I Am Serious...Wasn't Lying

 

            One of my readers told me recently that he thought my newspaper column last year about how I love to eat the buds of those orange day-lilies, which are thicker in the summer than thorns on a locust, was all a tongue in cheek effort to try to get gullible folks to do something silly.  But people, I am as serious as three-day blizzard when I say that those buds, cut just before they bloom, are delicious.

            He remembered the column I wrote telling folks I had envelopes filled with nearly invisible morel mushroom seeds for sale for a five dollars each and the one where I said that raw gizzard shad soaked in catsup tasted just like sardines.  I regret those feeble attempts at humor but that’s the truth about day-lily buds.  Sautee them like asparagus or roll them in eggs and flour and fry them and you will be amazed how good they are. In fact they have been called ‘poor man’s asparagus’.  They grow all over my place here on Lightnin’ Ridge and I like them so much that hardly any ever get to bloom!  Don’t take my word for it, ask someone who is honest and trustworthy!!!

Lying, and the Benefits Thereof -- According to The Front Bench Regulars

 

          My teachers didn’t really approve of me working after school at Dad and Grandpa’s pool hall.  One of the older lady teachers said I was spending too much of my time in that pool hall with a bunch of aging prevaricators.  I told Ol’ Bill what she said, and he and Ol’ Jim both really got upset by that. I was surprised they took it so hard.  Doc Dykes, the chiropractor, told them it just meant they were a bunch of old liars, and that was something of a relief to Ol’ Bill.  ‘Prevaricator’ sounded bad, like maybe he was some kind of weirdo.  He’d own up to an occasional lie, or at least an exaggeration.

         But all the Front Bench Regulars there in the pool hall would have preferred not to be called liars.   It is not exactly a lie if you say you remember catching a 50-pound catfish years back, if it only weighed 42 pounds.  That, claimed Ol’ Jim, was simply a product of not remembering clearly, and as acceptable as saying you had five dollars even if you actually only had four and a pocket full of change.  Because who ever knows how much change you have in your pocket? However, he said, if you actual said you had caught a 50-pound catfish and it was only 10 or 20 pounds, that was an outright lie and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

         Virgil Halstead came right out and admitted he lied almost every day…to his wife!  But then, amongst the married men, who didn’t?  My dad, the most honest and upright man I ever met, told my Mom he had borrowed a trolling motor to run our johnboat when he had actually paid 30 dollars for it.  Dad said the Bible stated ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ so he maintained that he had to lie about that trolling motor to maintain the peace. If Mom found out he paid that much for it there would have been no peace in our home for awhile!

                  Sometimes if you say things that are downright absolutely the truth, NO ONE will believe you.  For example, I saw a flying saucer when I was 13 years old! It sounds like a bald-faced lie, because you are thinking of a spacecraft filled with little green men.  But what actually happened was, Mom threw one at dad! It sailed across the room and narrowly missed him when he ducked, tearing a chunk out of the wallpaper. 

         I think I have written about all of this before, and I have given a great deal of thought about whether or not we will all be hanging our heads in front of St. Peter someday recalling some of the lies we told in our lives.  But Preacher Lampkin put it all in perspective for me one summer evening in the pool hall when it was just the two of us and all the Front Bench Regulars had gone home.  

         He said the commandment in the Bible stated, “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”  He said what that meant was no man should be a witness against another in a false manner.  For instance, if you really didn’t like some kid in school and you told the teacher you saw him stick his chewed gum under the desktop when he actually didn’t do anything of the sort, that was ‘bearing false witness’.

         Years later it dawned upon me that in court when you have to hold up your hand and ‘swear to tell the truth so help you God’, that the really bad people, the no-gooders and the worthless, had no reason to ever tell the truth. The truth might render them guilty! Only the good people who actually believe in those Ten Commandments are bound by such an oath. What a disadvantage that gives honest people.  If the judge is a no-account himself, as more and more of them are getting to be, a truthful man seeking fairness is really up the creek.  Knowing that, it is understandable why so often good people are run over and bullied by the bad.

         I think maybe God treasures women above men for several reasons and truthfulness must be amongst them. In general I think the ladies are a little more inclined to be truthful, especially when they get older. In the Bible it says that a good woman’s value is far above rubies.  There is not one statement anywhere about a good man having any value at all! I wish I knew where to go with all this.  Sometimes when I start writing I have a point to make and then in short order I forget what it is.  And that’s the honest-to- goodness truth.

         It is also the truth that you might enjoy reading one of my books or magazines. You can see them on my website…larrydablemont.com.  There are 11 books and more than 100 magazines we call the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal.

