Claret, Mustard, and Flies

I’ll be the first to admit I have some flaws as a fly fisher, but there’s only one that really bothers me. I can’t tie my own flies. I’ve tried, believe me, but it just doesn’t work. I’m too impatient and have mildly arthritic fingers, thanks to years of pounding on a keyboard. Whenever I approach a vise, the feathers take on a life of their own. It’s not a pretty picture. To cope, I follow the example of Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche depended on the kindness of strangers, while I rely on friends and a good fly shop.

I’m not alone in being ham-handed. There have been plenty of anglers like me since fly fishing began in the United States. The sport was largely confined to the East Coast before the Revolutionary War, with brook trout the leading species in streams and lakes. The Schuylkill Fishing Company, the oldest sporting club in the English-speaking world, was founded in Pennsylvania in 1732. The tackle available came by ship from England, and it was scarce. William Penn’s daughter, Margaret, once beseeched her brother in London to send her “a four joynted strong fishing Rod and Real with strong good lines.”

Flies for sale entered the picture only in 1772 at Edward Pole’s grocery store on Second Street in Philadelphia. His specialty items included wine and spirits, imported teas, raisins, currants, and mustard by the bottle or pound. He was an honest merchant whose aim was to sell the best kinds of goods “on the lowest terms.” On August 29, he placed an ad in the Pennsylvania Chronicle that offered, along with chocolate and claret, a selection of “artificial flies,” possibly the earliest written reference to them in the New World.

Soon Pole was doing more business in flies and tackle than in groceries. His ads became more inventive, too, and relied on eye-catching graphics. An ad from 1784 showed an engraved fish above a notice heralding the arrival of the good ship Commerce, under the command of Captain Bell, with an “elegant assortment of flies for either river or sea,” along with saddles, fowling pieces, and holster pistols. Pole’s business card depicted an angler netting a trout. His reputation was so impeccable that Lewis and Clark invited the company to outfit their 1803 expedition to the West.

Fly fishing was a growth industry by the late nineteenth century. Its epicenter was in the Catskills, where Theodore Gordon promoted the dry-fly fishing on the Beaverkill and Willowemoc. Dette Flies, the oldest family-run fly shop in the world, set up in Roscoe in 1928. Walt, Winnie, and daughter Mary Dette tied and sold their flies from their house. Anglers in the Midwest had discovered Wisconsin’s spring creeks, while the movie version of Hemingway’s hit novel The Sun Also Rises had the same effect as A River Runs Through It did later, although Tyrone Power was no Brad Pitt when it came to casting a fly.

For California and the West, the fur trade and later the railroad helped to spread the word. Trappers and hunters such as H. L. Leonard, the future rod maker, fished when they weren’t busy slaughtering any living creature they could lay their hands on. It’s difficult to say when or where the first fully equipped Western fly shop opened. As is the case with Irish Coffee or the Bloody Mary, there are a number of contenders, but a good guess would be the shop Dan Bailey established in Livingston, Montana, in 1938.

Bailey, born in 1904, tied his first f lies while still in short pants, casting to bass on the Kentucky farm where he grew up. He didn’t stick with farm life, attending college instead and earning a masters in physics and a job teaching at Brooklyn Poly. He pursued a doctorate in atomic science at NYU and escaped the city on weekends to fish in the Catskills, where he shared a cabin with Lee Wulff. They were partners in a fly-tying school in Greenwich Village and sold their flies from a back room at Chumley’s Bar.

If Bailey had finished his degree, he might’ve worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project, but he never turned in his thesis. His priorities changed after a honeymoon trip to Montana with his bride, Helen, in 1936. They camped and fished on the Gallatin and Madison, and Bailey never looked back. A year later, on a repeat trip, his car broke down in Livingston, where he spotted a space for rent in the Albermarle Hotel. He snapped it up for twenty bucks a month, thinking it might work as a fly shop. There weren’t any at the time, despite the wealth of trout streams.

The Baileys wound up living in a room back of the shop. They sold guns and ammo as well as tackle, and Dan peddled his flies at bars again. In the 1950s, he moved the shop to new premises on Main Street. He employed a dozen women as tyers, and visitors could watch them work. The women tied a quarter of a million or so flies per year that were sent to customers worldwide. That left Bailey free to fish. He preferred backwoods creeks over Montana’s great rivers. He valued the solitude, not the size of the trout, and became an ardent defender of the wilderness.


Among the pioneers in California, along with Ted Fay on the upper Sacramento, was Wayne “Buz” Buszek, whose shop in Visalia was a landmark for anglers in the San Joaquin Valley. Buz grew up in Lindsay, the “Olive Capital of the World,” and fished the choice streams of the southern Sierra obsessively in his teens, hiking to the high country for big, wild trout. An expert tyer, he created his most famous fly, the Western Coachman, a Royal Coachman variant, while on the Kings River in 1939. It became so popular with anglers that the Pacific Olive Company bought 2,000 as a promotion and gave one away free with every jar of olives purchased.

Buz worked as a mailman after college and rented a house in Visalia with his wife, Virginia, and his two daughters. But his friends continued to lean on him for free f lies, and he decided he ought to start charging them. He soon had so many customers that he could quit his job and set up Buz’s Fly and Tackle Shop at home. As with the Dettes, the whole family pitched in. Virginia tied leaders, Rosalie tied Woolly Worms, and Judy, only six, handled the packaging.

Eventually, Buz’s business outgrew its humble origins, taking over the breakfast nook and the screened porch. He needed the garage to produce the catalogs that alerted retailers to the range and quality of his flies, attracting such bluechip clients as Abercrombie and Fitch in New York and Norm Thompson Outfitters in Portland. The tight quarters must’ve gotten on everyone’s nerves, because Bud opened a proper shop in Visalia in 1981 and later built a new house with an office and fly-tying room for himself.

The Western Coachman never lost its popularity. Buz claimed it accounted for half of his sales. As a sort of homage, I once tried the fly on his old home stream, the upper Kings River. I bought a few at a shop in Fresno, where the clerk suggested I fish one at a dead drift in fast-moving water and at the heads of pools. I followed his advice, believing, as I often do, that the locals always know best. I’d like to report I caught several trophy rainbows, but that would be a lie. I blame myself, not the clerk or the Western Coachman. The International Federation of Fly Fishers created the Bud Buszek Fly Tying Award to honor Buz’s legendary skills. It’s a prestigious prize and has gone to such worthies as Gary Borger, Art Flick, and Dave Whitlock. Exceptional fly shops aren’t as rare anymore as they were in the days of Bailey and Buszek, of course. A website called Fly Fishing Treasures recently compiled a list of the top 25 in America. If you’re a ham-handed Californian, you’ll be cheered to learn that two, The Fly Shop in Redding and Lost Coast Outfitters in San Francisco, can be found in your own backyard.

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