Richard N. Cabela: Big-Time Retailer and Big-Game Hunter

Richard N. Cabela: Big-Time Retailer and Big-Game Hunter

SHELLY BANJO

Feb. 17, 2014 10:58 p.m. ET

Richard N. Cabela, a larger-than-life big-game hunter who was outspoken about the right to own guns and co-founded a chain of stores that capitalized on their sale, has died.

Mr. Cabela, 77 years old, died at his home in Sidney, Neb., his company, outdoor-gear retailer Cabela’s Inc., CAB 0.00% said Sunday.

He had served as chairman of the retailer’s board until June 2013, when his brother Jim Cabela took over the post.

Avid hunters and fishermen, the Cabela family started the company in 1961 when they purchased $45 worth of hand-tied fishing flies in Chicago and sold them through a mail-order offer placed in an advertisement in a sports magazine.

Along with his wife, Mary, Mr. Cabela produced a three-page mimeographed catalog that was mailed with each order. In the late 1980s, the company added Web sales and began opening sprawling storefronts resembling wildlife preserves that were known for displaying massive aquariums and taxidermied deer and lions. Cabela’s now has 50 stores in the U.S. and Canada. It also has a financial subsidiary called “The World’s Foremost Bank,” which it chartered in 2001 to serve its growing credit-card business.

The company became one of the largest sellers of firearms and ammunition in the U.S., benefiting from the guns and ammo-buying frenzy that followed President Barack Obama‘s re-election in 2012.

The election, as well as a series of violent shootings across the country, sparked gun purchases by people who feared a wave of increased regulation and the introduction of policies that would make buying a gun more difficult.

In 2013, about a fifth of Cabela’s $3.6 billion in sales came through guns and ammo.

Cabela’s and its founders were big supporters of the National Rifle Association, which honored the retailer in 2012 for being one of the few companies to donate more than $1 million to the gun-rights organization.

In an interview featured on the company’s website, NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre asks Mr. Cabela what he would say to a hunter who isn’t a member of the NRA.

“I’d say, how are you going to hunt without a gun,” Mr. Cabela said, wearing a camouflage blazer and sitting with his wife at their Nebraska home, which is full of mounted animals from the couple’s big-game hunting trips clambering over rocky tableaus.

“Some of these countries have no freedom, and a lot of that comes down to the right to bear arms,” he said.

He leaves his wife, their nine children and their families.

Recounting a recent trip to Ethiopia, booked after he heard a rumor that elephant hunting would be shut down across Africa, Mr. Cabela said in the videotaped interview, “I told Mary, we’d better go shoot an elephant before we can’t do it anymore.”