The Sixteen Pound Bass

 

    In my library there is a volume of Field & Stream maga­zine, in a hardbound cover, from April of 1918 to April of 1919. In these old mag­azines there is some very in­teresting reading, much of it by the great outdoorsman, Zane Grey, remembered for his famed western book. Indeed there is a great deal of difference in the way we hunt and fish today, but some things were much the same back then, in the thick of World War I.

    For instance, Field & Stream held a fishing contest, offering a host of outdoor equipment prizes in various categories. One entry drew more space in the magazine than any other topic but the war. It was a 16-pound smallmouth bass caught by George T. Magraw, M.D.Magraw wrote an elaborate account of the hooking and landing of his fish, and in­cluded a photo that nearly any­one would instantly take for a phony today. Apparently they were less skeptical in that day.

    The fish was said to be taken from a small one-acre lake near Avondale, Pa. Ma­graw claimed it took him one hour and 20 minutes to land the fish and that he had 175 yards of line out at one time. Field & Stream was very trusting, but they sent a repre­sentative to talk to Magraw and see the lake. He found the doctor of high repute in the community, and even com­mented that he never passed a dog on the street without a pat on the head.

    The writer talked to several men who signed affidavits naming them as witnesses to a smallmouth 36-inches long and 26 ¾ inches in girth. Before he left, however, the representative took note that the kitchen wall which was a background for the picture had boards four inches in width. Comparing those measurements with the picture, it showed the fish length would be only about 20 inches. Something was fishy, so Field and Stream asked for the photo negatives. Dr. Magraw became indignant, and stated that the negatives had been sent out of town and could not be recovered. He had, of course, eaten the fish, causing another hint of suspicion.

    Field and Stream went to work on the available picture with an architectural expert who examined the shadows and made elaborate calculations placing the size of the bass at less than 24 inches, and most likely less than 20. By then there was a considerable del­uge of mail from readers, nearly 100 percent against the doctor's claim. One reader said it was impossible for a fish to play out 175 feet of line in a pond of one acre size un­less he wound it around his body a few hundred times.

    Magraw replied that he was being made to look like a liar even after affidavits proved him a respected and truthful man. One of Field & Stream's writ­ers was a judge for the contest, and he wrote consistently about catching bass on artifi­cial baits and floating flies. When he questioned the fish fighting for an hour and 20 minutes, Magraw replied that the fish was taken on a minnow and “did not have a lot of cork and feathers rammed down her throat to drown her in 15 or 20 minutes.”

    The examinations of the photo, and explanations concerning the length of the bass which more or less proved it to be a hoax, took up four or five magazine pages in three issues, and became so involved and complex most outdoorsmen would have trouble figuring any of it out. Afterwards, the magazine gave Magraw 30 days to dispute the findings, and he did, with mathematical equations and drawings that were so confusing they could hardly be disproven.

    The good doctor wanted that record badly and he sent another picture. This time is was obviously a smaller bass blown up and laid over the top of a picture of Magraw. Even if you stretched your imagination you could not accept it, a smallmouth hanging from a man's waist, extending past his feet.

    Magraw stated that he had little faith in winning the prize because the judges were in the class of mules, and if you "con­vinced a mule of something against his will, he will likely remain of the same opinion." The editor finally took his gloves off, called the new picture an unspeakable fake. The matter was closed for good in the December issues of 1918, after nine months of study and debate by a half dozen experts.

    If the record had been allowed, and it might have been considering sworn, notarized affidavits from respectable men, then today’s 11-pound record brownie taken from Dale Hollow Lake in Kentucky would seem less of a phenomenon.

    It is hard to figure why a prize of a steel rod and reel would cause a man who was said to be upstanding and honest, to stretch things so far. It goes to show…fishermen have never really changed much.

 

Bobbers!

 

       If I were ever asked to list the ten things I have enjoyed the most in my life as a fisherman, not too far down the line I would list, “watching a bobber”.  It was one of life’s greatest pleasures in my youth. You too have likely done that if you grew up in the country.  If so, you know what I mean.

       Grandma McNew and I watched bobbers on my Uncle Roy’s pond, which he allowed no one else to fish except my cousins and me and Grandma and Grandpa.  

       Back then, summer ponds weren’t all filled with the scum and algae you see today.  The water there in the shade of a big oak tree was dark and deep, full of bluegill and bass and a few small catfish.

