Rare breed
The Woods' remarkable American success story is one of overcoming hardships and building boats … one at a time
Forrest Wood leaned against the long paddle with one arm, encouraging it’s yellow wood to slice through the White River. He is sitting in the back of a long green fiberglass float boat, guiding the craft through shoals, watching Nina Wood as she makes accurate casts to riffles and reels in rainbow trout.
The scene is slightly ironic: A man whose Ranger Boat creations spawned a multi-billion dollar industry in bass boats with all their electronic equipment, including a trolling motor, sitting in the back of a flat-bottom boat with a paddle and chasing rainbow trout tests the limits of irony. But it goes one step further. The roots of bass boats and the growth of bass tournaments began with that very scene more than 40 years before.
Forrest Wood is a modern-day folk hero in the bass fishing world. He’s the founder of Ranger Boats (the nation’s premier boat manufacturer), the namesake of the FLW Tour (the initials stand for Forrest Lee Wood) and mentor to everyone who meets him. Sammy Lee, promotions manager for Ranger Boats, once called him John Wayne in a bass boat. To many it’s an accurate statement, although it’s one Wood isn’t comfortable with. He’s more comfortable with being described as a simple man, an Ozark country boy who followed an ethic of working hard, doing quality work and standing by the finished product. It’s an ethic that laid the groundwork for the fruition of the American dream.
There are many ways to describe Wood’s life. But it is perhaps best to compare his life with a hot summer day in the Ozarks. Those days can be so desperate that the sun seems to burn a hole right through your body. The heat comes from everywhere; the glare from above and straight from the ground, where cooking rocks singe the bottom of your feet. Tree limbs are lifeless, and few birds test the air or sing their songs on days like this. Small streams are stagnant, and every living thing seems to be hiding from the penetrating sun. Then, as is common in these high hills and deep valleys, a summer thunderstorm blows through. Violent clashes of lightening flash above and bursts of rain stream down in a cataclysm that can shake even the most fearless of men. The storm can last for a few minutes or for hours. But when it is over, the hot rocks are cooled. The trees come to life and birds sing and soar into the sky. Stagnate streams are filled with life as they roll, and fish dimple the surface. The brief, ugly and foreboding storm transforms everything, and those that weather it see and feel greater things than they could have imagined before or during the storm.
In essence, Wood’s life is a mirror of these occurrences. He has weathered storms that would have shaken many men to their bones and came out of them with a renewed vigor that not only changed his life but also how most of us enjoy a day of fishing.
Wood was born in Flippin, Ark., in 1933 along the legendary White River. In those days, the White River was known for its smallmouth bass and it’s penchant for being calm and placid one day and raging with flood waters the next. Years before, the river was a pipeline for Arkansas’ Ozark bear trade. Black bear were numerous, and bear fat was a commodity. Rough men worked the harsh Ozark hills, hunting bear and strapping their pelts and fat onto huge oak logs that were floated down the river to market. It was the type of work the Ozarks were renowned for. Nothing comes easy in the hills. And it was no different for Wood. His ancestors were the first family to settle in that area of the Ozarks. For the most part, they were cotton farmers who eked out a living on land better suited for rock gardens than crops. Wood’s earliest memories are of walking behind a mule and plow “… wallowing rocks around to get a crop in the ground.”
“We grew up hard,” Wood says. “Nobody had anything, but we didn’t know the difference.” What Wood knew was hard work paid off, no matter what the circumstances. There’s no time to feel sorry for yourself when a storm blows through your life.
Wood’s first storm came after World War II, when cotton crops in the Ozarks were decimated by the boll weevil. With the coming of industrialization to cotton farmers in the Arkansas Delta, cotton farming was a lost cause in the rocky ground of the Ozarks, even for a boy who had dreamed only of being a farmer all his life. It was the first in a series of life-changing storms for Wood. With cotton gone as an option, Wood took work where he could get it. That included working as a wagon-drill operator and dynamite handler in the construction of Bull Shoals Dam.
That he had a hand in the dam’s construction is interesting. The dam itself is one of three along the White River that form Beaver, Table Rock and Bull Shoals lakes. They have also greatly shaped the lives of everyone who lived around them, especially Wood. Wood recalls that building the dam was exciting and tempered with a bit of sadness. In economic trying times, the dam offered jobs. But it also resulted in the loss of land for many nearby residents. Nina Wood’s family, for one, lost their farm due to the construction. For Forrest and Nina Wood, however, the dam’s real impact wouldn’t occur for a few years.
The two had fallen in love in high school. On their dates or “courting” as Wood still calls it, the two spent time fishing for smallmouth on the Buffalo River and Crooked Creek. Wood, who had always worked at almost any job he could find, drove the school bus while he was still a student. On many days, after the rest of the students had been dropped off at school, the couple would cut class and spend the day fishing. Some might say it was a match made in heaven. After graduation, they married.
