This interview was conducted with Francis Wood at his home in Seattle, Washington, on December 3, 2007. The interviewers are Danny Beatty and Tamara Belts.
TB: Today is Monday, December 3rd, 2007, and I am here with Dr. Fran Wood and Danny Beatty. Dr. Wood did just sign the Informed Consent Agreement and he knows he is being recorded; Danny will ask our questions.
DB: Well, I think you should start back in 1938 or 1939 when you said you met Ted Rogowski at a camp, is that about when?
FW: I would say it was the summer of 1948.
DB: Oh ten years later, okay.
FW: Ten years later; he was the fishing counselor at Camp Allagash up on Moosehead Lake in central Maine. I went up there as a fishing counselor since I had an interest in fishing, but I certainly was no expert at fly tying and so forth. He took me on in our co-counselor efforts, and got me started with my fly tying and casting instructions, and we just had a wonderful summer there. Then after that, he was a junior at Amherst and I was a sophomore at Princeton. He invited me to create a team from Princeton to come up and engage in the first of his intercollegiate trout derbies that he was running at Amherst. So I got a fellow who was also a fly fisherman from Princeton to join me, named Skip Hosfield, and we went up to Amherst for the first of these gatherings. Lee Wulff was there, and put on a demonstration of fly fishing. My fly fishing was awful and we were casting in the middle of winter in an indoor horse-ring or something of that sort and there were nets hanging up above, and I kept hooking the net with my backcast. I didn’t get any notable prizes for distance or accuracy, but Ted did give me a prize which was a fly tying vice which I still use and so that also got me started and kept me going with fly fishing.
Then I spent four more summers at that camp as a fishing counselor. The next year, Ted was not there, he was graduating and going to law school, and so I was up there with Skip Hosfield, who is now (and has been for eons) down in Eugene leading the fly fishing efforts down there. Then in 1954, I came out here for my internship after I graduated from Harvard Medical School, and found that fishing in Seattle area was a lot closer and easier to get to for a Saturday afternoon (or something more) than it was in Boston, so I thought this was not so bad. I was here for a couple of years, and during the second year I was here, 1955, I think that was when I joined the Washington Fly Fishing Club. I then was in the military in Southern California, from 1956 to 1958, and then I came back up here briefly in January 1958 and married my first wife who was the occupational therapist that I met in the Respirator Center at Harborview Hospital during my internship. From there we went back to Boston for two years of research fellowship and then decided that back out here in Seattle would be a good way to get my last year of residency and join the faculty, so that’s the way that worked out. I’ve been out here ever since. As I say, I was taken in to the Fly Club as a member even before leaving here, and then since 1960, I have been a regular attendee and a real supporter of the Washington Fly Fishing Club.
DB: Let’s back up just a little bit. I want you to elaborate a little bit on how you met Skip Hosfield at Princeton.
FW: He was the class behind me at Princeton; when I put an ad in the campus paper for attending the Intercollegiate Fly Fishing Derby, he responded. When I started at Princeton, I thought I would probably be an architect, and so I took some…
DB: He was in the school of architecture?
FW: Yes, he was in that school, but he stayed on with the architecture. When I took courses in architectural drawing I had sat at a table drawing these different perspectives of houses and things like that for it seemed hours on end, I wondered what else might be of interest. I accidentally took a course on the natural history of animals, you know things like how whales manage to dive to 2000 feet without getting the bends and things like that, and I thought, hey, this is interesting! Now, since my father was a physician, I decided, well, in case I might under some strange circumstances want to go to medical school, I might as well take the courses that prepare me for that, so I did. And I got into Harvard Medical School and it’s been a great career ever since, with enough time, but not quite enough for fishing.
DB: Were you possibly at Princeton the same time as Van Gytenbeek (R. P. “Van” Van Gytenbeek)? He graduated in 1955.
FW: Pretty close, I was out of there in 1950, so he came the year after me.
DB: Oh, he came the year after, okay. I’m sure you had some stories to tell each other.
FW: Well, Pete and I always seemed to talk about this, and I have this classy belt that is my Princeton class of 1950. Pete and I always say something meaningful like “Tiger, Tiger, Tiger, Sis, Sis, Sis, Boom, Boom, Boom, Bah!” But yes, I’ve known him quite a bit and worked with him somewhat over here.
DB: When he was in Seattle.
FW: When he was here: he’s just another amazing asset for fly fishing in the country, with his role in the Federation.
