A Floater From the Fifties

 

         I tried my best to create a Big Piney River museum and Nature Center near my hometown of Houston Missouri.  But it was not to be and now I have to empty it in hopes that someone else can take over and use that building, there in a beautiful, wooded setting a mile south of town, for something useful and lasting.  It could have been something great with all the Big Piney artifacts I have from 100 to 60 years ago.  I planned all kind of exhibits and a Big Piney aquarium filled with river creatures. I thought God wanted me to do it but I know that sometimes I have tackled things I thought God wanted me to accomplish when it wasn’t His idea at all, but just a product of my own misguided enthusiasm.

          It was all something I had done before with great success, in the 1970’s when I was Chief Naturalist for Arkansas, working on those nature center projects in State Parks.  Trouble is, when I started thinking about a Big Piney Nature Center I was in my sixties.  In Arkansas I did all that back then I was only 20-some.  I didn’t realize, ten years ago how quickly I would start approaching 80, and I was stupid enough to believe I was still going to be feeling young enough to make it all work despite health problems that would come my way due to my age.

 

        So here I am with a pair of old antique johnboats that I have to do something with.  In the 1980’s I built a wooden johnboat 15-feet long that is a duplicate of the ones my dad and granddad built for the Piney and Gasconade rivers between 1920 and 1970. For many years that boat I built was on display at the Jim Gaston White River Museum.  Now it is a good old antique, with the paint wearing off and the wood deteriorating.  It will be great for a display in a museum or old country store or perhaps one of the Ozark river resorts.

         The best part is, I will give it away to someone who wants to come and take it. I also will give away two display cabinets, one that is 8 feet long and made from Ozark walnut.  Both need glass tops but I couldn’t get that done.  A lady at the local glass company said they were too busy to mess with it.  Again, I will give all of this away plus some other items too numerous to mention.  I can provide pictures of the old wooden boat and display cabinets.

         Many springs ago I was hunting turkeys at a ladies ranch in the Ozarks when she showed me an old aluminum johnboat her late husband had bought that was made for the old-time Missouri Conservation Commission in 1950.  I noticed that the serial number was 0001 so I started investigating and found that it was made in Richmond MO by a fellow named Appleby. Mr. Appleby had come to my grandfather’s home on the Big Piney to watch him make wooden johnboats. He then decided to try to make one out of aluminum that was much longer, for the MCC to use on the Current and the Gasconade Rivers.  

         I was so fascinated by it that I bought it and the custom-made trailer and the little 3-horse Mercury motor that was on it.  It is on display now at that Big Piney nature center I built, but will be removed shortly.  I paddled it down two or three Ozark rivers that would accommodate its 20-foot length. It is just like the old White River johnboats from the days of Jim Owen and Charlie Barnes, the men from Branson who made Ozark float fishing famous in the early years of the last century.

           Appleby went on to establish an aluminum boat company named the Richline-Appleby Company at Lebanon, Mo.  He had a daughter named Diana Lowe, who took over the boat company after she was married.  Her son Derrick created a branch of the Lowe Company called Generation Three Boats.  I have a custom-made hard-topped camping-pontoon boat that Derrick put together for me in 1988, and a Lowe Paddle-Jon river boat made in 1969, which nearly duplicates my grandfathers wooden boats.  In the ‘70s and ‘80s I used a half dozen aluminum Lowe lake-boats and got to know Diana and Derrick. Just last week I visited the Marine Center in Joplin Missouri (which I believe is the best boat company in the Ozarks) and there were a bunch of new Lowe boats of all sizes.  May the company last forever!  

         See the first boat Mr. Appleby made in 1950, my camping boat and some of the other Lowe boats I owned years back on my internet site … larrydablemontoutdoors.

