A Tamer Game Feed : After a Fine Last Year, Charity Barbecue Will Buy Meat, Not Hunt It

For 26 years it’s been a fall ritual.

Drawn by promises of camaraderie and good food, as many as 500 hunters and their friends--including some prominent Orange County citizens--pay $75 for tickets to the Wild Game Feed barbecue near Irvine Lake where they play volleyball, toss horseshoes and eat such game as antelope, boar, elk, mountain goat, buffalo and caribou. Publicized only by word of mouth, the all-male gathering has raised thousands for charity.

The ritual will be on again this Friday, but with one important difference.

Instead of feasting on animals killed by the hunters, participants will be spreading their tables with meat bought from wild game producers in Texas and Wyoming, as well as local supermarkets.

The reason: a raid last year by state Fish and Game officers that shut down the feed, just before the feast was served. Organizers paid $33,790 last week to settle a lawsuit charging them with violating state regulations against selling meat obtained by hunters holding sport, rather than commercial, licenses.

“It was nothing but extortion,” said Denny Vopat, a Wild Game Feed founder who works in the sporting goods industry. “We did this for 25 years under the Fish and Game’s noses. If they thought we were wrong, they could have driven up in their car and said, ‘Hey boys, you’re illegal,’ and we’d have stopped.”

Said Howard Clark, president of Wild Game Feed Inc., which puts on the event: “We absolutely, positively had no thought that we were reselling the game that was donated.”

State Fish and Game officials and the district attorney’s office saw the matter differently, however. The civil lawsuit eventually filed against the event’s organizers charged them with conducting the unlawful business practice of selling meat without the proper hunting license, and false or misleading advertising for promising to serve meats--such as mountain lion and black bear--which were not actually available.

“It was the most just and fair way of resolving this,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Matthew Anderson said of the settlement, adding that there was no evidence of intent to break the law. “The remedy . . . seems to address the problem.”

Oddly, organizers say, the legality of the event had never been questioned, despite the routine attendance of police chiefs, sheriff’s deputies, judges, politicians and, according to Clark, state Fish and Game Commissioner Gus Owen.

Owen was in Washington Tuesday for confirmation hearings on his nomination as an Interstate Commerce commissioner and could not be reached for comment.

Eugene Langhauser, a retired Orange County Central Municipal Court judge now living in Palm Desert, said that he himself attended the event at least four times and never questioned its legality.

“Nobody ever thought about it,” he said. “You just had a lot of food (game) in your refrigerator and you brought it down and gave it to the guys. What could be illegal about that? Somebody has to get some money for it to be illegal and these guys never did.”

Among recipients of the annual charity--which netted several thousand dollars a year--were the Sierra Club, Ducks Unlimited (a national group fostering habitats for wildlife), crippled children’s programs and campership programs.

“This was a pretty classy bunch of guys,” Langhauser said. “It was very pleasant. Just a bunch of guys getting together who knew each other from a bar or from work. I met some very nice people as a result; they were kind of the movers and the shakers.”

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The gathering got started in the mid-1960s when a small group of hunter friends gathered at a restaurant in Orange to “talk about politics, hunting and fishing,” said Grant Clark, 70, (no relation to Howard). Among the group’s founders, he said, was Pete Winslow, then an Orange County marshal. Later, Clark said, the group met for a barbecue in the back yard of one of its members and eventually began holding its annual fund-raiser in parks.

As word of the gatherings spread, prominent citizens began showing up. At one time or another, organizers say, they included a state senator, President Richard Nixon’s chief pilot, at least one professional athlete, developers, a former county sheriff and numerous other law enforcement officers and officials.

“It just grew and grew like Topsy,” Grant Clark said. “Everyone wanted to come; we had every known animal” on the menu.

This year’s menu seems no different, despite the fact that everything on it was bought rather than donated. In addition to such meats as venison and “African game,” it promises turkey, duck, pheasant, quail, goose, salmon, clams, albacore, yellowtail, trout, sea bass and blue marlin.

To help defray the cost of settling the lawsuit and pay for buying the meat, organizers say, the price of tickets has been raised from $75 to $85. The increased costs is likely to significantly decrease the amount of money raised for charity, said Howard Clark.

By Tuesday, organizers said, all the tickets--some 500--had been sold.

And so on Wednesday night, as they do every year, a few of the guys will go down to the barbecue site near the lake to begin preparing the fire pits.

“We’ve got grandfathers, fathers and sons coming to this thing,” Howard Clark said. “It’s limited to people who get along well and enjoy this type of activity. People think we’re a bunch of bad guys, (but) it’s for friends of friends to come out and enjoy the day.”