My Mount Rushmore

The recent issue of "Fly Fisherman" magazine presented an article entitled "Our Mount Rushmore" describing four men who the author believed were the most influential fly-fishermen in history. This made me consider whose likenesses I would carve into my own local "Mt. Rushmore" of fly-fishing influence.

The first choice is easy: Ralph Haney. When I'd graduated from high school and was looking for something to replace my high-school activities, most notably basketball, I saw Ralph and his son Randy fly-fishing one evening and thought I might try it. I came up with an outfit. On my first outing, using some flies my dad had squirreled away, I caught a couple of trout. I was hooked and realized I needed to learn to tie flies. Haney took me aside, showed me what to order from Herter's (the Cabela's of its time), and then spent a couple of evenings showing me the basics. "You're on your own now," he smiled, though he continued to offer tips when I ran into him on the stream.

The second face on my "Mount Rushmore" has to be Michael "Pike" DiBartolome. Though better known as a big-trout, live-bait fisherman, DiBartolome also fished with flies during the spring hatches. Whenever I ran into him on the stream, he encouraged me to keep at it, that I would figure out how to catch fish throughout the season while using flies. Several years ago, his daughter, Nancy Strayer, my classmate, gave me his fly-tying tools and materials. Afraid of damaging the tools, I had Amber, my granddaughter, arrange them in a shadow box to display in my fly-tying room.

Next is the fishing partner of my developmental years, Bruce Houck, my brother-in-law. We learned to tie flies at the same time. We fished together regularly until after college when he moved 50 miles away and became a Spring Creek regular. Even then, we hooked up occasionally and sometimes fished with his mentor, Henry Malone, and some of Bruce's friends, including Alex Vezza, a terrific wet-fly fisherman.

The fourth face on my "Mt. Rushmore" is a collage of older fly-fishermen who were dry-fly fishing as early as Pennsylvania's famous Cumberland Valley fly-fishermen. This collage includes Ted Appleman, Raymond Hinkle, and C.A. "Brownie" Sherman. They developed their own Sulphur dry-fly imitation, the Piney Creek Special. Sam Lower, an all-around fisherman, was the first I witnessed fishing two dry flies at a time.

A couple other influential local fly-fishermen about my age, Dan Deters and Ed Gunnett, were an efficient fly-fishing team for many years.