       And in the summer, Grandma and I often sat there in the shade watching a bobber sit stone-still on a smooth surface.  The fascination I felt was something I still feel, watching that bobber knowing that any moment it might dance a little, throwing out little ringlets on the water, then dive out of sight in a flash, the braided line cutting through the depths.  It only took a jerk on the cane pole to know what you had.  But no matter, it would be dinner the following day; not filets in a skillet but whole fried fish with the head and fins cut off, just scaled and gutted.

       Usually that disappearing bobber meant only a hand-sized bluegill, but sometimes a bass 12 or 14 inches long would pull it under.  Once or twice in every few hours of fishing, it would be a 15-to 18-inch bass or maybe even a catfish, and if you weren’t careful you might break the end off the old cane pole by jerking too hard. You landed a bigger fish by walking backwards and dragging it up the bank.

       Just out of college at the age of 22, I took a job as the Outdoor Editor for the Arkansas Democrat, the state’s largest newspaper in Little Rock.  Believe it or not, we got a little home out in the country about 30 miles north of the city, and I brought down from the Big Piney a15-foot wooden johnboat Dad had built with a sealed marine plywood bottom, which meant it didn’t have to be kept in the water to be ‘soaked up’ as the older ones did.

       On Dardanelle Lake, about 40 miles west of Little Rock there was a small arm on the north side of the lake known as Spadra Creek, about 200 yards wide at the most. The owner of a local dock told me the crappie were spawning, big ones.  So I loaded that old wooden johnboat and went there.  

       One of the local guides by the name of Yarbrough, told me where there was a hump coming up in the middle of that long tributary, and if I could find it and anchor just off of it I could catch crappie beneath a bobber and a yellow jig.  The hump was only about 15 feet across and about 8-feet under the water and everything around it was 15- or 20-feet deep.  I could find it by lining up three trees on opposite banks as Mr. Yarbrough had showed me.

       To make a long story short and happy, I took some jigs and a bobber, and caught crappie with that bobber setting over that hump, letting the jig settle about halfway up from the bottom.  I got to watching that bobber with such concentration and enjoyment, I scarcely noticed the fishing boats that would pass, staring at the wooden boat I had paddled out there to the hot spot in the middle of the creek.  Every now and then I would reel in a huge crappie and in short order I had a limit.

       A day or so later Mr. Yarbrough took me fishing for bass out at the mouth of Spadra, in a fiberglass bass boat, just becoming popular at that time.  He showed me that crappie could be caught without bobbers, but it wasn’t any more   rewarding than the fishing I had a few days before in Spadra Creek.

       The Democrat had one of the best writers I ever knew working at a desk across from mine.  His name was Bob Lancaster.  Bob laughed at
the idea of doing a story for the Democrat about fishing from a wooden johnboat with a bobber.  “Here you are an outdoor reporter for a newspaper with a million readers,” he said, and you’re out there paddling around in a wooden boat with no motor, fishing with a bobber!”

       We both laughed about that, and in a month or so, the newspaper acquired a Mon-Ark fiberglass fishing boat with a 35-horse motor for me to use.  But I told Bob that day that if there were indeed a million fishermen out there reading the newspaper the majority of them started out watching a bobber.  We all had a common beginning as fishermen.

These are my daughters with crappie they caught using bobbers. The first two are my middle fisherwoman, Christy Lynn. The redhead is my youngest fisherwoman, Leah Noel. And the last is my oldest, Lori Jean. I can't really call her a fisherwoman though. She is the Dr. in the family and doesn't have time to fish anymore.

 

     

An Incident at Clevenger Cove

 

       As a seventeen-year old freshman at School of the Ozarks College in the mid-60s I studied fishing mostly! With Tablerock Lake so close and my having a key to the gate and boat on the School’s property at a place called Clevinger Cove, you knew where I would be on the weekends.  If I couldn’t get home to the Big Piney and didn’t have to work on campus friends and I would often spend Friday and Saturday nights there on Clevinger Cove in an old abandoned house. We’d spend hours paddling around Tablerock  Lake in an old v-bottom boat fishing for anything we could catch.

       That was back when the first Rapala lures were becoming famous and somehow I got one, an old sample from my Uncle Norten.  My uncle had caught an 11-pound 4-ounce bass from Clevinger Cove years before I ever fished it.  It was published in Sports Afield Magazine as the biggest bass caught that year in the whole country.  

       Norten was addicted to big spinner baits, so I got some lures he was given, because of that magazine’s recognition. One was that black and silver Rapala about 6 or 7 inches long. On a Saturday morning when the lake was high from spring rains I tied it on and paddled back up into the end of the cove where a big green bush of some kind stuck up out of the water. 

