My dad tried for a long time to get me interested in fishing. This was one of his early efforts, probably around 1952 or so
I tried, for a while. But there was a problem. I tended to get upset when the fish died. Somehow I didn’t relate to the fish as “food,” but as a creature that looked so colorful and graceful in the water.
But my dad kept trying. He was into his 90s and still reminded me that there was room on his boat, the Nadu K-2, apparently holding onto a glimmer of hope that “some day” I would want to join his gang on one of their weekend fishing trips. I always declined.
I know he was disappointed, although by that time obviously he wasn’t surprised at my lack of enthusiasm.
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At least he didn’t put in for financing from the Legislature to teach you and secure a lease for the fishing spot.
maybe he was hoping you’d fall in????
I had a grandfather who did that. He had a medical practice in Kankakee, Illinois and a mission to save lives – but a passion to kill bass in the land of the lakes.
So one summer late in the Truman Administration when my parents and I were visiting from Hawaii he took us on an extraordinarily old train that went as far as Rhinelander, Wisconsin then a sort hop to a rustic cabin on Lake Minocqua, like the one in the early innocent episodes of the series “Homeland”. I would survive out on the cold lake on boxes of Hornick candies. There were silos of dead fish back on land concocted in with buckets of unmelting ice and sawdust. It was like the pub crawl my London girlfriend’s father would put me through in Woolwich, except it was lakes with darting fish and not pubs with darts.
In the winter of 1835 Woodrow Wilson’s mother Janet, aged nine, swinging on a rope topside aboard a ship from Liverpool in terrible weather off Newfoundland, slipped and fell into the Atlantic only to be saved by a lifeline, according to the delicious new biography “Wilson” by A. Scott Berg. Eighy three years later her son sailed the Atlantic as the first president in office to ever do so, first landing in Brittany then spending the first six months of 1919 in Europe working with the survivors of World War I to sort out it’s aftermath. Just a couple of years before that my grandfather had made that same crossing as a captain in the US Army Medical Corp in order to ultimately contend with untold numbers of casualties in a hospital outside of Verdun.