. We are also not
a family that shoots stuff and kills stuff just to
kill it. I mean, if we kill it, we probably
eat it. We catch a lot of fish, We eat
a lot of fish. We don't. We're not one of
those people that, oh, that's an inferior deer, just shoot
(13:59):
it and leave it beside the road. We don't. We
don't do that. We we respect the game. We realize
that they're out there trying to make a living just
like we are. We shoot a lot of predators, coyotes, bobcats,
mountain lions if we see them, and and we would
eat the mountain and if we if we shot one,
supposedly they're really good. I've never had one, but the's
(14:21):
supposed they're really good. So and we do yeah, and
and and we do lots of stuff. You know, there's
a lot of people that deer hunt. When the season's over,
they quit feeding. Man, we fed year round. We've had
protein year round. We've had corn in the in the
winter time, which is carbohydrates, which helps all the animals.
Look when you sling that corn out of the ground,
it's not just the deer and the pigs they're eating.
(14:41):
You got blue jays and green jays, and cardinals and
sparrows and sandhill cranes. You got all sorts of birds
eating it. You got rabbits out there eating it. And
we don't kill any of that stuff unless we're gonna
eat it, So you know, we do a We're really
conscious about leaving the place better than than we found,
bit picking up our trash and taking you know, only
(15:03):
what we need any base it's we're good for our kids.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Can we get any baseball in on this or no?
Speaker 1 (15:08):
No baseball on this?
Speaker 3 (15:09):
O you guys, I want to know what your thoughts
on show her, especially with your time with each row
and just seeing him do the dual thing pitching and hitting.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
What do you think?
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Man? I never saw a big ruth play, But I
mean people make comparisons, and I don't know. Is it
too early for that? Uh? Too early? Is it too
early to call him the best player to ever play
the game? I mean he's only been here for forty
five minutes. But is he accumulating stats right now that
are going to make him the best player in the game.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
He also did fifty to fifty I mean for a
big duties.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Fast Yeah, it's I mean he I mean, are we
we have to be in the conversation right now of
him being the best player to ever play the game. Look,
this will really piss a lot of Americans that he's
a Japanese player. Well, do we have any Americans that
can do that? I say, we probably do, but we
(16:08):
never got the chance to do that. Most American players,
you know, over in Japan, they let you They let
if you're a good hitter, they let you hit, if
you're a good pitcher. They let you do both. Here
that doesn't really happen. There's very, very, very few guys
that have done that in the big leagues. Otani, Uh,
how we I mean, we play with a guy named
Brooks Keishnik that was a really good hitter at ut
(16:30):
he pitched and hit in the big leagues. I mean,
he would be sitting down in the bullpen and they
need a pitch hitter, they'd use him for a pinch hitter.
They're just not that many guys from America. They got
the chance to do that because they they either ran
us down one road or the other. I went down
the pitching road. I didn't have a choice. I couldn't hit,
But yeah, we could.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Hit at four o'clock.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
I couldn't.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
He couldn't.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
You could, I couldn't. You could.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
I could.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
I could get them on to move him over and
you could drive him in at four o'clock. But but uh, yeah,
I don't know baseball. Uh pretty I was pretty dead, said,
I'm not watching much of it, but because of the
rule changes and stuff it is, I'm glad to see
a World series where we're not starting the next tra
aning with a man on second base. I don't like,
I don't like, and I don't agree with any of
(17:17):
that stuff. But I think this World Series here, the
way it played out and the way it happened, I
think brought a bunch of people, me being one of them,
back into watching a little bit more baseball.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Hey, how good was Echiro?
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Phenomenal?
Speaker 1 (17:32):
I mean he's not a big guy, he's he's a
little dude. Like I I interviewed him. His wife is
as tall as he is.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Yeah, he's he's a little beauty guy. I'm gonna tell
you one thing. I don't know what he could have
done home run wise, if that's what he wanted to do.
That wasn't That wasn't his game. You know. He hit
the ball on the ground kind of like Bogs or
Gwen between second and third and ran like hell and
then he'd steal second, steal third. Dibbs. I, it's it's
(18:01):
hard to believe some of the balls he would hit
in VP when he says, Okay, I'm gonna go home
run this round, but he would. I mean the power
that he had, that granted is VP, but you don't
usually see a guy that's that little had the ability
to hit the ball in the upper deck in a
lot of stadiums. Yeah. As far as the player defensively,
(18:24):
I don't know. It's as good as it gets. Uh,
maybe as good a right fielder ever.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Due great arm still does. He's like fifty. He still
has a rifle for an arm.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Yeah. Man, he was a master of his craft. He
came in every day early. Uh. He had the Japanese
trainers work on him. They do acupuncture, they do this,
and they do that. He had this whole routine and man.
He never broke from it, and he played every day.
He played every day, which is something a lot of
(18:53):
you know, a lot of players didn't do. You know,
I heard a couple of guys Mike Blowers or Third
Basement in Seattle, said Filippi Alo was his manager, and
you know, I think a ball or double a when
he was with the Expos and Mike said, Manlip, I
really need a day off, and Felipe said, okay, that's cool.
Mike said, they posted the lineup part and goes, I'm
in it. He goes, I went in to Philippe's office.
He said, I need a day off. He said, every
(19:15):
day players play every day. Mike said, I get it.
I get it. It's your real plate every day. I mean.
The only time he had a day off, when Lou
forced him to take a day off, he didn't want it.
He came to the ballpark ready to play.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Just a phenomenal student of the game and speaks better
English than anybody on these phone promps. He was funny
in the beginning. He is hilarious, absolutely hilarious. Our ownership, obviously,
being Japanese in Seattle, did not want us to dress
him up when he dressed up the rookies. We put
his clothes. We put a Hooters outfit in his locker
(19:51):
in Baltimore. They took it out and they found his
clothes and put it back in. Well, we took his
clothes out and put the Hooters deal and they called us,
we can't do this gonna We're like, look, he's gonna
be fine with it. He wore it with pride and
he was like, Okay, it's tradition, I do it. And
he loved it. He loves and he couldn't wait to
dress the guys up next year. He is he's super smart.
(20:12):
He's super smart, he's super funny and dude, he's he's
really a good dude.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Well, thanks for giving us a few minutes, my brother,
I love you. Absolutely, give your wife and your kids
a hug from us.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Would you y'all do the same. And uh, we need
to do a time where we can talk about like
some of our other hunting exploitations. But you need to
come down here so you got the stories of your own.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
I know, I know, I will, I will once they
get rid of all this other stuff. Yep, have a
great thanks guys, all right, man, thank you y'all too
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