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Claude Hamilton Gresham, Jr., known as Grits Gresham (June 21, 1922 – February 18, 2008), was an internationally known American sportsman, author, photographer and television personality who hosted ABC's ''The American Sportsman'' series from 1966 to 1979. Gresham, who resided on the historic Cane River Lake in Natchitoches, the oldest city in Louisiana, traveled throughout the globe, particularly South America and Africa, to engage in hunting, fishing and shooting with various American celebrities. He was a champion of the environment and conservation, the subject of his graduate school thesis.〔(NSSF )〕 ==Early years, education, military== Gresham was born in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, to Claude Gresham, Sr. and the former Belle Hill. He inherited his nickname from his father, a semi-professional baseball player known as "Grit". Gresham grew up in rural South Carolina. As a small boy, he was so interested in hunting that he slept with his air rifle beside his bed. He took his first shot of the day out of his bedroom window. "Two things were going to happen every day when I was growing up. The sun was going to rise, and I was going to shoot something," Gresham said in a 1996 interview.〔(Grits Gresham | Times Online Obituary )〕 Before Gresham began his long career in outdoor journalism, he signed a baseball contract with the Chicago Cubs organization but never played.〔(Star-Telegram.com: | 20 February 2008 | Outdoors personality Grits Gresham dies )〕 He attended on a baseball scholarship the Blue Ridge School for Boys, a private male boarding school named for the Blue Ridge Mountains and located in Hendersonville, North Carolina. This school closed its doors in 1968. He also studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, but he procured his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees, with specialty in forestry and wildlife management, from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he was thereafter an inductee into the LSU Hall of Distinction.〔(The Town Talk - www.thetowntalk.com - Alexandria-Pineville, Louisiana )〕 During World War II, Gresham served in the United States Army Air Corps, the precursor to the United States Air Force. He considered his military service as important as his success in journalism.〔(Outdoorsman Grits Gresham Dies at 85 )〕 In Nashville, on February 8, 1944, Gresham married Mary Eleanor R. Gresham (July 4, 1925 – March 5, 2001), the daughter of a physician in rural South Carolina who attended a private school for girls. He called her a "steel magnolia". She was a Roman Catholic, and he was a Baptist; they wed in a Methodist Church while he was in between military assignments. In their first thirteen years of marriage, they had a different address each Christmas. Mary became an excellent cook by necessity and assisted her husband on his assignments with the use of her memory, note-taking, and photographic skills.〔 The Greshams had three children: radio talk show host Thomas Hamilton "Tom" Gresham (born in Arizona in 1951), and his wife, Patricia T. Gresham (also born 1951), of Natchitoches; Gary Kent Gresham (born in South Carolina in 1953) of Natchitoches, and Barbara Gresham Hammerman (born in Baton Rouge in 1947) and her husband, Raymond Levine, in Gig Harbor in Pierce County in western Washington state.〔(Blanchard St. Denis Funeral Home: Natchitoches, Louisiana (LA) )〕 There are three Gresham grandchildren, Delta Music Experience chief executive officer Amanda Gresham, ''Tom Gresham's Gun Talk'' principal Ryan Gresham, and landscape professional Meredith Gresham. After his military service, Gresham was offered $175 a month to play baseball as a first baseman for the Chicago Cubs/ Instead he went to LSU to obtain both bachelor's and master's degrees. His son, Tom Gresham, learned of the baseball offer from the Cubs several years after his father's death while looking through old family records. "He went to work to take care of his young family ... I wonder how much it hurt him to make that decision. So much that he never, ever told us he was signed by the Cubs." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Grits Gresham」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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