After the dam was built and jobs in the area became scarce, the two decided to make it on their own in the cattle business. To do that, they took out two loans, one for $2,750 to purchase 40 acres and a house in Flippin, the other to stock the land with Angus cows. The two were intent on scratching out a living in the rocks. But a long, hot summer’s drought would provide the second storm in Wood’s life. The drought coupled with a drop in beef prices from 30 cents to 7 cents a pound proved disastrous. The couple’s foray in the cattle business left them broke and in debt.
“Even though it was a sad and trying time, we were determined to pay off our debt,” Wood says.
The couple moved to Kansas City, where Wood went to work for General Motors, building F-84 fighter jets. For 15 months, the two saved every cent possible, eventually saving $3,500 to pay off the mortgage. Although he believes that every experience teaches you something, as soon as the debt was paid, Wood knew his future was elsewhere.
“We decided we were going to live in Flippin on whatever we could get,” Wood says. So, with his money in a sack, Wood tied his furniture to the top of his 1947 Plymouth and headed home.
Whatever the couple could get was under the shadow of the Bull Shoals Dam, where a change was taking place in the Ozarks. Releases from the dams had transformed the warm water of the White River into a coldwater discharge that stretched for hundreds of miles. The smallmouth that were home there when Wood was a boy were gone, and as mitigation, the federal government stocked rainbow trout into the river.
Today, the trout fishing on the White River is considered second to none, with a long list of world records to its credit. When Wood came home it was just starting to gain a reputation. And in that reputation, Wood saw an opportunity to start over. He began guiding, first working for others, paddling long flat-bottom boats over rocky shoals. Then, when the opportunity came, he and Nina Wood opened the Bull Shoals Boat Dock and specialized in float trips for the numerous rainbow trout in the river.
It was hard work, guiding all day for $8 in wages. Like everything Wood does, it was a family affair. Nina coordinated the trips and kept up the supplies, and his daughters made sandwiches. The work was from daylight to dark. But doing it taught Wood valuable lessons. The most important of which was that to keep good people, you have to take care of them.
When it comes to the guide business, it’s not an everyday affair. Some months of the year are slow, and since Wood wanted to keep good guides, he had to make sure they stayed busy during the slow times. Busy meant building things from houses and barns to bridges. He offered his guides benefits and kept them earning a steady salary. His loyalty to them was reciprocated; setting a standard of loyalty that still follows Wood.
Things were going well. Wood had one of the largest guide businesses on the White River, but with so much business, the long, wooden, flat-bottom boats used to float over the rocky shoals took a beating. To hold them together and make them last longer, Wood began covering the bottoms of his fleet of guide boats with fiberglass. And during slow fishing periods, he and his guides made fiberglass phone booths, shower stalls or whatever he could get a contract for. Working with fiberglass eventually manifested the idea of making an entire boat out of fiberglass. An all fiberglass boat was lighter than wood, and they could be custom built to the specifications of the angler.
The timing was perfect. Dams were being constructed all over the country and large lakes were providing the type of fishing that wood boats could no longer accommodate. In that setting, Wood found that anglers liked what he was doing with his boats, because he could build a lake boat, a river boat or one suited for both environments.
As purely a sideline to his guide business, Wood began crafting fiberglass boats in 1968. Because he liked what the titles Texas Rangers and Army Rangers stood for, he decided to name his creations Ranger. “It was just a good strong name,” Wood recalls.
Even though he had a name, there was no vision of making Ranger Boats into a huge company. Wood was still trying to make sure he could keep his guides busy during the slow season. He traveled to tournaments in Arkansas, asking every one he saw if they wanted to buy a boat. “Some of them did,” said Wood, pointing to Ranger Boat’s popular slogan of building their boats one at a time. “That’s the way you sell them, too.”
Customers found Wood to be likable, conscientious about his work and, most of all, honest. Those values would continually pay off for him.
At Ray Scott’s second B.A.S.S. tournament he met anglers like Scott, Bill Dance and Tom Mann. Wood says that he went to the tournament to win, but also to show off his boat and attract potential customers. He didn’t win the tournament, but he did get boat orders, including one from Dance.
The first year in the history of Ranger Boats, Wood sold six of his crafts, built from a garage where modern-day Flippin City Hall sits. By the second year he had sold 600 with the total climbing to 1,200 by the end of the third year. The operation grew so much that Wood moved Ranger Boats to the Silver Star Saloon, a bar that had been built during the boom years of the Bull Shoals Dam construction. The saloon had been built quickly, and it would come down even faster.
On the evening of May 4, 1971, the biggest storm of Wood’s life hit. He and Nina were sitting at their dinner table, visiting with their new friend and customer, Roland Martin. They met Martin at one of Scott’s tournaments and were taken with the charismatic angler. Martin had been fishing near Flippin that day and had been invited to come to dinner. The meal was going well until Flippin’s city fire bell started ringing.
A static spark or electrical short had ignited acetone, and a wall of fire spread quickly across the roof of the Ranger Boat plant. “When I heard the bell, I never imagined it could be my property,” Wood recalls. “I asked Roland if he wanted to go with me to see where the fire was. As soon as we saw the smoke, I knew where it was coming from.”
