I can’t help myself, I’m a collector and a clutter forgiver. I think for all the reasons my wife still loves me, the one she’d likely list first in the ‘cons’ column is that I have too much stuff and I don’t throw enough stuff away. The hope in life is that we will eventually know ourselves and learn to curb those tendencies that make us harder to tolerate. So naturally, I have tried to learn to ask questions when something that activates that hoarder gene is offered. Because, I’d like to stay married and I have – at age 46 – gotten to know myself a little bit better.
So, naturally, when a reader reached out via email offering his collection of Saltwater Sportsman magazines from the 1960s and 70s, I reacted first internally, with excitement, and fought off the impulse of just typing my address and hitting ‘send’. Then I did the smart thing and thought about my wife. My brain was reasoning at a rate of speed that would seem to have produced some kind of smoke, or at least the scent of burning grease and mechanical heat. I needed to know how many, if it was all of the issues from say 1967 to 1978… I would have to say no, I can’t bring 144 old, dusty fishing magazines into a house that’s already filled with old (and new) fishing magazines! So, exhibiting an impressive level restraint and maturity (if I do say so myself), I responded by asking that very question. The generous reader responded with a quantity that I deemed small enough to, sort of, fade into the noise… “about 20” he said.
When they arrived, I was under the pressure of a deadline and I looked at the box in a similar way that you might side-eye a sketchy dude on an empty subway car, like I didn’t want them to know I was looking. Finally, later that day, I sat on the floor and spread about half of them around me. There was a 1974, a 1977, a 1978, a 1968 and many others. I began systematically opening each one to the table of contents and scanning over the articles, I was amazed by how many names I knew, some of them were even guys I had worked with or met; guys like Milt Rosko, Hal Lyman, Mark Sosin and William A. Muller. In the June 1970 issue, I found an article written by the late Frank Daignault, it seemed so perfectly timed in that earlier this month, we had published what very well may be his last published article, ever.
The story was called Montauk on My Right and the basic premise was to say that the best water for 50-plus pound striped bass lay between the beaches of Provincetown and the rocky tip of Montauk. He went on to say that he felt that Cuttyhunk sat at the gravitational center, citing the fact that three 70-pound stripers had been caught there and – at that time – no others eclipsing that mark were known to have been caught on rod and reel. For me, a person who has edited a long list of Frank Daignault stories, it was really interesting to read his work at a time that came before his style had truly developed.
The jarring part for me was that I read the article in the voice I had always, subconsciously, assigned to Frank. Even though I’ve met him and spoken to him on the phone, I revert to the raspy voice of an old, wise fisherman when I read his stories. But then, I decided to do the math. Frank was 87 when he passed away in 2024 meaning that he was born in 1937, which means he was 33 when this SWS article was published, a full 13 years younger than I am now and smack-dab in the middle of that life that we have all romanticized at one time or another. The Daignault’s living their summers on the beaches of the Cape, fishing at all hours, paying their way with commercial striped bass in the golden era of surfcasting.
I love these old things, because they connect me to the history of what I love and the people who taught me the ropes through their writing. They preserve a static view of that time, through the photos, the ads, the articles and the people whose names live in the bylines. Their love and enthusiasm for the sport is basically cast in amber, it’s almost like a photograph of someone’s inspiration and that hard copy will wait as long as it takes for the next reader to stop, read and enjoy. It’s hard not to hope that someone might pick up something I wrote 50 years from now and feel all the excitement and inspiration that I feel when I sit down to put my thoughts into words.
I think that would be pretty cool.
