And should I dare ask where the Dave Beck knives fit into this history?
It started when my father took Brown's tracking class back in 1981, and Brown, upon learning that my father was a knifemaker, collaborated with him to design "the perfect survival knife". Over the course of at least a year, they corresponded, and my father worked on the design. My father made Brown a prototype that he carried on his tracking school trips, and Brown wrote back after one trip, saying that he could have sold at least 80 knives to his students, if he'd had them on hand. He predicted that my father would have to "open a private shop just to fill the orders from the school". My father geared up for a production run, cutting out knife blanks and preparing to mass produce them. For 32 years I've kept what is probably the only blank left from that original stack. The deal that was never to be.
After my father's original design was set, I believe Brown thought my father was too "small-time" to produce the knife in any quantity. He was just a one-man shop. So he cut off all communications with my father, eventually took the design to Ed Lombi, who I believe produced some for Brown. Then Beck came on the scene, where they probably furthered tweaks in the design. I see that Beck also has a "Tracker" knife on his site. I believe that Brown jumped from knifemaker to knifemaker with the design, trying to strike the right deal and get it mass produced. Chip McConnell was also reportedly involved with producing the knife and prop knives used in the movie "The Hunted". Ultimately, it looks like found his deal with Mike Fuller of TOPS knives in Idaho, who supposedly mass produces the "official" version. I don't know, there are lots of bits and pieces of this story out there.
What I do know, and I have drawings and letters exchanged between my father and Tom Brown to prove it, is that back in 1981 the genesis of this knife came from Robb Russon, who was forgotten. We never even knew that Brown was producing the knife until I received a copy of Blade Magazine with the cover showing the knife from the movie "The Hunted" with Tommy Lee Jones. I was flabbergasted. I took one look at the picture on the magazine, called my father, and said, "Your knife is on the cover of a magazine!". That design was so familiar to me, having watched my father develop it in his shop as he taught me the craft of knifemaking, that it only took one glance to know that it was no accident that it was identical.
I only wonder if Brown still carries my father's prototype in a sheath at his side, and I wonder if it burns a little when he pulls it out. No, he probably replaced it with that piece of crap that TOPS builds.
