World-Class Hunting Resort Springs Up In Kansas -- `Little Place For Hunting' Transforms 2,800 Acres

FALL RIVER, Kan. - Seventy-five miles east of Wichita, Kan., where grassland begins giving way to forest, sits one of the premier hunting resorts in the country.

The Flint Oak Hunting Preserve caters to a clientele who load up their corporate jets and private planes the way other hunters load up their pickups. They are people who can afford to hunt in a style becoming to British aristocrats. In fact, a British aristocrat - Prince Andrew - has hunted there.

What would lure British royalty to Elk County, Kan.?

Superb quail-hunting, first-class facilities and top-notch bird dogs. The combination is unbeatable for outdoorsmen.

"They can come here and be hunting in 15 minutes over good dogs," says Ray Walton.

Walton, a tall, barrel-chested man who made a fortune in publishing, spent close to $10 million transforming 2,800 acres of farmland and forest into Flint Oak.

He did not plan to create a premier resort - at least not initially. "What I was told was, `I just want a little place where I can go hunting,"' says Winona Walton, his wife of 34 years.

That was the idea when Walton bought the first 699 acres in 1978. After buying a neighboring parcel, though, he started thinking about a small club. More land became available. He bought it. The scale increased.

"In June 1979, I knew my wife and I were going to put in a nice hunting preserve," Walton said.

He would have been hard-pressed to find a better setting than the area just west of the Chautauqua Hills.

Kansas is to bird hunting what Montana is to trout fishing.

And the gently rolling terrain of southeastern Kansas is famous for its quail.

At the time, Walton and his wife owned Pennypower Shopping News, which published shoppers in Wichita, Topeka, Kan., and Springfield, Mo.

In 1980, they sold the business to Capital Cities Communications. That gave Walton the money to build a first-class resort.

Walton, dressed in a white shirt, stone-colored khakis and matching shooting jacket as he sits in the clubhouse, seems like a friendly, reflective man.

Yet his manner betrays the drive and determination characteristic of successful businessmen - traits that would prove handy.

"What I didn't realize is we were building a city," he says.

Developing Flint Oak took more than four years. It required a working knowledge of farming, game management, civil engineering, restaurant operation, lodging, retailing and dog training. Some of the lessons came hard.

"It seems everything we did was inadequate initially," Walton says.

Yet he built lodges. He built a sewer and water system. He built kennels, a clubhouse and an office. He built two lakes, target ranges, barns and storage buildings. He built 35 miles of road.

"Ray has never done anything halfway," says his wife.

The first and most essential task, though, was to provide the food, water and cover necessary for quail to flourish. Walton did not return the land to its native state as much as create an ideal habitat. Quail prefer the edges of fields, and Walton began clearing timber. Bulldozers would be on the property for three years.

Walton recalls, "My wife said, `Why'd you look for a place with trees when you are taking them out?"'

Walton planted sorghum for both feed and cover. Disks broke repeatedly in the rocky, seldom-cultivated soil. Flint Oak finally bought one designed to break up blacktop.

Did the people of Elk County think Walton was crazy?

"In some ways, yes," says Sherley Shinkle, who has worked for Flint Oak for 10 years.

"It seemed like it was going to take forever before he got it started," he adds. "But when he got it started, it took right off."

Flint Oak began accepting members in July 1982. The preserve never advertised. Walton started with a list of prospective members. Word-of-mouth did the rest.

"We are getting the guy who really loves the outdoors," Walton says.

The membership was closed at 294 people last November. Roughly half the members live out of state - some as far away as New York and California. A few live in other countries.

The membership is confidential. Walton will merely say the members include chief executives of Fortune 500 companies and people on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America.

Individual memberships cost $2,500 a year and include five hunts. A corporate membership, which grants privileges to three people, costs $5,000 a year and includes 10 hunts. Additional hunts cost $250 a person, with no limit on guests.

Walton declined to disclose the preserve's revenues. But Flint Oak has 25 full-time employees and, during hunting season, 25 part-time employees.

Touring Flint Oak fills a day - and Walton seems to have a story for each of the 2,800 acres.

Driving his white Sierra Classic with the Flint Oak logo on its doors, occasionally talking to the office on the radio, he mentions that the winding gravel road was once part of the Wolf Trail, a wagon train route the Coleman family and others took to Wichita.

He stops and points to a quail feeder hidden among sticks.

"The darn starlings get in them," he says. "That's the thing: What benefits one type of wildlife benefits others."

The call of a pheasant rings through the woods. Walton plainly takes pride in the preserve's abundant wildlife.

"Wildlife must survive for man to survive," he says.