DB: So about 1955, you met Roy Patrick, I suppose you went into the fly shop.
FW: Went into his fly shop, yes.
DB: Could you tell us a little bit of that story, about how you met him and how come he sponsored you?
FW: Well, I say I met him, and as usual when you meet another fly fisherman, you begin to talk about the types of equipment to use, and how long have you been fly fishing, and where do you go, and this kind of stuff. After I had been at this for a little while, he said why don’t you come on down to the meeting of the fly club which was, at that time, held at the hotel in the University District. So I came to it, no, as a matter of fact, I think it was still downtown at that time, and I came to a couple of meetings and then decided to join in 1955, which was just the year after I arrived here in July of 1954.
DB: And then you were gone for two or three, four years?
FW: Four.
DB: And came back about 1961.
FW: 1960.
DB: 1960; and then you got real active with the club at that point.
FW: Yes, I got more active, and went on more trips, and then was put on various committees per the book there [(referring to Backcasts)]. I was a secretary for one year, and I can’t remember which year that was, but kept the minutes.
DB: Could you tell us any particular stories of interest about people like Roy Patrick or these others that we no longer have access to that would be of interest to fly fishers?
FW: Well, Roy Patrick was a remarkable operator of a store, and this was one of the very early fly fishing stores with fly tying equipment, and fly rods and the rest of it in town here. His store is still there on Eastlake and continues to be quite busy. Of course, it was very nice having it that close to the center of town for a lot of us to be able to get in there. He was very helpful and tolerant. After my first wife and I got back out here in 1960, she went to make a fly rod and glued on the female feral backwards on the rod, and so we took it into Roy to see what he could do about it, and he was able to fix it up all right and then gave her, I think it was a card that Christmas that included a backwards glued in feral and said this is the way it works. She thought that was just marvelous. But he had a real touch for dealing with people, and in a commercial operation like that with somebody like that, why that’s a great deal of help and that worked out very nicely.
DB: Are there any other early Washington Fly [Fishing] Club members that you remember that you could have a story or two about?
FW: I would say, probably, there are a lot of them, and as I approach my eighties or decade and one year behind Walt Walkinshaw, I have forgotten a lot of them. But I look at, for example, Ralph Wahl was a major component, and has been a major component to your program in Bellingham, and his son Terry, was a bird watcher and bird bander and so that was the other activity that I got involved in. Terry dragged me off to band seagulls on Protection Island and Coleville Island just off the south edge of Lopez, and every year, we went to Coleville on the first weekend after the Fourth of July, and Protection the second weekend after the Fourth, and banded thousands of gulls and read bands on some of the adult gulls that had come back there. So the Wahl family, in these two areas, really…
DB: You came at it from two directions.
FW: Absolutely. And just a lot of other people I know; Gil Nyerges and I have been on a number of trips and more recently, some trips up to Canada with our wives. Bill Redmond and I would seek one another out here and Ted Rogowski; we have had a lot of contacts with Ted Rogowski and his current wife, Joan. We went over and fished the upper Missouri in Montana about, I guess it was maybe five or six years ago. That was just great. And Bradner; I have a picture of my dad who was out here for a visit at the time talking with Bradner at one of the exhibits down at the Seattle Center and things of that sort.
DB: Did you know Bradner when he had the bookstore?
FW: No.
DB: He had become the outdoor editor of the Seattle Times by then.
FW: Times, yes.
DB: Must have been in the Fifties that he made that transition.
FW: I think that’s right, yes. At least as far as I know, and of course Dawn Holbrook with his focus on making rods was just fascinating. And I am very fascinated as we speak at the number of people that are really consumed by making bamboo rods. Skip Hosfield, down in Eugene, that we visit periodically, is really gung-ho with his new bamboo rod making equipment and my feeling is, you know, if I’ve got a good fly rod that’s not bamboo, I’m delighted. So I haven’t fiddled around with that kind of rod making, I have taken…
DB: I don’t want this to be my interview, but Skip’s a good friend of mine, and you know, he started tying Atlantic salmon flies, three or four years ago and he told me…
FW: Oh, spectacular stuff.
DB: …and he told me, “I’m going to make a hundred, and if it works out, that’ll be fine.” And so somewhere about 70 or so, he sent one of them to a contest which he won and now he’s an international champion fly tier, so you know the story, but it’s interesting to me that you and he were good friends.
FW: Yes, since way back when.