       I couldn’t cast it a long way with that old Shakespeare reel and braided line but just that once it went back a little farther than intended and the line draped over the end of that bush. I gave it a jerk or two to try to free it and that Rapala lure danced enticingly on the surface just past the bush.

      Sometimes when a bass hits a topwater lure there is just a boil of water on the surface and he slurps it under with a minimum of commotion.  At such times I think the bass is just hungry and wanting a good meal. But after all, bass are predators and I am fairly sure that at times they just want to put on a show because they are mad as well as hungry. 

       That day, at the end of Clevenger Cove, there was a mad bass laying beside a log just beneath that green bush.  He didn’t want to just eat my Rapala he wanted to hurt it. And so my lure disappeared in a spray of water that came up a foot into the air with that big slab-sided bass. He crashed down on top of it carrying it beneath that bush before I could even bend the rod real good. I gave it a good pull and set the hook enough to feel that he was a monster of a fish as far as the fight he put up. But I figure he laughed to himself as he burrowed beneath that greenery and somehow got my line beneath the log.  I just hope those treble hooks hurt his jaw for a long time after he broke my leader.  That’ll learn  him!

       Actually it was more likely a ‘she’ than a ‘he’.  Bigger and fatter and meaner bass are almost always females.  And I am not insinuating anything here; but what the heck, females don’t read outdoor columns anyway do they?

       I have an even better story about Clevenger cove that I published in a book entitled “Prince of Point Lookout…Life and Learning at School of the  Ozarks”.  I worked for the President, Dr. M. Graham Clark back then and he asked me to take him and a very rich lady fishing one fall day there in the old boat in the big cove beside school property.  

       Her name was Nettie Marie Jones, who was a major donor to S of O.  I’ll write about that in another column sometime, how she caught a big bass that day herself.  That afternoon may have played a part in the building of a big structure now known as the Nettie Marie Jones Learning Center, there at the school.

You can find that book and others at website…www.larrydablemont.com

Three Heavenly Lakes

        There are high school graduation ceremonies going on around the country this month, causing me to remember mine, back in Houston High School in the sixties. I was only 17 when I graduated and never even dreamed of going to college.   My grades were not very good, because I never studied anything except outdoor magazines, and seldom completed any homework. I spent all my out-of-school hours working in my dad and grandfathers pool hall or on the Big Piney River in my johnboat.  

       My dad and mom never went to high school and had no relatives who did.  I was the first Dablemont to achieve that high honor. Our family was poor; both my parents were shoe factory workers.  There was a guidance counselor who knew that, a man by the name of Cloyce Gerdes.  He noted that I had made a very high grade on some graduation test they called an Ohio something or another.  I don’t know how that    happened because I just hurried through it so I could go fishing with a cousin that afternoon.  

       Surely something got switched or confused in those test results, but because of it and the financial situation I was in, Mr. Gerdes called me into his office to tell me about a college called School of the Ozarks, near Branson, Missouri, where poor kids were given jobs on campus to pay for room and board and tuition.  I sort of let that go by me because I had obtained a job sanding cars at a local body shop. Each night my fingers would bleed but it was worth it for the dollar and a quarter per hour I was getting and the opportunity to learn a trade.

       But I signed that application to School of the Ozarks and forgot about it.  The guidance counselor filled out the rest and sent it in.  That was in May and before the first of June I got a letter back saying I had been hadn’t been accepted but I had been put on a waiting list.  I figured as much… what college would want a pool hall kid with a 2.5 grade average? Miracles occur in everyone’s life and that next week one definitely took place for me, a miracle that changed my life entirely.  

       I was helping my dad put a new roof on our house that Saturday morning when Mom came out and told me that I had a phone call. When I answered, a Mr. Timmons told me he was the registrar at School of the Ozarks. He said that I had been fifth on their waiting list and five kids had quit. Looking back, I think that was indeed a miracle and that God was that day smiling on one of the poorest and dumbest kids in the Ozarks. I wasn’t very high on myself and I never thought something like that could happen to me. That night I filled an old dilapidated black suitcase with all the clothes I owned, as excited as I have ever been. In two days I had a job at the school and a dorm room and had started summer classes in a genuine college.  

       For a lot of reasons, the place called S of O was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.  A big fountain filled a pond-sized lake there on campus. It was called Lake Honor and no one knew it was full of bass but me. I found out within a few days of the time I got there.  

       The school sat on a bluff overlooking Lake Taneycomo and a student fisherman named Darrel Hamby showed me a path down over the bluff to find it. He taught me how to catch a fish I had never seen before, the rainbow trout. From Darrel I learned about the efficiency of using a spinning reel and rod and all about cooking fish in a dorm room with a hot plate and a skillet.

