“But did he have to name names?” one of the many editors who have fired Mike Frome plaintively intoned to investigators from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Well, yes he did.

“He gives ‘em hell,” bragged one of the many editors who hired Mike Frome. Well, no he didn’t. To borrow the words of Harry Truman, he “just told the truth on ‘em, and they think it’s hell.”

Frome didn’t become a college professor until seven years after I’d finished my schooling, but he was the best writing instructor I’ve ever had. He started teaching me my sophomore year in college when I read his first conservation column in Field & Stream. That was 1967.

Later, during my graduate studies in journalism, my professors pounded home the message that allowing one’s opinion to show in an article was as indecent as mooning the dean. Professional writers never pushed, prodded or challenged their readers. They were “objective” in that they presented only “facts.” They gave both sides of every story, never hinting that one side might be wrong or which side that might be. They got quotes from both sides, even when one or both sides were lying. They never identified the lies, probably because they didn’t recognize them.

The kind of reporting Frome did was harder and served the reader better. Rather than recycle flack babble and press releases from, say, Weyerhaeuser and the Sierra Club — something readers could get on their own — he dug out the real story. And, while he didn’t sermonize, he made it absolutely clear what he thought. How could a writer be so “unprofessional” and work for national magazines?

Frome claimed not to have known much about teaching when he entered academia in 1978 as a professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont. He was wrong because the best writers don’t just “report”; they also teach. When Frome got to the classroom he kept doing what he had always done since signing on with The Washington Post late in 1945 (after four years in the Army Air Force). He just did it in a different medium.

Frome’s central message in print and in class was that advocacy journalism is a virtue not a vice, that it’s not just okay but essential to have “an agenda,” and that if you’re an outdoor writer and your agenda is not safeguarding fish, wildlife and the environment, you should be in a different business.

Here’s how he put it in his recent book, Green Ink, which ought to go out with the member directory to all who write about the environment: “I have heard the command to ‘be professional’ used in some instances to block expressions of pity, grief, or outrage at wrongdoing.... As practiced by most dailies and other outlets, established journalism continues to suffer under the delusion that objectivity is being maintained. Not only is this a sham, but it does not promote as much digging into contrary views as the alternative advocacy. The best journalism carries authority and a sense of purpose. Literate writing, advocacy writing, contributes to a view of the world that is more rather than less complicated.... Get the facts, but then write them with feeling, your own feeling.”

From the start of my career as a freelance writer specializing in fish and wildlife, I’ve followed Frome’s model. For the first few years, most of the manuscripts I sent to national magazines nearly beat me back from the post office — usually with a terse note informing me that I lacked “objectivity.”

I thought I was over the hump when Sports Illustrated assigned me to float Maine’s St. John River and write about its impending doom at the busy hands of the Army Corps of Engineers who planned to drown it with two monstrous dams. Sports Illustrated promptly replenished my dwindling food supply by sending me a kill fee of $300, explaining that it wanted more about whitewater canoeing. The fact that the St. John is without any real whitewater was apparently no excuse.

So I repackaged the piece and sent it to Les Line, editor of Audubon. He loved it and ran it in the May 1980 issue. Les, who died in May 2010, became a close friend. He was, if possible, even more opinionated about fish and wildlife than Frome and me. The fact that I knew enough about my topics to have strong opinions about them delighted Line, who mostly shared those opinions but welcomed them even when he didn’t. He created a special section for me called “Ecopinion,” which in 1988 morphed into “Incite,” a regular, feature-length column in which I attempted to “incite” readers to thought and action, though people who preferred not to be written about often claimed that Line’s title connoted gratuitous pot stirring. I also wrote a regular natural history column for the magazine called “Earth Almanac.” My experience at Audubon drove home a lesson Frome taught me even before I got there — that whenever a door closes behind you another opens ahead.

In 2016 new doors opened for me after I quit both columns — Incite (because the new editors wanted reporting on birds only) and “Earth Almanac” (because the magazine's rapidly shrinking pages no longer had room for it).

Frome taught me that getting and staying hired is easy. What takes talent, effort and spine is getting fired — or, rather, choosing to get fired when principles are at stake. Frome did a lot of this, displaying a brand of courage you don’t see much in journalism or anywhere.

On March 4, 1971 William Towell, executive vice president of American Forests, sent this written order to James Craig, editor of the outfit’s magazine, American Forests, about its muck-raking columnist: “Frome, in the future, is not to write critically about the U.S. Forest Service, the forest industry, the profession or about controversial forestry issues.... I am very pleased, as was the board that Mike has agreed to this censorship.”

Frome had agreed to no such thing. Agreeing would have been easy; getting fired, the path he chose, was not. Richard Starnes, then Frome’s fellow practitioner of advocacy journalism at Field & Stream, wrote about the incident in such terse prose that he was able to get the entire story into just his title: “How the Clearcutters Tried to Gag Mike Frome.”

Heeding Frome’s example, I accomplished something even he never matched — getting hired and fired by a magazine all in the same day. One morning the editor of Fishing World — then the nation’s largest fishing publication — called to sign me up as the conservation columnist. I explained that he could pay me the going rate but that I’d need my standard contract, stipulating that the magazine take care of its own legal expenses in the event of any meritless lawsuit arising from my work. “No problem,” said the editor. But he called back that night to inform me the deal was off. His publisher had told him: “You mean he’s going to write controversial stuff that might get us sued? Forget it!”