Wood and Martin raced to the plant, and once they realized the night-shift employees were safe from the raging fire, they ran to the window outside of Wood’s office. The fire was spreading fast, fed by barrels of acetone, and was getting close. Wood looked in and saw that his desk, a metal Army surplus model, had yet to catch fire. Martin broke a window, and the two wrestled the desk open, retrieving 60 boat orders. It was the only thing salvaged from the fire.
During the course of fighting the blaze, Flippin’s fire truck ran out of water. As a result, the fire burned so hot that everything was destroyed, everything that is but Wood’s resolve. More than 60 employees were suddenly out of work. “We never thought about quitting,” Wood says. “There were too many people’s lives at stake.”
Wood kept every employee on the payroll and concentrated on how to rebuild quickly. He nailed a phone to a tree near the ruins and began to do business while friends helped clean up the mess and start over. Boat dealerships called, placed orders and paid early just to help out. Several of those post-fire Ranger boats were sold for $499 just to make the payroll. But Wood knew it would take more than that to get things off the ground. He went to Little Rock, Ark., and met with the Small Business Administration, hoping to get a loan.
“They gave me a stack of applications about 2 inches thick, and said it would be weeks before an application would be approved,” Wood says. “I figured we could make the money faster than they could loan it.”
The next day, Wood took out a $60,000 loan from Flippin’s bank. Meanwhile, he worked day and night rebuilding. Exactly 40 days and 40 nights after the fire, the plant was up and running and building boats again. “Had we known what the odds were of surviving a fire, things might’ve been different,” Wood says. “But we didn’t know any better.”
From a storm perspective, 1971 wouldn’t get any better. An employee who ran Bull Shoals Boat Dock died of a heart attack, and with everything else happening so fast, Forrest and Nina were forced to sell their guide operation. Then in November, a tornado tore through the Wood property, taking the roof of their house with it and a barn several employees had built just days earlier.
“After I paid a man for painting that barn, that very night a tornado blew it away,” Nina recalls. “It seemed like 1971 was a terrible time.”
It may have been. But the tragedies, like a summer storm in the Ozarks, brought new life to the Wood family. “You need some hard times every once in a while,” Wood says. “They make you appreciate what you have.”
That acceptance has always helped Wood weather the storm. That, along with a business strategy that almost seems strange in today’s corporate America. The tenets of that strategy are simple. Wood thrives on doing the best job possible. Whether building a bridge or a fiberglass boat, quality from start to finish is the cornerstone of being successful.
“We wanted to make the best possible product,” Wood says. “We weren’t interested in making something that anyone would buy. We were interested in the top of the market. You get that by making a quality product, advertising it and knowing that you had better deliver the goods.”
Meanwhile, hard times are never an excuse to cut back. In the past three decades the boat market has been up and down, but Wood never believed in laying-off employees or otherwise cutting back.
During one difficult period when prices for manufacturing products were skyrocketing, boat manufacturers were cutting back all over the country. At the time, Wood was advertising heavily in BASSMASTER Magazine with two full-page ads. Ray Scott, understanding the gravity of the situation, called Wood and told him he didn’t have to continue to advertise until times got better.
“I told him, I think I’ll buy three ads this month,” Wood says. “I believed in making hay when the others were going backward and it paid off.”
Wood’s philosophy not only endeared him to the fishing market, but also with his employees as well. He knew that the secret to success is people and caring for them. And you can’t create a loyal work force if you are not loyal to them. Employees of Ranger often describe themselves as part of the “Ranger Family.”
To give an example of the degree of loyalty his employees expressed, Wood recalls the story of Leonard, a truck driver for Ranger Boats for several years. While delivering boats to North Carolina, Leonard suffered a heart attack and Wood dispatched his private plane to fly Leonard back home. A few years later, Leonard died, and when Wood attended the funeral he was surprised to find that Leonard insisted on being buried in a Ranger cap and Ranger T-shirt. His head stone was even in the shape of a Ranger truck and trailer.
“You just don’t get that type of loyalty,” Wood said. “Today, it seems corporations want to shoot themselves in the foot. When times get bad, their employees are the first ones to go. They don’t realize that people are the most valuable thing you can have on your side.”
Today, Minneapolis businessman Irwin Jacobs owns Ranger Boats, but Wood is still involved as a spokesman for the company. Most of his time is spent on his 7,000-acre farm where he and Nina are finally fulfilling their original dream of raising cattle. They are considered one of the top breeders of Angus cattle, running approximately 1,000 head on their property.
“Most of our time is spent making a living for them,” Wood says.
The family, along with help from Ranger employees, can often be found in the hay fields, where cutting and baling hay is a constant activity. “I wouldn’t know what to do if I weren’t working,” Wood says.
Occasionally, he and Nina can be found floating the White River. Forrest sitting in the back leaning on a paddle, Nina casting in the front – neither one wanting to get very far from the roots where every good thing in their lives originated.
To learn more about Forrest Wood’s remarkable story see: