Fly Fishing Treasures: The Worldof Fly Fishers and Collecting
By Steve Woit. Published by Steve Woit—Fly Fishing Treasures, 2018; available at https://flyfishingtreasures.com, $80.00 hardbound, $175 limited edition.
Fly Fishing Treasures consists of a series of profiles of collectors of fly-fishing gear and memorabilia and their collections, but it is the collections, not the collectors, that are the real focus of the book, which is profusely illustrated with gorgeous photographs of flies, rods, reels, books and manuscripts, and old photos and marketing materials. The collectors profiled here have assembled what amount to object catalogues of the history of fly fishing in the United States and Great Britain — things that remain as traces of a world gone by, but a world that nevertheless has direct links to our own. That is what makes the book a valuable addition to contemporary angling literature. Because these objects exist in private collections or the collections of manufacturers and museums, the photographs around which the book revolves provide access to things no ordinary angler is ever likely to be able to see.
That includes such things as the Harmood-Banner Collection of 528 classic British salmon flies, presented in the section on the colorful and ever-controversial Paul Schmookler; Izaak Walton’s own creel, in the section on David Beazley, librarian of the Flyfisher’s Club in London; a rod belonging to Thaddeus Norris, author of The American Angler’s Book (1864), in an account of fly-rod history; and a devotional book, the Haslinger Breviary, dated to 1460 (almost four decades before Dame Juliana Berners’s Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle was published), in which an Austrian clergyman, Leonardus Haslinger, recorded 21 fly patterns and their variations, arranged by month, anticipating by five centuries Norman Maclean’s declaration in A River Runs Through It that there is “no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” The breviary appears in a section on Ray Clemens, curator for early books and manuscripts at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which holds the volume.
The photography and reproduction are first-rate, but what I think really recommends the book is the text that accompanies the photographs. Because the items in these collections are artifacts that embody the history of fly fishing in the United States and Great Britain, the discussions of them supply quick, focused histories of the sport, grounded in references to things that bring that past back to life.
There is a brief history of the American fly rod here, along with Jeff Hatton’s traveling display of early American rods, and a history of the fly reel and its evolution, as reflected in the collections of private collectors and manufacturers Hardy, Farlows, and Orvis. Connections to the history of fly tying abound, seen, for example, in John Shaner’s collection of books and manuscripts on the North Country Spider and other wet flies, as well as in the many collections of Atlantic salmon flies. And there are elements of the history of women in fly fishing in Moirajeanne Fitzgerald’s collection of documents and images, in a profile of the noted salmon fly tyer Megan Boyd, and in depictions of anglers and angling that fascinate some collectors.
These latter materials are what collectors call “ephemera” — a broad category of things not usually seen as important and that usually are just thrown away or forgotten, including advertisements, business cards, patent drawings, and the streamside gadgets of another age. But in effect, all these collections, including those of rods, reels, and flies, are archives of ephemera.
Such traces of the past are collectible because they are rare. Sometimes such things have become scarce as a consequence of willful destruction — mind-bogglingly, in 1967, when Hardy moved to a new factory, it threw away its “pattern reels” and attendant paperwork, the models on which craftsmen previously had based their hand-assembled products. Other things have been trashed in the disinterest in the past that seems a special facet of American culture. That’s why there was a time when someone could be selling an “old fishing pole” at a garage sale, and for a few bucks, a buyer would walk away with a Garrison 206 now worth thousands of dollars.
Today, whatever someone collects, the chances are that someone else collects it, too. That means there is a community of collectors who share their passion and knowledge, and there is also competition for the most desirable objects. That, in turn, means that there is a market for such things and opportunities for a collection to acquire monetary value and to appreciate — to be an investment. Realizing this, some of the collectors profiled here became dealers and traders in things associated with the history of fly fishing, from rods, reels, and flies to books and ephemera. Hence, Fly Fishing Treasures also covers the rise of marketplaces such as Lang’s Auction, dealers such as Berkeley’s Jim Adams, and ORCA — the Old Reel Collectors Association.
It also includes advice to collectors and would-be collectors about the pitfalls of collecting, where there is a difference in the roles played by love and money — the difference between accumulating what to others may seem like weird stuff just because possessing it pleases you and cold-bloodedly buying something because you expect it to be worth more later. Reel historian and librarian Jim Brown advises that “it is probably wise for the majority of collectors to combine investment and pleasure perspectives in their collecting. At some point you are going to cash out. If you have collected well, you should make a good profit. If you have collected too carelessly, you may have trouble selling your collection or may take a loss.” There are boomers of my generation who collect muscle cars from the 1960s and 1970s. Those Chevy Novas and Shelby Mustangs may simply have been someone’s heart’s desire back in high school, but they’re also worth a bundle today and seem likely to be worth more in the future.
As a series of profiles, this is a book best savored in small bites, which is a good thing, because it’s in effect a coffee-table book, in a large format on excellent glossy, heavy paper and registering 5.2 pounds on my digital bathroom scale. It is not something with which you can curl up comfortably in bed, but at a table holding an appropriate beverage (it need not be coffee), it’s something worth sitting down to read, instead of just flipping through the pictures, stunning though they may be. Chances are you’ll never get your hands on anything like what’s made accessible here, even if you’re a collector yourself, but if you are the sort of person who likes to come to the past by means of its objective traces in the present, you’ll enjoy Fly Fishing Treasures a lot.
— Bud Bynack
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
Those Were the Days
By Edward Ringwood Hewitt. Published by Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943.
Edward Ringwood Hewitt was an American industrialist who gave up control of boardrooms and corporate directorships to become a Catskills “riverkeeper.” No tycoon held the angling world in thrall for so long. He was Daddy Warbucks with a fly rod and the era’s foremost authority on trout stream maintenance.
If in hindsight we see his hatcheries and stocking programs as misguided and laugh at his bumptiousness, we can also recognize a true dynamo at work and marvel at the sheer zest he brought to his enterprises. No one was more gung-ho for fly fishing than Hewitt, even if he had a tendency to command his troops as if mounting an imperialist expedition.
“He was very positive in all his pronouncements,” said Arnold Gingrich, founder of Esquire, “and he tended to make a pronouncement of almost everything he said.” Legendary fishing writer Sparse Grey Hackle said Hewitt “had a gift for the unqualified statement” and “could make the truth sound like a lie.” That not only raised his profile, the angling scribe said, but made for better reading. Sparse Grey Hackle was the pen name of Alfred W. Miller, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who knew how to talk to men like Hewitt.
Edward Ringwood Hewitt (1866– 1957) came from old money. He was literally born to the manor — Ringwood Manor, which his middle name commemorates, a summer residence on six hundred acres of once sylvan countryside in Passaic County, New Jersey. Hewitt was brought up in a mansion in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan, in a household headed by his maternal grandfather, Peter Cooper, who designed and built America’s first steam locomotive and whose company helped lay the first transatlantic cable. Peter Cooper also established the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in Manhattan. Edward’s father, Abram Stevens Hewitt, Peter Cooper’s son-in-law and business associate, made a fortune in iron and steel manufacturing and got elected mayor of New York after helping the Democrats smash the Tweed Ring to take back Tammany Hall. Hewitt’s older brother, Peter Cooper Hewitt, invented the world’s first mercury vapor lamp — known as the Cooper Hewitt Lamp — and the mercury vapor transformer. Edward Hewitt grew up to be something of an inventor himself, although his major claim to fame as a patent holder was to design the original feltsole wading shoe. Fishing had been his passion since boyhood.
Action was thick on the ground in the Gramercy Park household when he was growing up. Edward and his brother “Cooper” got into more trouble than the brat in the Buster Brown comics. Police were regularly summoned to the house over their vandalism sprees and pranks with firecrackers. In his memoir Those Were the Days (1943), Hewitt recalls Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison dropping by the mansion to show his grandfather their new telephone and phonograph, as if that kind of thing happened every day. Whenever the famous Norwegian violin virtuoso Ole Bull toured New York, he would stop at the house to serenade the children. When Red Cloud, chief of the Lakota Sioux, came east to visit President Ulysses S. Grant for a treaty discussion at the White House, the famed Indian leader stopped in Manhattan to deliver a speech at Cooper Union and attend a reception at the Gramercy Park mansion dressed in full Indian regalia. Red Cloud later sent the family a gift of a rare buffalo robe with the history of the Sioux nation painted on its hide. After his graduation from Princeton, Hewitt took a postgraduate degree in chemistry at the University of Berlin. In his many youthful European travels, he indulged himself by fishing the finest trout and salmon rivers on the continent and in the British Isles. His first job was with Hiram Maxim in England, developing a steam-powered aircraft that didn’t quite lift off, as well as a one-cylinder car that he arranged to have marketed by the Adams Hewitt Company in New York. He also designed a truck engine for Mack Trucks and remained a lifelong design consultant for that company.
Hewitt eventually returned stateside to join the family firm and take a bride. His wife, Mary Ashley, whom he met in Europe, was the daughter of James Ashley, a Kentucky congressman later appointed as first territorial governor of Montana. Hewitt’s father-in-law had been a passionate abolitionist who personally transported the body of John Brown for burial after his execution following the raid at Harper’s Ferry. Ashley later led the impeachment proceedings in Congress against President Andrew Johnson. But more to the point, he put his son-in-law into some very good trout fishing in Montana.
At work for the family enterprises, Hewitt oversaw chemical experiments at his grandfather’s glue factory in Brooklyn. He had a knack for invention and problem solving, and his interests ranged far and wide in the world of scientific inquiry. Hewitt took a deep interest in agricultural problems and soil enhancement and experimented with ways to increase the vitamin content of hay.
He was also an inveterate tinkerer who took out dozens of original patents. These included one on a machine to produce strings for musical instruments (he left his collection of rare instruments to Harvard), a “silent” shotgun cartridge, a soap to keep hands warm in cold water, a lubricant for fly lines, an opaque fishing leader, an insect repellent that did double duty as a leader lubricant, and a fishing reel that would come apart handily with the removal of a single screw. Early on, it seems, fishing was a major preoccupation with him. None of these inventions ever quite matched the breakthrough discoveries of his brother Cooper, even if fly fishers regard that wading shoe as the most important invention since Eli Whitney’s cotton gin.
Things changed when Hewitt came into his inheritance. By Gilded Age standards, it was only a modest fortune, because it was the tradition in the Cooper-Hewitt dynasty to direct much of its vast wealth into philanthropy and civic-minded projects. With the inheritance and the income from his patents, though, Hewitt finally had the financial independence to focus much of his energy and wealth on stream restoration and habitat improvement projects dear to his heart. He became an evangelist for better fishing, and his goal was to build a better trout stream.
In 1918, Hewitt purchased 2,700 acres of land in the Catskill Mountains that included four miles of riverfront on the Neversink River. He considered this to be the finest trout stream in the Catskills, as had his late friend, Theodore Gordon, the consumptive hermit and former saint-in-residence there. Hewitt’s idea was to turn this patch of heaven into a trout laboratory.
Hewitt tapped into a spring on a hillside behind his fishing camp, known as the Big Bend Club, and ran a sluiceway down into hatching troughs and rearing ponds that he screened to keep out predators. He also piped water from the same spring to the club’s back porch and fed it through pipe coils into an antique icebox used to cool the day’s catch and keep fresh the breast meat of blue herons that Hewitt killed for raiding his ponds once too often. Before dining on them, he would hang the carcasses for days in the manner of English grouse hunters.
Hewitt planted tens of thousands of hatchery fingerlings in the Neversink. Hoping to improve their diet, he imported mayfly larvae from England. He installed deflectors to alter currents, dug holes in the river to protect trout from anchor ice, and built wooden plank dams to increase the holding capacity of his trout pools. (Time and the river flowing have since washed away those planks, probably for the best.) Hewitt was keen on introducing Atlantic salmon to the Catskills, but the fertilized fish eggs he imported from Norway and Scotland didn’t take to the Borscht Belt.
Naturally, Hewitt was a wizard at fly tying and designing his own famous patterns, such as the Brown Bivisible and the Neversink Skater. He was a highly regarded tyer and theorist, but employed others to make production copies for his fishing and to give away to friends. Some tyers were rumored to hide when he paid neighborly visits to area tackle shops, because he was considered to be something of a pain in the ass. He certainly enjoyed being high rod in the Catskills. His best fishing buddy was the Wall Street stockbroker George M. L. LaBranche, a dry-fly advocate who, like Hewitt, gained fame by committing his theories to books. It was an age when gentlemen wore coats and neckties while fishing, and there were few if any creel limits. Hewitt was said to have killed 53 salmon in a single day on the Upsalquitch River in New Brunswick, but he warmed to the idea of limited catch and release.
Like many investors, Hewitt’s finances were pretty much wiped out in the market crash of 1929. We can thank the Great Depression for much of the public trout fishing in the Catskills. Rich property owners were forced to sell their private holdings to the State of New York just to keep their heads above water. Not Hewitt, who used his Neversink property to generate new sources of income that would somewhat make up for his losses after the income from his patents dried up. One solution was to rent fishing rights to about thirty anglers at $120 per year — this group became known as the Neversink Rods. Hewitt would drive them to their beats in an antique high-sprung sedan, taking the turns at whiplash speeds. He even pressed his rod holders into service for his ongoing stream experiments, making sure that the biggest fish got released, even if this meant wading in with a net and releasing them himself before anyone could object. Later, in old age and with the onset of wartime gas rationing, Hewitt downsized the Neversink Rods to a private fishing club for half a dozen or so cronies. He even managed to hang on after the state condemned two-thirds of his river frontage for a reservoir. He seemed excited by the prospect that the reservoir might be suitable for stocked salmon. Nothing seemed to dampen his high spirits.
“I expect I know more about trout than anyone else in the country,” he once said, with his usual modesty. And he let the English-speaking world know it by writing Secrets of the Salmon (1922),Telling on the Trout (1926), Better Trout Streams (1931), Hewitt’s Handbook of Fly Fishing (1933), Hewitt’s Handbook of Stream Improvement (1934), Nymph Fly Fishing (1934), Hewitt’s Handbook of Trout Raising and Stocking (1935), and A Trout and Salmon Fisherman for Seventy-Five Years (1948).
By means of his high profile and constant proselytizing, Hewitt set the standard for public trout management on rivers and streams throughout America in the first half of the last century, for better or worse. We can understand the logic behind this. After all, it was an era of put-and-take fisheries and the bottomless creel. But today, with better stream conservation, we have soured somewhat on trout hatcheries and artificial stocking. We have come to realize that we can’t make a better river than what nature has already put out there for us and that the best hatchery is a healthy wild river.
Hewitt’s most enduring legacy might be in showing us an effervescent way to live fully engaged, even if most of us lack the capital to run with it as far as he did. As a businessman, Hewitt was scrupulously honest. As a sportsman and inventor, he brimmed with energy. And not even the Great Depression could make him lose his sense of humor. Shortly before his death at age 90, Hewitt told an interviewer that he had arranged to have his ashes spread over the waters of the Neversink. “That way,” he said, “it will give the trout a chance to get even.”
