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'Angling to escape the bondage of time?' The American Museum of Fly Fishing

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#1 ·
There is indeed such a museum, located in Manchester, Vermont, not coincidentally the home of Orvis since 1856. Although my wife shoots for Orvis 4 or 5 times a year and has brought me a t-shirt and hat from the museum, I'm afraid I've never been there. Here's a wonderful article on it from last Tuesday's Wall Street Journal that makes me itch to tag along on her next trip.

K

July 19, 2005

Angling to Escape the Bondage of Time?
Here's a Cache to Catch a Fisherman's Fancy

By GEOFFREY NORMAN
July*19,*2005;*Page*D8

Manchester, Vt.

For one who is not an angler, the mere existence of the American Museum of Fly Fishing, in Manchester, Vt., might come as a surprise. This is just fishing, after all. How much history, tradition and culture is there to be preserved?

Quite a lot, actually. More, even, than some people who consider themselves avid fly fishermen might have realized. The literature of fly fishing alone is extensive. The only works in English more frequently reproduced than Izaak Walton's "The Compleat Angler" are the Bible and Shakespeare.

Fly fishing has come a long way since Walton's book was first published back in the 17th century, and the museum does a good job of dealing with this history, taking the visitor through a kind of timeline of exhibits. But while the history is interesting, the deep appeal of fly fishing is not in narrative. Angling is precisely an escape from the bondage of time, which explains, in part, why so many fishermen come home late for dinner. When you step into a river, you stop looking at your watch.

Passions for fly fishing run so high that calling it a "pastime" seems a gross understatement. One learns at the museum that Bing Crosby was an avid practitioner, perhaps leading to his efforts to ban high-seas netting of Atlantic salmon.

And the museum in Manchester does a marvelous job with the timeless aesthetics of the sport. No other pastime (which seems a weak word for such an abiding passion) puts so much art into its tools. Contemporary fly rods are built from cold, high-tech composites; but as recently as three decades ago, they were still largely made from bamboo by craftsmen who were as skilled as violin makers. These split-cane masterpieces were, in their day, more than mere tools. They were heirlooms passed down by generations, and the best of them are, today, highly collectible. Rods made by H.L. Leonard, Everett Garrison, E.F. Payne and others are on display, and even the most modern angler will find himself thinking, as he admires them, that he really ought to try fishing with bamboo at least once this season. Even mounted behind glass and despite their age -- and some of them are more than a century old -- the rods look alive.

And, then, there are those things that give fly fishing its name -- the flies. Bits of feathers and yarn tied artfully around wire hooks -- some of them almost impossibly small -- the flies are an undeniable art form. There are dozens of them on display, many tied by names like Walt Dette and Harry Darby and Carrie Stevens that still resonate with devoted anglers. Some of the old flies -- especially traditional wet patterns tied on snelled hooks -- have names like "Matador," "Quack Doctor," "Dreadnought" and "Blue Limerick" that delight almost as much as the imaginative mix of colors that seem to duplicate nothing found in nature but that intrigued trout into striking. Among the flies in the museum's collections are some of the oldest known in existence, dating to 1789.

Dozens of reels, some classics and some merely engineering curiosities, are also on display, including the works of Stan Bogdan, the Von Hofe brothers, Benjamin Meek and other famous makers. Some of the gear on display was once used by anglers who were celebrated in other fields from which they retreated to the water to restore themselves. There is Ernest Hemingway's Hardy Fairy rod, which was donated to the museum by his son Jack. And an Orvis rod that belonged to Bing Crosby, who, a plaque explains, was so devoted to the cause of the Atlantic salmon and its preservation that his efforts to ban high-seas netting of the fish led to his music being banned in Denmark. Imagine any nation banning Bing Crosby.

Benny Goodman's Paul Young rod is here; also Babe Ruth's Payne. And there's a Shakespeare glass rod that belonged to Ted Williams, who was as skilled and single-minded on a bonefish flat or salmon pool as he was on the baseball diamond. Williams, according his plaque, liked to tie flies after a game. "It releases me," he said, "...Come in after a game, all taut and nervous, tie a few flies and, boom, right to sleep."

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF FLY FISHING
Manchester, Vt.
Open every day (except major holidays)
10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
www.amff.com1

There is something of that restfulness, for that matter, about the mood of this little museum. And one senses in that mood the appeal that fly fishing has had for so many American presidents from John Quincy Adams, whose fly box is on display, to Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, who are still active anglers. Other fly-fishing presidents include the old political rivals FDR and Herbert Hoover. Perhaps this quote from Grover Cleveland best sums up presidential feeling for fly fishing: "In these sad and ominous days of mad fortune-chasing, every patriotic, thoughtful citizen, whether he fishes or not, should lament that we have not among our countrymen, more fishermen."

Some American political giants, it seems, could not always leave their passions behind when they went fishing. Daniel Webster, the visitor learns, liked to lecture fish when he had caught them, as though they were political opponents, calling them, among other things, "antifederalist."

