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.

 

 

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