Walton, whose uncle and grandfather taught him to hunt as a child, drew on his lifelong love of the outdoors in developing Flint Oak. He strove to create natural hunting conditions. At most preserves, birds are released shortly before a hunt. Flint Oak restocks quail throughout the year - and does not guarantee birds.

"To us, that's a shooting preserve, while ours is a hunting preserve," says Pete Laughlin, the operations manager and a friend of Walton's for more than 30 years.

The preserve does release pheasant, rare in southeastern Kansas, for hunts. Preserves in western Kansas - such as Pheasant Creek and Lazy J - boast the ideal habitat for pheasant. Flint Oak's niche is bobwhite quail, a game bird ideal for bird dogs.

"The fact of the matter is, the most important service we provide is the dumb dog that goes out with you on the hunt," Walton says.

Three dogs, two on the ground and one held in reserve, are used for each hunt. Flint Oak's bird dogs are the canine equivalent of professional athletes. The preserve even keeps statistics on each dog's performance throughout the hunting season.

Walton's first bird dog, a Brittany spaniel, was a gift from his wife on his 25th birthday. He now employs three trainers and owns 100 Brittanys, Labradors, pointers, English setters and springer spaniels. The preserve trains 40 dogs at a given time.

"We try to get our hands on every dog every day," said Ron Laws, the head trainer, who learned how to train bird dogs in his native North Carolina from his grandfather.

The preserve, which no longer enters field trials, has had 19 dogs qualify for national championships.

"I venture we could sell all our dogs within a week, if we wanted to, at an average price of $3,000 to $4,000 each," Walton says. "These dogs hunt more in a year than most dogs hunt in their life."

The dogs, though, don't pay the bills. Not until the 1980s did Flint Oak achieve a positive cash flow. Walton says the business is now in the black. He acknowledges he could have earned a better return on his money investing in bonds and simply clipping coupons.

But Walton has long been intrigued by the question of why successful businessmen, once they climb to a certain level, often stop doing what made them successful. He even thought about writing a book on the question - a question that would apply to him once he sold Pennypower to Cap Cities. He soon realized the answer was simply the fear of pushing their luck, of losing what they had accumulated.

Walton was 46 and rich; he decided to "push onward."

"You are either green and growing or ripe and rotting," he is fond of saying.

Flint Oak would consume more of his capital than he expected. He was never afraid the preserve would fail. But, laughing, he acknowledges, "Yeah, I got carried away a little bit."

"What makes him happy is building," says Winona Walton.

Walton repeatedly shares credit with his wife for developing Flint Oaks.

Would she do it again?

"I wouldn't have done it in the first place," she says.

Laughlin describes his friend as an inquisitive man, with high standards, who can be demanding of himself and others.

"He's a guy who's driven," he says. "He's one of those guys who get things done."

Yet even Laughlin once walked into Walton's office and said, "Why in the world are you doing this?"

Just why did Walton spare little expense in building Flint Oak?

"I can't answer that question," he says as he drives past a manicured lawn in a place where there is no need for any lawn.

He pauses. He's been accused, he says, of being the master of the cliche. He goes ahead anyway.

"The successful people," he says, "do the things unsuccessful people won't do."

Flint Oak's sporting clays course - a range with targets that duplicate the flight of game birds - exemplifies that trait. The course has been called "the Pebble Beach of sporting clays." Grits Gresham, shooting editor of Sports Afield, says, "It is one of the best courses in the country."

At each station on the course is a bronze statue, set on a block of polished marble, depicting the game bird the target duplicates and indicating the direction of the target.

The statues are one of the touches - and there are many - that distinguish Flint Oak from other preserves.

Near the course are two lodges, one a former barn. "It was built the same year I was born: 1933," Walton says. The rooms are Basic Hotel, except for a built-in gun cabinet in each. Rooms start at $70 a night. Sportsmen don't want to stay at the Plaza on a hunting trip.

The lodge overlooks a man-made lake, the last improvement before Flint Oak opened. On a nearby ridge stands a 98-foot water tower bought from the city of Kechi. Earlier on the day of the visit, a great blue heron could be seen rising slowly and majestically from the lake.

Walton still is not finished with Flint Oak. He is expanding a building to add three meeting rooms for business conferences. The main lodge must be expanded.

Walton says the business can grow faster than he wants. After 13 years, he is giving thought to traveling and doing other things. "I'm a single-purpose guy, unfortunately," he says.

One of his main concerns is ensuring that Flint Oak continues without him.

"When you start something, you have a pride of authorship," he says. "You like to see the character of the business maintained."

His friend Laughlin puts it better.

"All of us want to leave our footsteps," he says, "and this may be his."