DB: All those many years ago. So one of the things I know that you’re very interested in is the high lakes, and through the Washington Fly Fishing Club you’ve been leading a group of fly fishers into the high lakes for many years.
FW: I would say going with them, not so much leading them. Pete Baird has been more of a leader than I have been.
DB: Oh, well, but tell us about that. I thought you also were quite involved with it.
FW: I would say quite involved, yes. We would all go in with our own shelter arrangements, sometimes a shared shelter with another member, and go into various places that members like Pete Baird had figured out were a good place to get to. I early on [got] very much interested in the high lakes from the stand point of getting in there, not having huge crowds of people, exploring around half a dozen lakes to fish in and then able to come back out. Some of these places were a pretty good effort of seven miles each way to get into them, or something like that, and of course a few thousand feet to climb and that was very interesting to me because of my interest in the environment in general. And if I only caught a couple of fish while I was in there, or half a dozen, or something like that, why that’s okay, that worked out all right. And in addition to the high lake trips with the fly club, my first wife and I and our two daughters would go into high lakes on long weekends and things of that sort and using information obtained from other fly club members, where we could get in and explore around and have a really great time. So that’s my involvement, and most recently, a year ago this past summer, the fly club had a trip into the Scottish Lakes Camp, just on the east side of Stevens Pass. And that’s where you drive on Route 2, and about twenty miles beyond Stevens Pass, pull into a parking lot and they pick you up in a four-wheel drive and take you in eight miles to the camp, which has running hot water, and a stove, and nice things like that, and then from that camp you can hike out two or three miles. They have about nine lakes that are reachable, some of them are seven miles from there, but it’s not having to climb up, it’s up and down and around, so that was my most recent high lake experience which was also fun.
DB: I also understand that you enjoy fishing the small streams of Western Washington.
FW: Yes.
DB: And how far north have you fished the small streams?
FW: I would say, with Walt’s son, we went up oh five years ago to a creek that is off the Mount Baker highway, and you know, that’s neat. You fish at one pool and float dry flies down there and you don’t see any action, and you move on twenty more feet, and there’s another pool, and you see what you’ve got there. That’s one thing I like about the small streams. My dad was a member of a club called the “Swiftwater” that had fishing rights on a stream up in the Pocono Mountains, north of Philadelphia, and so I went up there and fished for a while as I was just beginning to learn about fly fishing. The streams here are very similar, and oh, the upper south fork of the Snoqualmie, near Snoqualmie Pass where it hooks away from Interstate 90, so you don’t have so much road noise in your ears, why that’s great fishing, although there are not a lot of fish in there. But you can wade back and forth in August and be comfortable in shorts.
DB: Did you do any of this back country creek fishing, say thirty years ago or forty years ago, up in the foothills?
FW: I would say, probably yes. And with our kids we took a trip up into the Eagle Cap Wilderness in the Wallowa Mountains in Northeastern Oregon and in addition to fishing the lakes up there, why, we would stop for lunch and fish a creek that we were standing by and found out there were a lot of small trout in there and things of that sort, so that was a lot of fun.
DB: Was part of these trips to find birds, to find new species?
FW: Not particularly. I would usually carry my binoculars along to see what I ran into. But it wasn’t looking for rare birds or looking for giant fish or anything, no particular goal except to have a great time and to touch-base with the environment, and those two things were just fine. Even (not with this much rain) with some lousy weather we’d run into periodically, it was just great.
DB: Over the years have you attended quite a few of the Washington Fly Club outings?
FW: I would say, over the years, quite a few. On an annual bases, you know two or three maybe.
DB: Was there a particular one that you enjoyed more than another one?
FW: I would say, some of the trips over to Lenice Lake, for example, and up to the Dry Falls Lake, which was the most recent major trip we’ve been on. We went up to Dry Falls with the club a couple of years ago, and you know, being out on the water with a lot of club mates, and realizing that they can help you, if they catch a fish, they’ll be more apt to share their pattern with you than if you were all by yourself and among a bunch of strangers. Then we would get together and people would bring in various things for the dinner and stuff like that.
DB: You mentioned at the beginning that you learned fly tying with Ted and others in a camp in Maine. So were you learning that type of fly, the streamer flies and so forth, then?