The charm of this little museum is in its blending of this kind of quirky information with the undeniable beauty of the items and artifacts on display. These include not merely the rods, flies and reels but also the works of Winslow Homer, Ogden Pleisner, Thomas Aquinas Daly, Walter M. Brackett and others who tried to capture in their art the essence of fly fishing and its grip on the imagination of so many anglers down the years. Something the museum, itself, does on its own terms and splendidly. You can lose track of time here almost as easily as you can on a river.

Mr. Norman a writer who lives in Vermont. His last novel was "Inch by Inch."
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112172681443788798,00.html
Hyperlinks in this Article:
(1) http://www.amff.com
Copyright 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
 
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#2 ·
Don't get the the East coast often but would like to visit this museum.

Have many of you been to the Fly Fishing Museum in Florence Oregon? If it's still open, it is pretty interesting. I was last there maybe 12 years ago. The curator was a gentleman named William Cushner. I believe he has passed by now but his son in law (Jack Smrekar) has carried on William's artform (framing flys). William was the curator of the postage stamp collection at the Smithsonian for 50 years or so and was a master at framing art pieces. He had functioning equipment in his basement that hasn't been made in maybe 100 years. An odd thing about William was that he knew nothing about flyfishing however he had many friends that were super-notables of the first part of the century. Widows gave him bamboo rods, reels, etc. that belonged to very famous anglers and it is (or was) on display in this little house (280 Nopal St.). He also had hundreds, maybe thousands of pre-tied flys on gut leaders (circa 1910) that had been stored for decades in the basement of one of the old New York sporting goods establisments (Abercrombie's I think) after it closed. William's framing was remarkable. One I remember was a fly framed in a shadow box. The fly was mounted on a revolving fiber-optic narrow cylinder that both turned the fly and illuminated it. Is a cool place.
rgds
 
#3 ·
Anyone doing a fly fishing road trip through New England, especially during the splendid colors of autumn "fall foliage" time, should make the trip to manchester VT and check this museum out. An imp-ressive collection. And the Orvis old home store is just down the road, along with a nearby Orvis "Thrift Shop", and you can get in on the tour of the Orvis Rod Shop too- the oldest continuously operating fly rod shop in America.

Along the way it is only a beautiful few hours drive west; to the Catskill Mountains and Livingston Manor New York- the home of The Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum They are right there on Lee Wulff's Run on the Willowemoc River, just a short few minutes drive from Roscoe- "Trout Town USA"- and the storied Beaverkill. That collection hosts Lee Wulff's tying bench and assorted paraphenalia, The Harry Darbee fly tying shop collection, some of Roy Steenrod's flys, including some of the first Hendrickson's, the Dette collection, and an array of objects, ephemera and art from the days of Theodore Gordon through Ed Zern. The Fly Fishing Hall of Fame is there as well. Between the American Museum and the Catskill Museum, you will be steeped in the beauty and depth and history of our game. And that's just on the east coast.
 
#5 ·
On the PBS Fly Fishing Show on ch 28 out of Tacoma at 7:30 Sunday mornings they had a pretty good show all about the museum. Since they often repeat their shows a few times it should come up again soon. After watching the show I can tell, I could spend hours just looking at the wall of diffrent fly patterns.
 
#6 ·
Ben Snuzin said:
Have many of you been to the Fly Fishing Museum in Florence Oregon? If it's still open, it is pretty interesting. I was last there maybe 12 years ago. The curator was a gentleman named William Cushner. I believe he has passed by now but his son in law (Jack Smrekar) has carried on William's artform (framing flys). William was the curator of the postage stamp collection at the Smithsonian for 50 years or so and was a master at framing art pieces. He had functioning equipment in his basement that hasn't been made in maybe 100 years. An odd thing about William was that he knew nothing about flyfishing however he had many friends that were super-notables of the first part of the century. Widows gave him bamboo rods, reels, etc. that belonged to very famous anglers and it is (or was) on display in this little house (280 Nopal St.). He also had hundreds, maybe thousands of pre-tied flys on gut leaders (circa 1910) that had been stored for decades in the basement of one of the old New York sporting goods establisments (Abercrombie's I think) after it closed. William's framing was remarkable. One I remember was a fly framed in a shadow box. The fly was mounted on a revolving fiber-optic narrow cylinder that both turned the fly and illuminated it. Is a cool place.
rgds
The museum in Florence is a real treasure. It is one of those small and very personable specialty museums. The last time I visited (over 17 years ago); Jack was still sorting through Cushners extensive collection. I spent a few memorable hours with him up in the attic as he sorted through an incredibly large and historic pile of fly fishing history. William Cushner's collection was eventually split. Part of it went to the American Museum of Fly Fishing, in Manchester, Vt., part to the The Sport Fishing Museum on Granville Island, Vancouver, BC and part stayed with Williams' son in law, Jack Smrekar, in Florence, Oregon. I have not been to the Vermont museum but I can say that a trip to either Florence or Vancouver is well worth the time. The Vancouver museum also has a substantial reel collection as well as some nice rods. If you are truly interested in visiting either place, plan to spend a few hours.
Vancouver has the added advantage of being on Granville Island which allows uninterested friends or family to stay occupied for a few hours while you indulge yourself at an unhurried pace.

Jack Smrekar continues William Cushners craft of Fly Plate framing. To learn more about Jack, William and the history of the framed fly go to www.anglerschoiceframing.com

TC
 
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