Dad Was a Better Fisherman Than Any of the Bigtime Pros

As a lad growing up in a Midwestern area where the light poles along the highways more closely resemble toothpicks than anything else, I had one fishing hero...and it wasn't Roscoe Vernon "Gadabout" Gaddis, even though he was known to millions of TV viewers in the area at the time as "The Flying Fisherman." No, sir, my fishing hero was my dad.

"Slim," as Pop was called by many back in the day, was many things, starting with a self-employed carpenter. He also was a musician...a "fiddler," to be exact (and, no, I don't mean "violinist"). He set many a person straight on the difference between those two terms over his 88 years. And during a lot of my youth, he had his own band, which played at various western-swing venues in the area where we lived. That, however, was before he gave his life to Christ. The transformation in Dad the Sunday he walked out of church as a newborn Christian was nothing short of amazing. He truly was a different person...and in all ways good, too. Oh, he still played music but never again in a dance-hall setting. His new venues were churches, senior-citizens' centers, and nursing homes.

Both the "old" pop and the "new" one, however, still shared his love of fishing with my brother and me, and it...to my delight...stayed that way throughout our childhood. Dad was his own kind of pro, in that he knew where to find and seine minnows and crawdads, and where and how to gather a container full of fat grasshoppers. He knew how to get a hook out of the fish's mouth. As I got older, he taught me how to pick out those horrible bird's nests I made with my new baitcaster. He also showed my brother and me where to find the biggest worms and how to keep them all year long. He never tired of giving us casting-practice tips, or teaching us how to tie different knots.

What Dad maybe didn't know...or perhaps he did...was that there was a lot more than fishing going on when my brother and I spent time with him on the banks of the Neosho River, one of its creeks, or a local farm pond. You've probably heard the song "Just Fishin'," by Trace Adkins. The lyrics went like this:

"...And she thinks we're just fishin' on the riverside

Throwin' back what we could fry

Drownin' worms and killin' time

Nothin' too ambitious

She ain't even thinkin' 'bout

What's really goin' on right now

But I guarantee this memory's a big 'un

And she thinks we're just fishin'... ."

My memories of those days is what makes Pop a better angler than "Gadabout" Gaddis or any of the other bigtime fishing celebrities you hear or read about. And though he's no longer around to fish with me, I always had the satisfaction of knowing he was my biggest supporter while he was here. I remember that he was as giddy as a kid in a candy store the day I took him for a ride in my first bass boat. We could talk fishin' all day long, and he never once would try to change the subject.

Even though I know the pros could put a whoopin' on Dad, they can't touch my memories of him. Why, he even taught me how to tell a fish story with a straight face.

Pop simply always has been and always will be my fishing hero. Despite working long hours, he made time to take my brother and me fishing on a regular basis, and he made it enjoyable for us. He always told us to take our kids fishing, too. "They may not always know what's really goin' on while they're young, but they will someday," he would say.