FW: Certainly the Gray Ghost Streamer that was on the fly club emblem for a while was a Maine fly that was used in trolling for the salmon up there in Moosehead Lake, and then a number of other easy-to-tie flies, thanks to Ted. We got our beginning fly tiers at Camp Allagash to tie this pattern called the “Dead Chicken”, and that was just a yellow chenille body on a regular size 8 hook, tied off and then a brown chicken hackle feather in the front of that, it was one of the simplest patterns you could imagine. Then we’d go out to some of the lakes around there and catch fish and the campers were pretty impressed by how that worked out. I haven’t used a “Dead Chicken” in a while but I think I still have a couple in my box.
DB: Have you continued your fly tying over the years?
FW: Yes.
DB: You use flies only that you’ve tied?
FW: No, no, I tie up the patterns for local areas. I haven’t tied much in the last couple of years because when I go over to the Yakima River or something like that, I usually duck into a shop and find out what are they recommending and buy half a dozen of some different patterns. If I go over to fish the Yakima, which I have done with a neighbor who has a boat and also guided trips over there, I will go and find out, you know, here it is September the 12th, what are the fish hitting now, and that will be different from what they are likely to be hitting two weeks before or two weeks after. I’ve got a lot of fly tying equipment upstairs but I don’t tie a lot of flies.
DB: You talk quite a bit about the mountains and Eastern Washington, have you done any fishing on the sound with Steve Raymond or those fellows that…?
FW: I went out with a colleague that, actually, I brought in as a member to the fly club named Scott Rosenkranz; he lives up on Whidbey Island. We went out to the South Whidbey State Park out there and fished for silvers in September about three years ago. That was great, you know, it was lovely weather, and you could see the fish rolling just off of the kelp out there. He had these small streamer flies and he put a hole in a teeny cork and runs a leader through it and then ties on the fly. The cork makes it (a) stay on the surface, and (b) as you snake it along, it blips it like you might want to blip a large mouth bass lure, and the silvers see it. I think I caught four or five silvers, one of which was over 16 inches, which I think was retainable, but the rest of them were 12 or 14.
DB: Oh, feeders, okay, but that’s still fun.
FW: Oh yes, yes. And you know, going somewhere with either some advanced knowledge or somebody present who knows what they’re doing is just great and I’m sure I’ve done the same thing with others with regard to high lakes and small creeks and stuff like that. And just to share this, and it’s interesting to look at my fishing career and my bird watching career, back to what we were talking about, and I really am so happy to catch three fish and not have any of them to mount on the wall or something like that in the same way I look at a bird and say “look at the light on that, that’s one of the best views I’ve seen of a robin” and I’m not after the really rare ones. I subscribe to Tweeters on email, which tells me where all of the rare birds are being seen and sometimes we’ll join some friends and go up to see that rare duck up on the Skagit, and things of that sort. But that’s not a major part of my focus, so I think reaching out, taking advantage of where we are and what we can see is so neat, so that relates to the fishing also.
End of Side One, Tape One
DB: I’ve got a picture of an award you got from Al Pratt many years ago. Tell us a bit about Al Pratt and his Goofus Awards and how come you got one and maybe others that you remember.
FW: Not only remember, but I will show them to you. Coming out of one of the high lake trips that I took with Pete Baird and other club members, as I came out the trail, I ran into some junk along the trail, trash that people had tossed. I picked up a chunk of rope and some other stuff and came out [with it]. That Christmas party after that, I got a special award which (I’ll show it to you), was a large garbage can. Al presented me with that and the award for falling out of the canoe and another award for when my first wife and I visited my daughter who was working in Nepal. When I came back I gave a fishing report which had no strain of truth in it because I didn’t fish over there, but I talked about some strange fish, and so I got another award for that, I’ll show you some of these things that you accumulate through the decades.
DB: So tell us a little bit about Al Pratt and his job and how these things all kind of fit in with his personality if you could.
FW: It’s a great sense of humor and then his ability to create all of these things (awards) tied to his sense of humor. But also to his ability for mechanical construction, if you will, and some of the pictures in there show some of the humongous things that he put together with regard to awards and other stuff like that. He was just an amazing genius.
DB: He was the David Horsey of the Sixties.
FW: He really was, yes. And you look at his books on fly fishing.
DB: Did you ever, maybe I asked, did you ever go on the “Wet Buns” outing?
FW: I’ve been to the “Wet Buns” outing, I think, twice.
