Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood

The Viggle Years

32 l The Viggle Years I can’t remember the first fish I ever caught. It was probably a bluegill or perch that fell for an angleworm. But I do remember the first largemouth bass. I could take you to the same lake tomorrow, find the same little bay, and cast to the same lily pad. It was a Saturday morning in June 1951. Dad rowed a creaky rented boat across the flat calm of Hartlaub Lake, a thirty-acre pothole southwest of Manitowoc. Rosy light fanned over the horizon from the sunrise that was on its way. Dad rounded a point and let the boat drift toward a lily pad bed on the east shore. He held a forefinger to his lips and pointed to my rod, meaning that I should pick it up, very quietly. “Make an easy cast to the outside edge of the pads,” Dad whispered. “Wait for the splash rings to go away. Count to thirty. 33 Then give the plug a jerk so it’ll ‘bloop’ on the surface. Reel up the slack line. Wait for the rings to disappear. Count to thirty and bloop it again.” We drifted within a reasonable cast of the pads. I was pretty good with my trusty, solid-steel True Temper bait-casting rod and precious Pflueger Supreme reel. I swooshed the rod back and launched a ponderous, red-and-white Heddon Chugger plug toward the pads. It landed with a splat, almost on target. The rings disappeared. A puff of predawn breeze riffled the water. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Bloop! Swirl! Hit! Bolts of lightning coursed up the line, down the rod, and into my hands. “Nail him!” Dad yelled, and I leaned back to set the hook. Wow! This was no fussy little bait-stealing bluegill, but a fish with a mind of its own! Nothing Dad said during the sleepy drive from town had prepared me for a fish that actually fought back, that yanked the rod tip down into the water and pulled line off the Pflueger against the pressure of my thumb on the spool. Down, down he bored, and then shot to the surface, jumping clear of the water and shaking the hooks of the Chugger with a terrifying rattle. But in a minute or two it was over. Dad scooped up the bass with a flick of the landing net, and I was face to face with sixteen inches of mean, green largemouth. My bass was only three times as long as the big cedar plug he had tried to eat. He wasn’t Old Beelzebub, the ten-pound, bulge-bellied bass of my dreams, but as far as I was concerned he was the biggest fish in Wisconsin. Dad popped the Chugger’s massive hooks out of the bass’s mouth. He handed the fish to me. I held it fearfully by the lower jaw and felt the prickles of its teeth. “What d’you say we give him a second chance?” Dad asked. I TheViggleYears 34 TheViggleYears knew what that meant. I slipped the bass into the water and watched it flash out of sight. My first bass, come and gone in about five minutes, only a memory. Loss and gain, pride and pain swirled around in my head. I had wanted that bass, and yet I didn’t really want it dead. I glanced up at Dad. He was smiling at me, a steady smile of approval, man to man. I swallowed hard and felt the aching throat that comes before tears. But I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was eight years old and had to take the rough with the smooth. “Let’s see if we can catch a bigger one,” Dad said. And so we fished through our full battery of lures: the Chugger, a Bass-O-Reno, an Al Foss Oriental Wiggler with a pork frog on it, a Shannon Twin-Spin, a Creek Chub Pikie Minnow, a Jitterbug, a Flatfish, and a Pearl Wobbler made of genuine Ohio River clam shell. But by ten o’clock it was obvious that the bite was over. It was time to go home and mow the lawn. Dad rowed back to the little landing where a farmer rented boats. He tossed the anchor, a coffee can full of concrete, up on the grass. We unloaded our rods and...