 

Pork Rinds and Blackberries

    There have been many innovations since the use of the first fishing lures, including the advent of the many varieties of pork-rind. Probably the use of pork-rinds all came about when some old-timer couldn’t find any fishin’ worms, and turned as a last resort to a strip of thin-sliced bacon. My uncle, an old time fishing guide, swore that the most effective lure in Ozark reservoirs over all seasons was a large jig with a long, slender port-rind eel. Leave that eel off, he told me, and the effectiveness of the jig is reduced considerably. He told about landing a ten-pound bass from Table Rock after the hook pulled free in the last foot or so. The fish fell to a tough pork-rind eel wrapped around the bony structure beneath the gill.

    Fishing with him years ago on the War Eagle River in northwest Arkansas, I watched him cut a two-inch long razor-thin strip of white pork-rind to adorn the rear treble of a Flatfish lure. Using a similar deep-running wobbling crankbait, I came up with the idea of two thin strips on two of the three rear hooks. With the lure wobbling through the water, those strips looked like tiny white legs whipping and flagellating behind the lure.

    I caught several nice Kentucky and largemouth that day and took the same procedure to Bull Shoals Lake to experience success there. In mid-summer a year or so later, I used the same set-up  on a Wiggle-Wart lure to tempt a pair of big smallmouth from an Ozark stream. Almost any deep-running, wobbling lure becomes twice as effective with one or two thin strips of pork rind on rear hooks.

    Such thin strips are a favorite too of experienced fly fishermen. At times nothing more is needed for panfish, trout and bass. Fishing the Big Piney as a boy, I was taught by my dad to use small white fly-strip rind, about ¼ inch wide and two to three inches long on a small spinner and jig. We would split the tail of the pork-rind, and the combination was more effective against smallmouth on that little “Shimmy-fly”, than any other lure.

    Now there are so many types and colors of frog chunks and rind available that you can’t get them all in your tackle box. But it you had nothing else to fish with, the pork-rind baits would allow you to catch fish almost any time, anywhere.

Black Raspberries

    Ol’ dad would just as soon never see another blackberry thicket. In boyhood days back in the Ozarks of southern Missouri, cousins Dave, Darb, Butch and I picked enough blackberries to fill a dump truck. We were forced into the thickets by cruel mothers who saw such outings as social occasions, and canned more blackberries than the fruit cellar would hold.

    Back then I didn’t eat many blackberries. A couple of old men in the pool hall said that eating raw blackberries caused appendicitis because of the seeds. I swore back then that when, and if I ever grew up, I’d never be caught in a blackberry patch…unless it was the dead of winter and I was hunting rabbits or quail.  But I loved the blackberry pie my daughter Christy baked for me over the Fourth of July weekend. I didn’t have to pick any, just eat the pie.  Therefore I got no chiggers!

    I only knew one blackberry picker who wasn’t bothered by chiggers. His name was George Halley and George was a professional. He picked blackberries all summer and sold them door-to-door to folks in our rural community. My cousins and I looked up to George. He didn’t take baths, or make his bed, or have a regular job and we figured he had to be the bravest man in the world to wade through a blackberry thicket looking only for berries and no snakes.

    He sometimes traded blackberries for home brew, which was one of the local farm products in Big Piney country at that time. Uncle Roy the father of Butch, Dave and Darb   made some hisself.  Us boys I talked it over an decided that it was the home brew that kept George from being over run by ticks and chiggers, so Butch got a sneaked a pint jar of it from his dads cellar and we medicated ourselves with it. It’s been years, but I can tell you from clear memory that if home brew in the blood won’t kill ticks and chiggers, nothing will!

    That experience with alcohol may be the reason I have drink nothing stronger than ice tea and lemonade my whole life-long. In the back of my mind I can’t help but wonder if less fortunate souls may not have been steered toward alcoholism by thoughtless mothers bent on hording blackberries.

    I have two computer sites now, one is ‘larrydablemontoutdoors’, which carries my columns and photos, and the other is ‘larrydablemont.com’ which shows all my books and magazines which you may order.