I talked to my wife, my present wife; Bunny was a high school classmate of my first wife Nora. Nora died from ovarian cancer, and Bunny’s husband, who Nora and I visited up in Alaska at the logging camp, he died from prostate cancer. So Bunny and I decided, hey maybe we need to get together, so that’s for the last, now fifteen years why we’ve been married, and that’s turned out to be a very good arrangement. When we visited them up there, I fished around the logging camp there, and some of the lakes and so forth, not a great deal of success.
DB: Where was this?
FW: Outside of Ketchikan, we took a float plane north in to Neets Bay up there, that’s where the camp was.
DB: You mentioned going to Alaska, it’s quite popular, were you the type of fisherman that did these, for lack of a better word, exotic type trips, going to all these famous places?
FW: I would say no, I’m not hooked on that, but I have been up to a camp in Alaska for a week with fly club members, fishing for the salmon and stuff like that, not incredibly successful, but delightful trips and good company. Also, some similar trips with the fly club members up in B.C.
DB: With Gil Nyerges; we interviewed Gil and I got him to tell us about finding that lake and going there. I got him to go back before your time of living here, of making the drive up the Fraser Canyon when the roads were built out over the river. We got two people to tell us that story. The first time I ever went, it was pretty rough but that was in the Fifties, but going back before that it was really rugged. He said it took a day from Seattle to Ashcroft and then another day to wherever they were going. It was a long, hard day to get to Ashcroft, now we drive clear to, I don’t know Williams Lake or wherever, that’s what seems like a fairly big drive. And that’s where you go to this lake. What’s the name of the lake?
FW: Eliguk.
DB: Yes, yes.
FW: And we’ve been in there couple times.
DB: Let’s see, I was going to ask you, I wanted to go back and talk to you a little more about your fishing in the streams, because we find in Western Washington, not many fly fishers really do the small stream fishing, and so…
FW: That’s true. And it may be because of the availability of salmon, steelhead, large trout in some of the lakes, and the small streams don’t have a lot of large fish, and if you’re looking for that, why that might pull you away from the small stream fishing. But catch and release has always been pretty much a part of my life since I started fishing in the Pocono’s and went after the small trout that were there, and then occasionally larger trout.
DB: Yes. Did you ever try the Olympic Peninsula?
FW: Oh, you bet.
DB: Upper Elwha and that?
FW: Yes, and taking the kids up the Soleduck River into the Seven Lakes Basin and went in up the Quilcene Rivert to Charlia Lakes where they had Atlantic salmon, and that was in one of these fly club high lakes trips, and that was interesting. Used to regularly go on those high lake trips, but now that I’m getting older and a little more decrepit, I haven’t pushed myself so hard.
DB: I think we all can understand that. I was hoping that maybe in the Fifties or Sixties you went on some of these trips and had gone in to the upper reaches of the Skagit or the Nooksack drainage, but it sounds like you haven’t done that.
FW: Don’t know; I’d have to go back to the maps.
DB: Oh, I see.
FW: I’ve been to so many places around here and I forget the names and then the name pops up somewhere in something I’m reading or some discussion I’m having with somebody, and I say, gee, I’ve been there, but I don’t know where that lake is, and I’d have to go back and check. I have this two volume set of the Lakes of Washington, east side and west side, and boy, those are two comprehensive volumes where they’ve named all the high lakes and things like that, and I can remember now, as I look at the aerial photographs or something, what that trip was like.
DB: Did you ever go on the Chopaka trip?
FW: Yes.
DB: Do you like that place to fish?
FW: Yes, that is a very interesting part of the territory.
DB: Is there anything else you’d like to add about combining the fishing and the bird watching, are you involved at all in the organization of bird watching?
FW: Yes, I volunteer to run trips for the Seattle Audubon Society, and I was just looking in their notation and my next trip is just a local one out on to the area behind the Center for Urban Horticulture over here, where we take new birders or young birders out for three hours on a Saturday morning and just walk around there. I’m going out there on the 9th of February with the next team. I also have run trips down to the Nisqually National Wildlife area which is just marvelous for a whole bunch of different environments and not knowing, on a day like today, what sort of things you’d run into. We went down there one day, which was not too dissimilar to today, and they let us into the conference room which had a big sign over it saying “no food”, but we could take our lunch in there and look out the window and see what was [paddling] around on the lake in front of it and so forth. Also, I’ve run trips up to the Sequim area and out to the Three Crabs Restaurant where you’re looking out over the salt flats with eagles. I’ve been fairly busy with Seattle Audubon along those lines, so working both with the fly club and the Seattle Audubon, why, it’s gotten me tied to the…
DB: They had an article in the Getaways the other day with the peregrines on the bridges in West Seattle.
