Tell us about your fond memories of you and your father while growing up.
I'm fortunate that my parents are still alive and healthy. They both live only a short walk down the street so I see them almost everyday and we eat dinner together couple time a week. My father's great love is/was fishing... fly fishing to be more precise.
I remember his fly casting lesson at the golf course behind our house on evenings when I was around 10 and going to lakes and canals when he came home from work to fish for bluegills and bass. We used to go down to the Keys together early in the morning when I was about 13 to flyfish for bonefish on the flats while the sun came up. He took me flyfishing for tarpon and jacks in the Lower Keys when I got a little older. He used to spend hours tying flies and occasionally he would tie one "perfect" fly which he would hang up on his cork board to admire. He taught me to tie flies (and jigs), build/wrap rods and modify Medalist fly reels so tarpons and jacks wouldn't destroy it on their long hard runs. Back then (70's and 80's) most people didn't even know you could flyfish in the ocean. I remember my dad hooking up with a large Jack down in Key Biscayne and soon there were over 50 people that came over from the beach to watching him fight that fish. Bunch of tourist wanted to take pictures of my dad with the fish after it was landed. At that moment, to me, he was like a rock star.
He still fishes couple time a week with the flyrod at the lake behind his house. He occasionally catches bass, peacocks and bluegills but mostly he just like casting his rod out there. On few occasions I caught him casting hookless flies... he said the thrill is getting the fish to strike.
Two years ago I purchased a very nice split bamboo rod for him... something he could never justify spending the money on while raising a family. He took that rod and used it to catch couple fish at the lake but last time I saw it, it was on the top of the cork board above all his "perfect" flies.
He and I had a lot of disagreements while growing up but we always made time to go fishing together. We had our life which were good or bad, then there was fishing which was totally separate from our life.
He was never into hunting but I've been telling him about my recent adventure into hog hunting and he is intrigued but it. I've asked if he wanted to come hunt with me but he said he's not interested doing it but is living it through me. Everytime I come back from my property he wants to know what happened.
He isn't a perfect man but he's been a damn good father to me and a great father-in-law to my wife... my son thinks he's the best grand father in the world.
can't do this topic. enjoy your Dad while you have him. memories are great but not like having him around to tease you a little.
My father has been gone almost 33 years and I still miss him. He too was a fisherman and didn't care a thing about hunting. I have many great memories of fishing in and around Orlando in the late 1940's and 50's with him.
My grandfather was from Czechoslovakia and died rather young in the state of West Virginia, grandmother remarried and moved to Colorado where my father learned to flyfish for trout as a young boy. At the end of WW2 he met my mother in an Army Hospital in Nevada. She was from W.Va., they married and returned to W.Va. and then moved to central Florida shortly after 1946. I was born in W.Va. in '46 but have been in Fl. since '47.
My first big memory of my dad's fishing was a big stringer of bass that he and one of my older cousins had caught. They caught them while wading in a cow pasture, east of Fell's Cove in Osceola County. The pasture was flooded after a hurricane and the fish were under some big live oaks feed on something.
Just up the road from Fell's Cove, in Orange County, there was the Duda Canal running south out of Lake Hart into Lake Amanda Jane. Here I spent many a day learning to fish and rambling in the woods on the west side of the canal. At that time there was a dam across the canal that provided enough water for the celery farm on the south side of Lake Hart to irrigate the fields. It was deep and black water. Here my father taught me to catch bluegills and I finally graduated to bass. In this same area another canal went from Lake Mary Jane west into Lake Hart on it's east side. Used to be called Moss Park, maybe still is? My dad loved to fish this area and back then it was unusual to see too many others fishing. Always lots of bass to eat back then.
Another place that stands out in my memory is Lake Ivanhoe in the middle of Orlando. Back then you could rent an old wood boat from the Chamber of Commerce for a dollar a day. Daddy would take his old "kicker" and put it on the driest looking boat and off we would go. Caught some of the biggest bluegills in Ivanhoe on Sunday afternoons after after he took me to church in the morning. Ivanhoe was connected to Lake Highland by an underground drain system. Where the water came into Highland, there were big schools of little shad and Dad would put a treble hook on and snatch one of the little shad and the attach a big red and white bobber to his line and let go with the current out into the lake. It was not unusual for him to tie into a good bass. I usually had to watch these preceedings as I didn't have rod and reel containing enough line get out in the deep part.
Our relationship was pretty good, had our ups and downs as most fathers and sons do, but one of my fondest memories of my father came the day I was leaving for Parris Island in 1964. He went to work late that morning so he could say goodbye, as he usually was gone before 5am. He planned to go to work when Mother took me to the plane. As we were preparing to leave, my dad ran out the back door and got in his old fishing car and drove off. That was the only time I remember seeing him cry. I remember looking at mother and she said "He loves you son."
Coming home from the Marine Corps, I discovered my dad had learned a lot since I had left home! One thing he had learned was to go shad fishing on the St. Johns. We enjoyed some great times trolling up and down the river. He also had taken up fishing for redfish in the Indian River somewhere around Rockledge. He and his buddies would literally each have a big red as long as their leg when they came out of the river, still wading after all those years. One thing that I didn't agree with him on, was he traded my Willys Jeep station wagon for a Peugeot while I was in boot camp. The little French car served me well and proved the my dad did know what was best for me. Mother and dad relocated to Clermont in the mid 60's and he truley enjoyed fishing the lakes in that area. He learned the secret of Lake Minneola, trolling in the middle of the lake with some deep running plug. He always brought us a big mess of bass on Saturday evening, of course I had to clean 'em.
We moved from Orange County to the Panhandle in '73. Dad retired in '75 and they also moved to our little farm. He still fished every chance he got but he enjoyed the cattle and the farming that we were doing in addition to a full time job. He had a fish pond dug and stocked with bass and bluegills for his 3 grandchildren (he said it was for the cows to drink in). He never got to fish that pond. We were working some cows one afternoon and he was leaning on a metal gate when a big yearling hit the gate pretty hard, 30 days later he was gone. He had given up smoking just a few months before but it apparently had taken its' toll on his health. Doctors said congestive heart failure.
He was 66 when he died, I was 33. This year I will be 66 if the Lord allows me to live through September. One thing I know is that I was always my dad's little boy. Treefarmer
his WW-2 service in Africa,Italy,India,Burma and China, putting himself thru harvard law school on the GI bill, his patience, good advice, being the village attorney with lots of connections his free representation came in handy more than once., the crap I put him through without his killing me in my sleep, the way he worked like a dog to care for us kids and his wife, 4 kids in private college at the same time. as a young teen he confiscated my fireworks and made me "dispose of them", so I broke them in half and left them in his ash tray and you guessed it. in 1982 he was a very early triple bypass heart surgery patient, my Bro and I flew in from Denver to see him , took his car and parked it illegally at the hospital. hooked up to a ventilator unconscious when the hospital security overhead paged his license plate # he woke up saying "that's my car, what did you sob's do now? self taught wood working/carpentry/wood carving, piano and organ playing and singing in choirs and barbershop quartets. wish he were still around.
can't do this topic. enjoy your Dad while you have him. memories are great but not like having him around to tease you a little.
Ditto!
:saluting R.I.P. Dad! Semper Fi! :USMC
