Helping Kids Get Hooked on Fishing...That's What Old-Timers Do

"It was the third time the young man in this photo had come into my store," said the shop owner. "Every time, he had been full of yes sirs, no sirs, pleases, and thank yous. He had been wanting to buy a fishing rod and reel, 'cause his daddy wouldn't let him borrow his anymore. On this day, he had come in with $5.

"Because of his extraordinarily good manners and politeness, he left my store with a $50 rod and reel...and his $5. 'Go fishing and enjoy being a kid,' I encouraged."

As the shop owner admitted afterward, "When I was a kid, a few old-timers took time to help me on my way. One of the best things about fishing is the people you meet."

That same philosophy played out in something else I found online and involved, as luck would have it, another 9-year-old boy and a lovable but notorious old-timer whom I'm going to refer to as HH.

It was one day in late winter or early spring when HH showed up at the door of the house where this second 9-year-old lived and asked if he would like to go trout fishing with him. After his mom had given her permission, she hustled her son off to bundle him up for the adventure. While going about this loathsome chore, she said, "Be careful if HH tries to show you any dirty magazines."

"Yes, Mom," he replied. "I'll be careful."

So HH and the 9-year-old loaded up in the former's red Ford pickup.

"A couple things I noticed right away," said the boy, "were the coffee can spitoon down by the shifter and a weird furry thing that covered the shift knob. What is that furry thing?" he asked.

"It's the nut sack of a buck I killed last year," came HH's response.

"That's cool!" thought the young fella...as he mentally added 100 points to HH in his list of personal mountain-man heroes.

A short while later, the duo arrived at their destination. A little creek flowed alongside the road where they had stopped. As they piled out of the truck, HH (as the boy would come to understand was customary with his newfound friend, regardless of the companion's age) offered the 9-year-old a chew of Copenhagen. He also offered the boy a pull off the large bottle in a brown sack, which, as he learned in his teenage years, was a bottle of Hood River vodka.

"Awful stuff," noted the boy, who refused both offerings. However, HH kept offering both items whenever he saw him over the next two decades. "In his mind, HH was just being neighborly," the boy reasoned.

Anyway, HH then dug out an ugly looking little rod, a can of worms, and along with the boy, headed down to the creek bank. The 9-year-old hadn't much more than gotten his line in the water when HH imparted the first of what would be the first of many pieces of advice over the years.

"If a game warden shows up, just toss the pole in the creek," he said. "Then tell him we're pickin' wild flowers.

As the boy eventually would learn, HH loved to pick wild flowers when nothing else was happening, so it was a plausible excuse. However, his mind was reeling at the impact of this information. After all, he now was a dreaded poacher. He also was facing his first moral dilemma.

"But what about your pole?" the boy asked HH. "Won't we lose it?"

The 9-year-old quickly figured out, though, that this was why the pole looked so crappy in the first place. And he just kept on fishing...and soon caught his first trout. HH shared a lot of things with the lad about fishing on the banks of that little creek, and what had started as an obsession grew with intensity over the ensuing years.

"Now don't be getting any awful ideas about ol' HH," said the young lad. "He was a flawed man...perhaps even deeply so...but he was a good man. He helped me catch my first trout, gave me my first fly vise, showed me how to prune an apple tree, and showed me how to bone out a deer quarter with but a few swipes of the blade.

"Later on, there would be things about his character that would give me pause," the lad continued. "But then my dad always would remind me of the good things about HH, like when he helped my folks move into a little house affectionately known as the 'chicken coop' (yes, it actually was a remodeled chicken coop).

"And while HH didn't know my parents from Adam," the lad noted, "he had heard that my dad didn't have any firewood, so he showed up one day and took my dad out to cut a load of wood. My dad didn't even have a chainsaw yet. A week or so later, both of my dad's trucks were broken down, and there was no way he could get to work. HH showed up and loaned my parents his wife's car. Keep in mind that my parents were complete strangers from California. He literally was the kind of man who would give you the shirt off his back. He never failed to wave at complete strangers when driving down the road, and he loved to just stop his truck right in the middle of the road and chew the fat for a while."

Years later, after the 9-year-old had grown up and was married, he and his wife moved back to that little valley next door to old HH. Because he couldn't get around very good anymore, the young couple helped him until he died.

As HH's grown-up fishin' buddy noted, "Every young boy ought to have his very own old man to teach him how to be and how not to be. I miss HH an awful lot. I thought he'd live forever. He was always old but never yet seemed to really age. The sad thing about all the old-timers I grew up knowing is that they've all passed on now. That's like being blessed and cursed at the same time. Only an old-timer has time for a kid, and yet you know that death looms at the door of your relationship.

"The best part of my relationship with HH is knowing that a week before he died, he was baptized in a bathtub, so I know I'll get to fish with him again one day."