Page From the Past: Mississippi River Fishing
As told by Bluegrass Storyteller Chuck Larkin
In the 1980s, Chuck Larkin hosted the WPBA-TV variety show “Tonight at Ferlinghetti’s,” a PBS music series taped in front of a live studio audience. He died in 2003 at the age of 71, but not before becoming one of the Atlanta’s most recognizable storytellers. A charter member of the Southern Order of Storytellers, he was a regular at the National Storytelling Festival held each year in Jonesborough, Tennessee, relaying his tall tales in a style akin to the late Justin Wilson, the popular Cajun TV chef and raconteur.
Larkin’s still-active website, chucklarkin.com, contains many of his stories (“tall tales” some folks call them), and lucky for us, he granted permission to the storytelling public to “use, revise and tell the stories” he collected there. One of the best is this wonderful tale about catfishing on the Mighty Mississippi while visiting relatives in Kentucky.
My Uncle had some blacksmith equipment. I fired up the forge and made a fishing hook from two old iron horseshoes. It was a big hook like if I curled my wrist and hand up toward my arm. In the barn I also found an old busted up piano. I pulled out a big thick piece of piano wire. I would estimate today that the wire would be about a 2,000-pound-test line. After all, I was after a big fish, and in the old days, you went fishing to catch fish. We had never heard about sport fishing. For a fishing pole I borrowed my Uncle’s small flag pole. In the forties, we did not have aluminum flag poles like the wimpy ones today. In the old days, our flag poles were made of U.S. steel. Next, I fixed some dough ball bait. For those of you who were raised culturally deprived, dough ball bait is made out of course ground yellow corn with bacon fat mixed in to hold it together. The dough ball bait I made was about the size of a soccer ball. I put it around my hook and baked it in the oven awhile until the dough hardened up some.
The next morning, I dropped my baited hook into the water from the front of the boat. Wham, bam, a fish grabbed that bait, and the next thing I knew, I was being towed down the Mississippi at incredible speed. That surprised me, because I knew I had tethered the boat to a small 100-foot oak tree. I looked back and that tree was bobbing in the water behind me. The roots of the tree were still snagged in a tiny five-acre island it had torn loose. The island was fluttering along behind the tree. It looked like a giant cow flop. We went skimming over the water at such amazing speed that the friction of the water passing under that wooden hull was too much. The boat’s bottom started to heat up. The next thing I knew, the bottom of the boat was on fire! The boat sank and left me barefoot water skiing down the Mississippi River holding on to that steel fishing pole.
Now, I know that some of you do not believe me. Well, I’m known to be open, forthright, candid and truthful. If you check the Guinness Book of Records, you will find my name listed as the father of barefoot water skiing. I was clocked that day at 96 miles per hour. That was 1947. I held the speed record until 1951 when Evinrude finely built a motor large enough to take the record away from me.
Suddenly the line went slack and I sank. I swam up to the surface. Let me tell you something. If you find yourself in the water in the middle of the Mississippi, that river looks about as wide as it is long. And the Mississippi River runs from D-11 to L- 14. I started to shout for help. But I had swallowed too much Mississippi River water. I was all choked up. All I could do was whisper the word help. I reached into my bib overalls and pulled out my reading glasses.
When I was a child my eyes were so bad I had to wear big thick-lens glasses to read. As I have gotten older, my eyes have gotten better, so now I just pick up some thin magnifying glasses in a drug store for reading. I put the big thick lens up to my mouth and whispered, “Help, help, help.” Those glasses magnified my voice so people as far away as Vicksburg thought it was Gabriel’s horn and Judgment Day was here. Boats came from everywhere.
I was picked up by a sternwheeler river boat … I was wet, irritated and still holding the fishing pole. I gave the pole a great heave to set the hook. That is when I discovered that the fish that had taken my bait had never moved. It was my bait moving from his mouth to his stomach that had drugged me so fast in the reverse direction down the river. That was one humongous fish. Do you know that Jack Cousteau put 185 underwater photographers into the Mississippi River? They took one sequential lengthy picture of that leviathan fish, and the picture itself weighed three tons! That is one big fish.
When I popped that fishing pole, up out of the water came nine Guernsey cows, five hogs, a flock of 27 mallard ducks and four acres of corn. Apparently they had been feeding on the corn inside that fish. Next came a baby 432-pound catfish with my fishing hook caught in his tail. It was a lucky catch after all.
Now here is the part some people do not believe. In the side of the baby 432-pound catfish was a fishing spear with a 54-foot-long line. On the other end of the line, we found a skeleton of a man. He was sitting in a small row boat with the end of the line tethered around his wrist. Between the feet of the skeleton was a small leather bag filled with 720 mint-new gold coins date stamped 1872.
I thought this was my lucky day. That is, until we returned to Carlisle County where old Judge Vandegrift recognized his Guernsey cows and hogs. He thanked me profusely, without financial reward I might add, for rescuing his cows and hogs. They had been swallowed a year earlier during the drought when they were all skin and bones and as thin as fence rails, but after feeding on the corn, they had fattened up well. Of course, the corn was gone and only the fodder was left. Would you believe?
The FBI impounded the gold pieces. They had been stolen in a bank robbery in Memphis, Tennessee in 1881. The robber had been ingested by that fish during his getaway. That is when I learned that sometimes crime does not pay. And I’ve been ruined for fishing every since. I do not know about you, but I do not ever want to hook on to another fish the size of the one that got away that day. Anything smaller than a 432-pound catfish is just too small for me to bother with.
Now I know some of you doubt the validity of this experience, but I have proof. I still have my baby jackknife that Santa Claus gave me when I was just three years old. You see, I was born during the Great Depression. When a child got to the walking/talking stage, they got their own pocket knife. We used that pocket knife to cut that skeleton free and give him a fitting burial. The next time you see me, ask me and I will show my baby pocket knife to you. I do not lie.
AND THAT’S A TRUE STORY.
