Business: The Hunters

Looking up from their reed-laced duck-blind, the two hunters saw a Chippewa Indian guide splashing toward them through the frozen marsh. “Man is shot!” he shouted. “An accident! An accident!” The two men hurried to another blind, 300 yds. away, where they came on a hunter’s nightmare. On the rough hummock, Harry W. Anderson, 67, retired vice president of General Motors, lay dying, a gaping wound in the back of his head. Over his body crouched Harlow Curtice, 66, onetime General Motors president (TIME, Jan. 2, 1956), in a state of trembling shock.

The day before, Curtice and Anderson, friends for 35 years, had joined G. Arthur Brown and their host, George W. Kennedy, board chairman of the Kelsey-Hayes Co., at an exclusive businessmen’s duck-hunting preserve on Ste. Anne’s Island, on the Canadian side of Lake St. Clair. After a good night’s sleep in the island’s lodge, the four hunters rose late, sampled the icy (17°) morning air, had a leisurely breakfast. By 9:45 a.m. Curtice and Anderson were seated side by side on cartridge cases behind their blind, with 12-gauge shotguns at the ready. It was not a new experience for the two old friends. This was their eighth annual trip to Ste. Anne’s together.

An hour and a half later, the two had bagged six ducks. Then Curtice sighted a low-flying flock, off to his left. He leveled on the lead duck and fired. At that instant. Anderson stood up, inexplicably lurched toward Curtice, and caught the full blast in his head.* “That’s one of the things I can’t understand,” a haggard Harlow Curtice told a press conference the next day. “He may have stumbled. The ground was very uneven. I don’t know why he didn’t stay down.”

A waterfowl biologist for the Michigan State Department of Conservation thought he knew: “Elderly hunters are affected seriously by low temperatures. Anderson stood up for a better crack at a flock of ducks, and his legs were undoubtedly numbed and out of control. In balmy October weather, there would have been no accident.”

*In the first seven days of Michigan’s deer season, 30 hunters died—four from gunshot, five by asphyxiation (gas heaters) and 21 from heart attacks.