I was born and reared on a farm in West Virginia. Hunting and fishing was all I ever knew until I was about 12 years old and we moved to Barberton, Ohio.

At an early age, my experience was that the smaller the lure or bait the more fish I caught on them. I used a single piece of corn on a tiny gold trout hook to catch native trout and smaller fish from all the small streams near our farm. We were very poor and I could not afford to buy lures, but my stepfather would let me take his tackle box when I went fishing. He had several nice lures, but most were big CCBCO “Pikie Minnows” and such. I never could catch anything on them. He did, however, have a standard-size “Jitterbug” in a yellow frog and I caught an occasional bass whenever we would go to a neighbor’s pond. Fishing the streams with the big baits just scared the fish.

In later years when I lived in Ohio, I learned that catching sunfish, trout, and such on flies was the way to go. My favorite fly was a black or gold ant. At first, I did not have a fly rod so an old fisherman showed me how to work with a regular rod and reel. He gave me a wood egg-shaped bobber that was about as big as an egg! He tied it on about 6 ft. above my ant and told me to cast it down along the shore line as far as I could cast it, keeping it about 15 ft. from the shore line and slowly work it back, stopping and pausing ever so often. It worked like a charm! Soon, I was catching bluegill the size of my hand with every cast. In a matter of a few minutes, I had about 30 on my stringer. I did not want to stop and he was not doing too well, so I told him he may have every fish he took off my hook. In a little over an hour, he got so exhausted that he quit. He counted the fish and he had 155, nice bluegill. That was a day on Turkey Foot Lake that I will never forget.