       I went to work on campus for the school president, Dr. Graham Clark who showed me some   property the school owned on Tablerock Lake called Clevinger Cove, where a V-bottom boat was chained up beside an old abandoned house.  He gave me a key to the gate and the boat and in June of that year I caught the first crappie I had ever seen, plus the  biggest largemouth bass I had ever  caught. On the weekends that I couldn’t go home to the Big Piney, friends and I would spend the night in that old broken-down house and fish most of the time there.

       Indeed it seemed like I had died and gone to heaven. The story of Clevinger Cove continued for two years, so I will finish it in my next column. But my life as a naturalist-outdoor writer got a big boost because of a miracle… five students quitting and making me a place to learn, away from  the Big Piney River…  Lake Honor, Lake Taneycomo and Tablerock.

 

Read the conclusion to this story, and next weeks column on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors.com 

The Second Gobbler

   

                                                         Dr. Fell with his gobbler

       If I write a second book about turkey hunting, one of the stories would be about the spring that I took Dr. David Fell on a hunt in Texas County, in the heart of the Ozarks.  Dr. Fell was a client from Oklahoma, an ophthalmological surgeon well known in the Midwest.  

       He read an article I had written for Field and Stream magazine about hunting wild gobblers and from that he knew I was guiding turkey hunters.  So he set up two days with me in which we would hunt turkeys the first half of the day and then float-fish the Piney River in the afternoon.

       Dawn found us that first morning on a farm I had permission to hunt, and we were only about 200 yards from a gobbler that sounded off on the roost. A few seconds later a second tom gobbled...  I heard them fly down off the roost and move toward us.  About that time I heard another hunter calling to the gobblers.  We were south of the turkeys and he was to the northeast.  He called too much and too loud, so I knew it wasn’t a hen. That was kind of exasperating because the landowner had assured me no one else would be hunting the land.

       Within the next hour the second gobbler completely shut up but the main one, seeming to stay where he was and gobbling quite often.  The other hunter kept at it; not very good at imitating a hen, but sometimes you don’t have to be.   My uncle Norten claimed he once called one up by pulling a rusty farm gate back and forth!

        I am supposing that one gobbler kept expecting a hen to come to him but to our good fortune none came or they departed after mating.  He got quiet for about thirty minutes and then started up again. He sounded off about 30 yards or so closer.  Dr. Fell was well hidden with a tree behind him and some multiflora rose between him and the tom turkey that was beginning to act as if he indeed thought my call was a beautiful young hen that couldn’t wait to meet him.

        About then off to my left I heard the unmistakable sound of a gobbler strutting, with that spitting and drumming sound they make.  I looked over and saw him moving around behind me only a few yards away.  Obviously he was the second gobbler we had heard that morning on the roost, but he hadn’t sounded off since.  

       He was a nice tom but Dr. Fell, who was several yards in front of me, couldn’t see him.  In a matter of five or ten minutes the gobbler moved around behind me and out of sight into the woodlands.   It took another hour but the tom turkey before us moved into sight about 60 yards away.  It was Dr. Fells first turkey hunt and I could see him react.  He began to shake with excitement and I hoped he knew the big bird was still well out of   range.  He did well to wait and when the gobbler was strutting about 35 yards before us I gave a soft call and he straightened high to look. At that moment the shotgun’s roar echoed across the valley and my turkey-hunting client collected his first gobbler.  But the story didn’t end there.

        Dr Fell had already paid me for two days on the river as well as that turkey hunt but he was so excited about his big 22-pound gobbler with an 11-inch beard that he wanted to get it back to Oklahoma to show some of his friends before he cleaned it. He told me to keep the money and he would come back some other time to float the river, and off he went.

Dr. Fell and me with his trophy gobbler

       But while we were taking pictures the other hunter showed up.   He was a timid and apologetic local farm boy about 14 years old, maybe younger.  He looked at that big gobbler with envious eyes and said he hoped to get one like that sometime before the season ended.  Two days later he did, and I was there!  I called up that gobbler too, for the youngster… a few hundred yards from where Dr. Fell bagged his first turkey.  The boy was about as excited as I was when I killed my first one.  I wrote a magazine article in later years about both turkeys.  

       I got paid for one and the other one I just did for another kind of reward, one that didn’t involve pay. It was an act that made me as happy as anything I have done as a turkey guide.  Maybe the greatest part of that season long ago involved that second gobbler and a poor farm kid that didn’t even own a camouflaged shirt.

        You can see a photo of Dr. Fell and his gobbler on my website… larrydablemontoutdoors.com.