Hide, Horn, Fish, and Fowl: Texas Hunting and Fishing Lore

FISHING FOR WHOPPERS

Henry and Linda Wolff 7978-ch05.pdf 10/6/11 8:17 AM Page 306 FISHING FOR WHOPPERS by Henry Wolff, Jr.  Whoppers come in many forms, everything from a hamburger to a big fish, but I happen to be particularly fond of the kind that are measured not by taste or size but in the telling, such as the stories that can be heard around a table on a lazy afternoon in a country tavern—or at a fish camp like the one at Indianola that the old fisherman Ed Bell operated for many years. Known in his time as one of the best tall tale tellers on the Texas Coast, one example would be a story that Bell always credited to a friend, Tex Wilson. It seems that Wilson and his wife had been fishing in some fairly deep water when their boat bogged down. “It had to be four feet of water for it not to kick up any mud,” Bell explained in telling the story. “All at once it just stalled and ol’ Tex couldn’t figure it out since there weren’t any logs or anything there to stop a boat. That was when his wife looked over the bow of the boat and said, ‘Good Lord, Tex, cut that thing off and come here and look a minute.’ He did and there was a big ol’ flounder with his back just flush with the top of the water. “They had beached on that flounder’s back.” While staring at the big fish in disbelief, Bell said they spotted yet another swimming off that was just as big. “I got curious to see just how big those flounders were, but I didn’t go through school far enough to figure it out in algebra or advanced math,” Bell would note in telling the story to an appreciative audience. “I had to get me a pencil and a tablet. The way I figured it, a flounder that’s twelve inches long, eight inches wide, will weigh about three-quarters of a pound. So I took it from there and after I had worn out two pencils and just about filled the tablet 307 7978-ch05.pdf 10/6/11 8:17 AM Page 307 with figures, I got, near as I could, to the exact weight and size of that flounder. It was 48 feet long and 32 feet wide, four feet thick, and weighed 30,000 pounds. “So, I figured it was a pretty nice flounder.” It was always interesting to hear Bell tell his stories when the weather turned bad and the fishermen would gather inside the rustic camp to swap yarns, or in his later years when he became a regular on the storytelling stage at the Texas Folklife Festival at the Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio. His talents at telling tall tales even took him to Washington, D.C. at the Smithsonian Institution during the American Bicentennial Celebration in 1976. He was also prominently featured in Patrick B. Mullen’s book from the University of Texas Press, I Heard the Old Fisherman Say: Folklore of the Texas Gulf Coast, with the author describing Bell as the best tall tale teller that he had encountered on the Texas Gulf Coast—“a true raconteur who has continued the art of traditional storytelling.” I had fished for many years at Bell’s camp at the cut between Powderhorn Lake and Matagorda Bay, but got to know him best after he had become well known for his tall tales and I was writing a newspaper column for the Victoria Advocate. I recall once asking him how much truth there was in his stories. “Not a lot,” he replied. “If I put too much truth in them then people will get to believing everything I say.” In his book of Texas coastal folklore, Mullen did some dissecting of Bell as a storyteller, pointing out how his success had to do with four major areas of style – concrete detail, ludicrous images, point of view, and narrative persona. As a newspaper columnist always searching for something to write about, I mostly considered him as being just a damn good story teller. He could hardly open his mouth without making my day, and there just never was any better among those who could spin a good fish tale. He did tell Mullen that he seldom told...