The rod is long gone, and the tackle box, and all the lures, hooks and weights. *Don’t feel sorry for me, or mom, because a few years later the gentleman friend of my Aunt Pete, Ervin Wilkins took pity on a young fatherless boy and took me out fishing on his small boat, and I did catch some fish, but that’s another brief story.
I kept the Penn Peerless No. 9 reel through the years and probably never used it since that Christmas morning. I never became an avid fisherman, although I did enjoy going out with Ervin on hs boat several times, on the James River, up between Portsmouth and Norfolk, Virginia.
The reel has spent a good deal of the last 13 years on the top of my bathroom medicine cabinet and it has had the company of several of the carved wooden seamen that I bought years ago in Jacksonville, North Carolina for $1 each.
I’ve often wished that I had bought enough of these wooden figures to make a Fishing/Seaman Themed Chess Set. The old fisherman, dressed in a yellow coat & hat like the Gorton Fisherman could have been a bishop and later I thought that the Rooks could have been a seagull sitting on a dock post.
A CHRISTMAS FISHING TALE
[No fish were harmed or caught in the telling of this story.]
About 57 years ago now, when I was about 15 years old, my mother had a gentleman friend that she worked with named Rip Jackson, buy me a Fishing Tackle Kit. She worked with Mr. Jackson at the Naval Medical Field Research Lab (Bldg. 66) aboard Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base. She was a Civil Service “Clerk Typist” and I don’t know his title or job tasks.
Mr. Jackson also helped my mom get a Collie for me, that we named Lassie. This dog had been one of the canines scheduled for use in the lab experiments, so no telling what fate Lassie had been rescued from.
She gave him the money and he bought some of the following items: A Penn Peerless No. 9 reel and a rod. A copper colored tackle box. There was one distinctive fishing lure which was a pearl white plastic shrimp with at least two three pronged hooks hanging down from it. *Years later I would wonder if that lure might not chase away more fish than it would attract.
I do recall that there was a small bottle of sweet smelling oil. It was supposed to attract fish, and I believe it either had an almond or cherry scent.
She gave them to me as a Christmas present on Christmas morning. The morning was sunny, but cold and a little windy but being the loving mother that she was and a trooper, she drove me down to the Bogue Sound Fishing Pier.
The Pier was one of the many fishing piers built out into the Atlantic Ocean from which avid fishermen would come and throw their lines out over the pier railings and deep down to the Ocean below.
This morning there were only a few fishermen on the pier. One specifically was an older fisherman (probably much younger than I am now) and he was pulling in fish almost as soon as he threw out his line. I think he was originally at about where the waves start to break on shore. *Neither mom nor I were fishermen or knew anything about what we were doing. But I guess mom figured out that if we got up close to the old fisherman some of his talent or luck would rub off on us, so we sidled up to him.
Funny, but our closeness to the old fisherman didn’t cause us to catch any more fish. In fact, we didn’t catch any fish that morning, and I’m not sure I have ever caught a fish with that reel. But our closeness to the old fisherman did affect the number of fish he didn’t catch, so he moved away from us. And we moved close to him again, and he moved away again. Then we left him alone.
Fishing Reel
Bill Gibson, II 