>BORN in Deadwood, SD, 75+ years ago;

>FLYFISHED Black Hills streams and some points east but usually west for 60+ years;

>MARRIED 50+ years--one wife, two sons--so it appears to be working out;

>RETIRED (completely worked out) after 37 years of college teaching;

>CONVINCED fishing bamboo fly rods and storytelling are two of the four essential things one does in order to remain human (most having their own private ideas about the other two).

>Ernest Hemingway's Foreword to A Fly Fisher's Life by Charles Ritz

Charles Ritz is one of the very finest fishermen I know. He is not only
a great fly fisherman for trout and salmon but he is an articulate writer
and a splendid technician.

He is also an iconoclast who never hesitates to destroy an idol in order
to deal only with true and important facts.

Because he is a charming companion he does not bore a non-technical
reader with his knowledge. But it is there like a mine of true information
for anyone with the desire and the intelligence to work it.

Fishing with Charles Ritz you come to know the streams of Normandy
and Austria and the salmon rivers of the North.

As the world is run now few people can fish as far as Monsieur Charles
fishes. No matter how it is run even fewer people could ever fish as well.

>Arnold Gingrich in The Fishing in Print on Vincent Marinaro, A.J. McClane,
and John McDonald

"Three of the elect. When the saints go marching in--that is, when
the roll is called of the angling immortals of our time--these three
will be of their number. . . . No fisherman above the literacy level
of our sport can possibly be unaware of Marinaro's Modern Dry Fly
Code, McClane's Standard Fishing Encyclopedia or McDonald's
The Complete Fly Fisherman: The Notes and Letters of Theodore
Gordon. We need pause here no longer than it takes to genuflect."


>John Gierach's last two paragraphs in Fishing Bamboo

On the other hand, I have heard of fishermen gluing lead shot in the
frames of their reels to add weight for balance. That seems a little
extreme to me (although it's not the weirdest thing I've ever heard of
fishermen doing), but why not if they think it matters and it makes
them happy?

I mean, that's why some of us use bamboo fly rods and, as far as that
goes, why we fish at all: because we think it matters and it makes us
happy.