FW: Right, yeah. And there’s another trip coming up with the peregrine expert from Seattle, looking for them in the Green Lake area.
DB: Did you say if you knew Bruce Ferguson?
FW: I can’t remember, I think I have met him, several times.
DB: You probably read his books. He is kind of focused on the raptors.
FW: The raptors, yes.
DB: And he goes up to Skagit County every year so he can find those hawks and falcons and whatever else is up there that only come in for part of the year.
FW: They have the Rough-legged Hawks.
DB: That’s not far from where I live.
FW: Oh it’s not, you’re right!
DB: Yes, it’s just across the flats there, I live in Anacortes.
FW: In Anacortes, okay.
DB: Well, out on the edge of Anacortes. So you mentioned your Red-tail over here, we have Red-tail in our yard everyday.
FW: Yes, if we had them every day, then I would really suspect that that was what that was, but whether that would be a crow’s nest up there where we do have crows pretty much everyday, they don’t make as much fuss during the summer…
DB: Oh, that sounds more like it.
FW: …that would be a possibility. But we see Red-tails and eagles over here, flying over along the lake here on a regular basis. That’s another one of the advantages of living here.
DB: You mentioned that the salmon and the steelhead and the trout in the lakes, and so forth, it kind of pulls people to that type of fishing, did you ever get involved with the steelhead or any of those?
FW: I fished for steelhead years ago. At the medical school, we had a group called the “Steelhead Trout and Bloody Mary Society,” and a couple to four of us would go out, a couple of times a winter, up to the Skagit with a guide and float down. This was not fly fishing. I hooked a steelhead on a fly up in Canada, but I didn’t land it, and all of this Skagit steelhead fishing was with wing-bobbers and regular casting reel and so forth, so I haven’t spent any significant time fly fishing for steelhead.
DB: I’m going to change gears completely. You’re a friend of Skip Hosfield’s, tell us about, and I’m sure you went, the opening conclave in Eugene, Oregon, in I think it was, 1965. I suspect that you went because Skip asked you to. He was very much involved in getting that started and he was one of three that were the key people that got the whole thing going.
FW: Yes, I think he wanted me to go down there, and both of my wives were from that area, just north of Eugene, and so it would be a question of going down and spending some time with my first wife’s mother and things of that sort. So that was a combination of things just working beautifully to get involved in that sort of thing, I did not actively participate except listen and talk with people and met with some of the various special attendees that were there.
TB: But did you realize, though, or were you at all surprised that it did give birth to the Federation of Fly Fishers that became this national organization that is still around today?
FW: If somebody had said that this organization would be around for half a century and gain in power, I would have said, gee, I don’t know; I wouldn’t have put any money on it at that time. But I am just delighted that it worked out that way and you could see it, the Federation, picking up momentum on fly fishing just as fly fishing was picking up momentum across the country, and interested more and more people. I am just delighted that that was part of it. The video tape that Skip sent me was the one of that first meeting with the various speakers and one shot shows the back of my head sitting in the audience on one of those swinging tape views, but that was all that I was participating in. Yes, that was great and greater in retrospect.
DB: It’s interesting that those three people, Rogowski, Wood, and Hosfield, all were together back in the Maine area back about twenty years before that. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how Ted became involved with Lee Wulff, you must know that story, if you know him that well.
FW: Absolutely; he got involved with Lee Wulff while he was in law school. Lee invited him to go up to New Brunswick where Lee was fishing for sea-run brook trout, Atlantic salmon and other things up there, and Ted was the photographer for him, taking the moving pictures that he now has. I’ve been trying to get Ted and Joan to come out here and put on another show. The last one that they put on out here, of those films, I was eclipsed, I think I was off at a medical meeting somewhere that I couldn’t get out of, so I did not see that one, but I would love to see some of the pictures that he took up there. He was therefore related to Lee, I think even before Lee’s first marriage, and then following along with Joan, and then after Lee died, why, Ted and Joan got together and that’s worked out very nicely. Ted’s son is still down in Olympia, so Ted came out here for a visit a year-and-a half ago, I think.
DB: I saw Ted about three years ago in West Yellowstone. Joan is still doing teaching; she is still involved with the fly fishing.
FW: She’s tapering, but yes she is, and she’s just an amazing involvement with the Winston Rod Company, and other elements, and she is an incredible teacher also.
DB: Yes she was quite an athlete, actually.
