Pete Kendall: Hankering for fishing shared by many friends, family members

It is said that if you teach a man to fish, he’ll never starve.

That could be accurate, but I’m proof positive that the converse is not true.

Nobody ever taught me how to fish, and as you can probably tell by sizing up the corpulent mug shot accompanying this column, I’ve never starved.

But I do like fish.

And I like to fish.

Please bear with me as I explain.

If I happen to be hungry for fish, I generally go buy some, pre-cooked, at Fred Lobster.

Or I tag along to mooch when others go to fish, such as the time I followed Gerald Hayworth to the banks of the Brazos River, where he set and ran a trotline, cleaned the resulting channel catfish, dropped them in a deep fryer and invited me to dine.

I kind of caught several black bass on Lake Whitney one morning in the mid ’80s. I say “kind of” because a friend named Ricky Marshall loaned me a bait-casting rod and reel and another friend named Phil Irwin tied a plastic purple worm onto my leader.

All I had to do was drop the line in the water, wait for something to act fish-like, and then pull.

The two resulting critters were the tastiest I’ve ever eaten. They should have been. They were prepared by my mother, not by me.

I have experienced considerable excitement while fishing.

In the summer of 1956, I caught a 14.5 pound snook in the Gulf of Mexico off Venice, Fla., where I was visiting my grandparents.

My financial adviser would have been proud of the decision I made when old Gramps asked, “Do you want to fillet it, or do you want to sell it to the restaurant in Sarasota?”

Sell the rascal, I told him. I think I bought boxing gloves with the resulting windfall.

In the spring of about 1991, with reports of sandbass running in the Brazos, I accompanied a friend I will not name, Jerry Cunningham, to a promising spot on the water near Nemo. He promptly fell in.

I brought back no fish, but I gleaned several nice anecdotes for a column that weekend.

I would dearly love to add the excitement of fly fishing to my outdoors résumé.

I inherited a goodly amount of fly fishing “stuff” from the father, who was a fly fishing devotee. He never caught anything besides perch, but he sure could cast — and who cares whether a fish bites or not as long as you can place the microscopic fake insect on his nose so he’ll go into writhing fits of ecstasy and bite down on the hook?

Well, I’d like to learn how to fly fish. Would anybody like to teach me?

That’s what I thought.

I’m willing to bet our late publisher, Paul Griffith, would have been more than happy to take me to the banks of Buffalo Creek for a fly fishing lesson.

He probably wouldn’t have known how to fly fish, either, but he would have entertained me with funny stories.

Telling funny stories was one of the things Paul did best, along with writing an intentionally, or unintentionally, riotous fishing column for the Times-Review.

I happen to have a sample right here:

“Wonder what fishing was like 100 years ago in Johnson County? This being our Centennial edition, we thought we might digress a bit on the fish history of our proud 100-year-old county,” Paul wrote in 1954. “First we would apologize for no column last week, and it was gratifying to know that quite a few readers asked us why. The answer is that we have another small job as advertising manager and from the looks of this edition you can see we have been busier than a goggle eye perch guarding a nest.

“But let’s get back to that fish history. Just imagine all the fish that have been caught in this county in the last 100 years! Put them all on one stringer, and it would probably go around the world.

“Wonder what the old pioneer crossing the county in a covered wagon did when he came upon the beautiful clear waters of the Nolan and Brazos rivers?

“I imagine he could just look in and see hundreds of fine game fish. Well, that did it. He hastily got out his trusty fly rod and a black gnat and caught a hundred whoppers without batting an eye.

“Wait a minute! That’s what we would have done ... but this old boy is tired and hungry and history hasn’t caught up with the fly rod. So, I’ll bet his stomach got the best of his sporting blood and he just waded in and grappled him a few nice old lunkers to be roasted over the evening camp fire.

“Man, Oh Man! What you and I wouldn’t give for a chance at these fine streams when they were virgin territory! Coming on down the line, we imagine Pat Cleburne and Col. Chambers probably bet two Indian scalps on many an afternoon as to who would catch the biggest fish out of McAnear or Buffalo creeks.

“Soon young communities were springing up over the county and most of them centered on an all-important water hole. Fish was a very important part of the diet in those days when a man had to live from the rivers and game all abounding in great numbers.

“The Indians speared, trapped and grappled their fish, and the white man caught on easily. Then some wise guy brought in fish hooks of whale bone and what not, eliminated the practice of getting wet and introduced the sporting chance to fishing.”

Such eliminated the fun of fishing for Paul, who thereafter turned for his simple pleasures to the game of golf. But that’s another story.

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