It was a Saturday in May of 1955. I am 9 years old and have been waiting for this day since last fall. Fishing with my grandpa Charlie, my dad and me, it did not get any better than this. We got up at about 3:30 AM. It would be a looooong day that typically wouldn’t culminate until about 10 PM Saturday night by which point everyone would be exhausted. We lived in Maple Heights, a then new subdivision populated by mostly World War Two veterans and their families living in ticky-tacky houses that all looked the same as the song goes. We had to make the trek to East Cleveland to pick up my grandpa Charlie who lived right on the lake where my father was born and raised, and then trek west two more hours to East Harbor-Catawba where the boat was docked. Typically, we didn’t get out onto the lake until after 9 AM. This was the start of my life of fishing Lake Erie that persisted for some 60 years until ultimately a few years ago I couldn’t fish anymore—health problems. I do miss it terribly!
By 3:30 my dad had made Cream of Wheat—a gruel concoction in a pan on the stove. He ate that every morning, likely a holdover from when he was young. I only ate it when I “had to”—it tasted like lumpy wallpaper paste. Even then I had to bury it with sugar from the sugar bowl to choke it down. We packed up our green and white 1955 Ford and were on our way. That Ford was the sharpest, newest, flashiest car on our block. My parents seemed to get a new car every other year back then—I guess an important status symbol in ticky tacky land in the ‘50s. Into the trunk went the five horsepower Johnson trolling motor, the 25 Hp Johnson big motor, aluminum J. C. Higgins fish cooler ice box, various fishing rods and fishing boxes, a Pyrene Fire Extinguisher, lunch, 8-10 beers, and a coke for me. I’ll never know why he didn’t just leave the motors on the boat. I know that his back suffered greatly from lifting those motors. Eventually he had to have disc surgery. I had a new fiberglass fishing rod that my grandpa gave me for my birthday. These rods had recently come on the scene, and people weren’t quite sure how they would fish. Would you be able to feel the fish biting as well as you could with the old steel poles? Charlie thought they would be fine. Our boat, a 15 ½ foot lapstrake Lyman wood boat, very small even by 1950s standards, was tied up at the dock and not all that different from a typical lifeboat. It was one of the smallest of the large bevy of 20-35 footers spread about the hundred or so boats at East Harbor. I don’t know how Dad managed to secure that first dock space each year, but my nine-year-old brain surmised from the many ensuing conversations between dad and grandpa that each year the price kept rising and we would eventually have to move or possibly get one of those new Tee Nee Trailers to drag the boat behind the car with. Actually, that might not be a bad thing, they said. We could also then fish at Pymatuning and Mosquito Lake, newer inland lakes created around WWII. Another topic of conversation centered around possibly buying a larger boat, that holy grail of boats in my mind–an 18 ft Thompson. One was docked next to our boat, and I was infatuated with it, fantasized about it, dreamed about it. You could stand up in it, it had two big outboards, a windshield and a top! Unfortunately, none of these conversations seemed to come to fruition. (Again, I point out that cars took precedence in Dad’s life). Probably the money situation was influenced by my mom’s ever burgeoning social calendar and Dad’s nightly tipping a few too many at the local hangout. Ever fearing that we would sink in this tiny craft, it was always me that sat in the rear of the Lyman and manned the manual bilge pump to pump out the water that invariably accumulated in the floorboards. Being a very small boat, waves did more than occasionally splash over the transom that was only inches above the water level. And of course, rogue waves from passing boats, rough water splashing over the bow, and storms that came up always contributed to the water in the bottom of the boat and my having to pump it out. Even at that early age I vowed that, some day I would never again ever have to worry about water coming in on any boat that I would ever own. Storms, believe me I saw God out on Lake Erie several times in some of the worst thunderstorms that I ever experienced!! More than once we had to seek shelter on someone’s island porch till the storm abated. I’m not religious but I’m a believer! (echo that 15 years later on the Enterprise in a hurricane in the Tonkin Gulf!) And unfortunately, there was the time, when I was a teenager, that I had to grab the wheel from Dad who was a little too tipsy to handle the boat in a Lake Erie storm when he scared the BeJesus out of my uncle—his brother-in-law–and me by taking a large wave head on, launching the boat in the air and breaking the seats.
But early on in the 1950s Dad was a very good teacher. These were the good times. There was family harmony which wasn’t the case as I got older. He taught me and my much younger brother how to handle a boat at an early age in rough water and storms. You always angled the boat into the waves and rode the swells in between. Take it easy, take it slow! My brother Craig and I learned well from him. We both went on in life to own several boats, both on Lake Erie and the ocean, and weathered many severe storms. Inevitably Craig and I later had the boats that we took Dad fishing in. They were much more substantial than that 15 ½ ft Lyman. I’m sure that he was secretly proud of that, something he never quite achieved.
Finally, out on the water we usually headed for Put-In-Bay where Dad, Grandpa my mother and Grandma Clara before the war often rented a cottage from a local man named Foy. I never knew his first name. So, of course that was the first place we started trolling at, going back and forth east and west from Starve Island, then east toward the monument varying the water depth each time by working a little farther out, or closer in. There were no electronics back then. You just let the line out, found the bottom, and then reeled up two turns, every so often finding the bottom again. A compass? We had a brass one the size of a silver dollar in his fishing box although a few years later he invested in a good one that hung from the dashboard. It gets downright scary when you are caught in a storm and can’t see where you are going. But you did learn what dead reckoning meant.
May was the ideal time to fish the island area because the fish were hungry from the winter and the Canadian Soldiers (technically Mayflies) hadn’t yet arrived—those bugs that arrive all at once in hoards and stick to everything that could be stuck to. Apparently, the fish love to eat them and gorge themselves. So, the fishing falls off for a couple weeks in June. We caught walleye, perch, white bass, occasional catfish and sheepshead though we often took them to give to some shore fishermen who gladly welcomed them. The objective was to fill up the cooler with fish, empty it of beer, and hopefully head back to East Harbor by 4 PM.
The trek home was something I looked forward to. Somewhere near Huron we always stopped at a large ice cream stand—a Dairy Queen if I remember right– where we each got foot long hot dogs and a coke which we ate in that ’55 Ford. We dropped Grandpa off, he took some fish, and we headed back to ticky tacky land. It was usually dark by then. Then we cleaned fish. Yes sir, I cleaned and filleted fish at that early age of 9. Sometimes my neighbor pals would come over to see what we were doing. They were always interested, wanted to go fishing. As far as I know he never took any of them out—worried about them getting seasick. I’m sure he was also conscious of the smallness of the boat and not much room.