FW: Absolutely, yes.
DB: Tamara, I’ve pretty well covered everything; Fran, maybe [you have] some things that come to mind, just from your own view point or perspective, that you’d like to tell about fly fishing. You’ve given us some insight into how you feel about it and how it’s affected your life and so forth, but maybe there’s some other angles you’d like to elaborate on.
FW: I would say, the most important thing that bird watching and fly fishing have done is just pulled me to the environment, and as a result of some of this, why, I was on the board for this organization that was based in Seattle, called the Center for Environmental Law and Policy (CELP). I worked on the business of how one can do things such as monitoring the use of wells over in Central Washington that are pulling water out of the aquifer, and thereby cutting the stream flows and things of that sort. Also taking a look at some of these ideas for pumping water into very expensive new lakes over there; one option they want to do is put a big lake in that will drown out Lenice and Nunnally Lakes just to save the water and then run it off a little later when the agriculture needs it, or something like that. This has been important recently; the effort for the central area for CELP has shifted from Seattle to Spokane, where the original executive director lives. She’s picked up that role again and we’re seeing what can be worked out. So I think environment is one of my major things.
That’s why I like this lot next to us, even though there are a few trees blown down there.
We had a work party on the park, just two doors down south of our house, this past Saturday, and got a lot of mulch spread around and things of that sort. That’s another example that may be why I haven’t done much fly fishing in the past year because I get involved in the Audubon Society trips and the park and things like that.
But I would say that’s the key to it all. I look at my trips up into the high country, and understanding what, oh, the shoulder of Mount Adams looks like and things of that sort. When we sat down with maps and trail descriptions and things like that with the kids, why, we had all kinds of places to go, and now, our kids, my two daughters (one’s living across on Bainbridge Island, just south of the ferry harbor there, and the other one is in Port Townsend), and they’re taking their kids out and going to high lakes. And I think, you know, boy, if I was going to transfer something to the kids at this young age, why that would be, it’s just great.
DB: Okay.
TB: Actually I have a question, because you were on that committee that looked at membership for the Washington Fly Fishing Club?
FW: Yes, I’ve been on a bunch, probably half a dozen of the committees that looked at the selection of officers for the coming year (nominating committee). I’ve been offered that recently and turned it down because I don’t know the younger members of the club that well, I know the old duffers, but they shouldn’t be running the club. But the other thing, I now attend the conservation committee meetings, which are almost monthly. A fellow that I brought into the fly club, Doug Schaad, is one of the co-chairman of it. They’re looking at stuff from Olympia regarding state laws and which ones should the fly club swing in behind, and which should they oppose, and stuff like that, so that’s been an activity. I was on another committee that I was just reading about there, that I have forgotten about, I can’t remember exactly what that was.
TB: Well, there’s one that I think that you were on, that you looked at the membership about whether to keep it open or to close it and you put a lid on it.
FW: That’s right, that’s what I was reading about, and decided that we would bring in two new members if our membership number was below, something like 215.
TB: 215. Yes.
FW: And then from 215 to 230, we would bring in one member a month until it got to 230, or whatever the top number was, and then we’d cut it off at that time. I can’t remember what the discussions were at that time, but it seemed to me, we wanted to not bring in a whole lot of members that then would not participate or something of that sort, and we didn’t want to trample out our meeting places, which have moved around and are about to move once again. This Christmas party at the College Club is going to be the last one there and we’re moving down to the Tennis Club down along the Lake Washington shore here, shortly after that. That’s going to be a little easier to get to, but that’s all right.
TB: Okay, and did you know Bill Redmond back on the East Coast too?
FW: Yes, Bill also was a counselor at Camp Allagash in 1951, so Bill Redmond, Ted Rogowski and Skip, were three people that rotated through Camp Allagash while I was there, and to have the three of them out here and as active movers and shakers in the fly fishing world has just been an amazing part of my life.
DB: Well, I’ll have to call Skip this weekend about that.
FW: Yes, you do that. Tell him you heard some improbable stories about him and wondered if he wanted to make any comments.
DB: You know he was the vice president the years I was president of the Federation.
FW: Oh, is that right?
DB: Oh yes, he was the spark plug; he raised our membership by 50% in three or four years. As he said, it was a kitchen table operation. He was good.
FW: Well, let me wander you upstairs, and I’ll show you a couple of things.
TB: Okay so we’re done here?
FW: I think so.
TB: All right.