It still astonishes me that Field & Stream and, later, Western Outdoors hired someone like Frome. He was not a hunter, and from personal experience I know that he exaggerated with the word “pretty” when he called himself “a pretty terrible fisherman.”

I’m even more astonished that he managed to stay at Field & Stream for seven years, writing 75 conservation columns and a dozen features, always naming names, never pulling a punch. Frome was happy at Field & Stream. “Clare Conley [the editor for most of his tenure] gave me free rein, plenty of space and supported me all the way,” he told me. “I loved writing for the hunters and fishers in the outdoors community and received calls and letters from all over the country with inside information, invitations and pleas to come to investigate issues. I spoke at state wildlife federations, Trout Unlimited chapters and at college and university programs.”

I especially liked Frome’s “Rate Your Candidate,” published before each election. Politicians who got low scores, including Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) and Rep. Gerald Ford (R-MI), complained bitterly. Sen. John Pastore (D-RI), chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, which regulated broadcasting, earned only a “marginal” in the 1972 election. In 1974, with Conley gone, Field & Stream canceled “Rate Your Candidate” and fired Frome, explaining that it just didn’t like Frome’s writing, which may have been true, and later that he was “anti-hunting,” which was a lie.

Reporting on the firing, Time magazine quoted Conley, as saying, “We got vibes from CBS [which owned Field & Stream at the time] that they didn’t want trouble with Pastore. The word was ‘Do what you have to do, but take it easy.’”

What struck me as much more newsworthy than Frome’s firing was the public reaction it generated. Nothing like it has ever been seen in outdoor journalism. Readers picketed CBS headquarters in Washington, D.C. Expressing outrage in print was Ray Scott of the Bass Angler Sportsman Society, Jack Lorenz of the Izaak Walton League, Tom Bell of High Country News, fish and wildlife agencies in Massachusetts and Montana, even Outdoor Life.

On the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives Silvio Conte (R-MA) declared: “Mr. Speaker, I rise to express my dismay and outrage about the censorship and dismissal of Michael Frome, one of the nation’s foremost conservation writers... Because he occasionally dared to attack those politicians who control legislation in committees important to CBS, Mike Frome was censored, censured and, finally, dismissed.... It is intolerable that CBS, which prides itself as a national symbol and defender of the principles of free speech and free press, can get away with firing Mike Frome because he exercised these principles.... The firing of Mike Frome must be interpreted as a selfish and hypocritical act.”

A prophecy for the next three decades was offered in an editorial by James M. Shepard, director of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, in that agency’s magazine, Massachusetts Wildlife (ghostwritten by me): “Don’t worry about Mike’s career. Why should you? He never has. And that, in a nutshell, is why his career has been and will be so illustrious. He’s forever getting fired from somewhere, but, to the dismay of those public enemies he publicly probes, he never shuts up.” Field and Stream’s reaction was to savage Shepard in print.

As a college professor, Frome pushed the envelope, too, but it is harder to fire a professor than a writer, and eventually he won the support of most of his colleagues and superiors — liberating them to a degree. The University of Idaho College of Natural Resources now offers the Michael Frome Scholarship for excellence in conservation writing. He challenged and questioned, trained political activists and writers. Believing that people learn by doing, he encouraged his students to get involved and foment change. He sent them into the field to report on real issues, and he had them publish their articles. Sometimes this churned up the locals, but churning is good for everyone save a few conservators of torpor.

When he invited me to address his students, local sportsmen, and some of the faculty at the University of Vermont he warned me against churning for the sake of churning. “Don’t go looking for a fight,” he instructed. “The fight will come to you.”

Indeed it did. When I spoke to the audience, and later on the radio, about superstitions surrounding eastern coyotes — native predators recovering along with the Yankee forest and which I believe have always been part of it — I elicited vicious condemnation, not just for me but for Frome for inviting me. Deer hunters, who blamed coyotes for everything but the weather, were in high dudgeon. A biologist from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, an agency financed by fishing and hunting license revenue, was apoplectic. Burlington Free Press outdoor editor Bish Bishop authored a long-rambling harangue about coyote-coddlers. Frome’s superiors dressed him down. That eastern coyotes don’t affect deer populations was a fact most of my audience, with the exception of Frome’s smarter students, didn’t want to know.

Years later, when I asked Frome to comment about environmental education for an article I was writing, he sent me an excerpt from one of his lectures that gave me an insight into why some in academia view him as a threat: “Education, with only a few exceptions, is about careers, jobs, success in a materialistic world, elitism, rather than caring and sharing; it’s about facts and figures, cognitive values, rather than feeling and art derived from the heart and soul; it’s about conformity, being safe in a structured society, rather than individualism, the ability to question society and to constructively influence change in direction. A change in direction is critical and imperative. The most important legacy our generation can leave is not a world at war, nor a nation in debt to support a nuclear star-wars system, nor the settlement of outer space, transporting all our worldly problems to the rest of God’s universe, nor the breeding of test-tube babies and robotic drones. Our most precious gift to the future, if you will ask me, is a point of view embodied in the protection of wild places that no longer can protect themselves.”

My definition of a “legend” is someone who makes a difference, and to make a difference you have to be different yourself. You have to question, probe and nag. Never can you be content with the status quo. You can’t run out of fuel. You can’t worry about who you might offend. You punch only with the truth; and, while you never “pull” the truth, you also never bully. Unless you’re protecting a source or someone vulnerable to retribution, you need to name names in most cases; but you remember that the people you are naming have feelings, friends and families just like you.