Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/641958
Bait he first time I saw the Presti brothers, they were sprinkling coffee grounds across the front lawn of the little GI Bill house my family had just moved into, one block inland from the Niagara River. It was 1953, and the youngest Presti, Cosmo, and I would start kindergarten together at Pacific Avenue Elementary in a few days. Neither 5-year-old Cosmo nor I had yet contracted the uncontrollable obsession with catching fish that still plagues me today. But his older brothers, already afflicted with that madness, had been harvesting nightcrawlers from that front lawn for a couple years. What the Presti brothers knew, and what I learned eventually, was that with a level-wind bait-casting rig, a half-ounce bell sinker, a package of snelled hooks, and an empty coffee can full of fresh-picked worms, a boy could catch almost everything that swam in the Niagara. Cosmo and I came down with the fever soon enough. And since the only treatment (and not much of a cure) for the fishing disease is fishing itself, we picked worms most summer nights for the next ten years. I t's probably safe to say that the common earthworm—our "nightcrawlers" being the fattest, thickest, and longest North American member of the Annelida family—is the "gateway" substance that ushers most young boys into the addiction we call angling. Like millions of young anglers before us, Cosmo and I caught our first fish—stoneroller chubs—on half a worm. All summer long throughout our grade school years, our lawns looked like rice paddies as we let the garden hose run and run until our parents yelled at us. Evenings, after the last hide-and- seek games fizzled out and the faint blue glow of TV game shows or Bonanza emanated from living room windows, we crept on hands and knees across the soggy grass, flashlight beams dancing before us as we tugged stretchy nightcrawlers from their holes. We suffered wet knees, mosquito bites, fingers punctured by thorny red barberry clippings, and less painful but far worse, surprise handfuls of undetected dog droppings. But we got bait. Neither Cosmo's father nor mine fished, and so our angling was limited to places along the river we could reach on foot or bicycle. That meant behind the cement docks, behind the water plant, behind Hooker Chemical Co. This was nearly two decades before the Clean Water Act; the city of Niagara Falls is downstream from the steel mills of Buffalo, the automakers of Detroit, and the stockyards of Chicago. Most days, if we caught anything, we caught chubs, carp, a stunted white bass or two. A good day was one with a rock bass in it, and we went fishless altogether on many. If angling was a team sport, our mascot would have been a skunk. For much of the 1950s, gathering bait was almost always more satisfying than fishing with it. Then, the summer after fifth grade, a small, two-bedroom home, a lot like mine, sprang up on the vacant lot next door. At first I mourned the loss of my secret hiding places in the sticky milkweeds, the garter snakes and toads I often caught there, the snow forts and clubhouses made of scrounged building supplies my pals and I would no longer be constructing. But when a boy my own age, Danny Humic, moved into the new house, everything changed for me. Danny's father, a serious fisherman, owned a boat. A boat! I wouldn't have been more excited if a troupe of female nudists had set up camp there. This came at an opportune time. Cosmo Presti, my staunch fishing pal, was impossibly handsome, and by this time not only had he discovered girls, they'd discovered him. To my great disappointment, Cosmo combed his hair back into a ducktail, set his fishing rod aside, and began practicing the Twist. Far too shy to dance with (or even talk to) girls, I found myself in need of a new best friend. Enter Danny Humic. Danny was an only child, and Mr. Humic was happy to bring me along on their fishing trips. The Humic's boat—a ten-foot Grumman aluminum skiff with a 7½-horsepower Mercury motor—fit on top of their Ford Fairlane station wagon. For the next five years or so, we took it out almost every summer weekend, fishing the upper Niagara from the steel mills in Lackawanna downstream to the treacherous Navy Island drifts just a couple short miles above the deadly falls. When we really felt adventurous, we car- topped the boat up into Ontario, north of Toronto, where we camped and fished Georgian Bay, Lake Simcoe, and the Kawartha Lakes. My bait-fishing horizons expanded. Winters, we jigged through thick Lake Erie ice for perch and smelt, impaling the larvae from goldenrod galls on bright chrome hooks. Right after ice-out in the spring, we fished small shiner minnows for fat bullheads in Jordan Harbor off Lake Ontario. Summers on the Niagara we drifted for black bass with chubs, carefully threaded through the lips, learning to resist the urge to set the hook on the first bite, instead opening the bails on our new Garcia Mitchell 300 spinning reels and feeding out line until the smallmouths had turned the bait in their mouths. We caught grasshoppers and crickets and fished them on fine wire hooks for wild brook trout in small, clear streams up on the Bruce Peninsula. We fished for monster spring-run rainbows in S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 8 4 Anglers, once upon a time, used everything from nightcrawlers and maggots to frogs and even ducklings— impaled on a hook, alive and wiggling. By Richard Chiappone T Here's tHe Worm by HAROLD ANDERSON – imAgE cOuRtESy HERitAgE AuctiONS, HA.cOm