What You Don't Know (about people)

Almost every Thursday Gary and I exercise recovering raptors as part of an eight person flight crew. It involves two team members grabbing a specified bird from their flight pen, attaching them to jesses (leather strips that attach a recovery line to their legs), taking them out to a field and letting them fly while evaluating their rehabilitation progression. Gary, who is in his early 70's, has been at this for some twenty years, me for just three. His calm demeanor and long experience in handing these birds has taught me much as a neophyte.

Most of our time together, walking the ten minutes to and from the field, is spent sharing small talk. Gary is often hiking in some national park or forest, and occasionally takes an exotic bird watching trip overseas, combining that with usual tourist activities.  We talk about those travels, or about the next trip he's planning as we trek out and back from the exercise area. As a former Anderson Windows employee, his life seems an ideal retirement story.

Then one day I happened upon a copy of Midwest Outdoor magazine. To my surprise, Gary's picture was on the cover, under the title, "The Most Influential Angler You Never Heard Of."

"What the heck," I asked, "you fish - I mean, big time?"

"Used to. I still love to fish, but don't do it as much as back then."

What I didn't know about Gary was that he was at one time a nationally recognized fishing expert, and one that introduced a whole new way of fishing. He and a friend had invented a device for trolling for walleye. It doesn't sound like much, but by adapting the trolling board concept from that used in the Great Lakes, they were able to fish for walleye during the middle of the day and in places in a lake they were thought never to be found. Prior to "planer boards", it was believed that the fish hibernated during the day, and could not be caught except in morning or evening, and then only in certain areas of the lake. Gary and his buddy found a way to fish so-called "suspended" fish, opening a whole new way of fishing to the angler community. They even turned it into a business for several years.

"Yeah, those days were tough," he explained. "I'd work at Anderson during the day, make and ship product at night, and then promote the product fishing in tournaments on the weekends. The phone was always ringing off the hook, all hours of the day or night. People from all over the country, heck, all over the world wanting to know how it worked, how you could order them, what bait to use. Drove my family nuts."

Photo's from a St. Paul Pioneer Press article June 25, 2015

"Trolling Pioneer Still Has Lessons to Teach" by Dave Orrick

I could sense he didn't miss those days. Even with the relative celebrity that came with the features on  television, the interviews, and the crowds at tournaments, he didn't regret that it was all in the past, now mostly forgotten. It's probably why it never came up in our conversations.

Once again, another example of the lack of depth some of my conversations have (see Jukebox Man). Not asking the right questions to learn of the interesting things or experiences people have in their past that give them an entirely new dimension, and that can be added to my own knowledge and experience in just a few minutes. The rest of my flight team can expect more diligence during our walk-and-talk's.