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The only guy named Tom I knew of there sold flies to my grandmother but he talked about rods and fishing with clients which may have led them to believe he also made rods there. My dad, who worked there, says he did not; sold flies to them. I don't know if he was a jobber or not but he made good flies

I played the 1978 tape the other day and she says of course Ted had to be the best at wheatever he did so was fascinated with everything Paul (my Grandfather) did and knew. I printed his letter here where you usually put photos on your page. Please read it. I didn't mean he's the only one who taught him--I know about Les Cassie, Ray Holland, Jimmie Albright, Jack Brothers, J. Lee Cuddy,Ted's love of Zane Grey's books, The Fall 2005 issue of "The American Fly-Fisher" ( is that you?) says that "Williams studied and discussed rod tapers with Grandpa (and he and Bobby Doerr called Grandma "Mrs. America." I wasn't trying to imply he only learned how from him but that he also learned things from him. The article gets some things wrong, as everyone does who uses Arnold Gingrich, a good friend of Grandpa and Grandma's, as a reference-- he got this part wrong and all writers use it as if it must be the real story. My Grandparents did not go to Duluth to fish and then to Detroit and were not in Detroit in 1920. Everyone always says he moved to Detroit from Minnesota and made rods by age 20. He was 27 when he met my 17 -year-old grandmother in Duluth in 1916 and did not make rods until after he'd tried working with Eppinger in Detroit after 1923. He did not sell fishing tackle in Duluth.

At 17 Grandma, 3 years here from France, took a part-time job at a Duluth jewelry store, a fortuitous choice because Paul H. Young, a 27-year-old shipyard foreman, walked in one day to buy jewelry for his nieces and changed her life. She was beautiful and he was handsome and Paul got her to go fishing and that was that. Well, she got him to go to a dance first, but he wasn't much of one. She'd won first prize in a waltz contest but he couldn't dance so that became the end of her dancing. "That was the end of the swimming, too," she says, more to herself.

Before he got to Duluth, Grandpa had spent his entire life in Arkansas rasing a brother 12 years younger than him while an aunt raised the middle brother and two sisters in Jonesboro. Their dad often disappeared--supposedly as a teacher he got into arguments with every school board he worked for and had to move on to the next school district to get a job. His wife had 5 kids and so many leaks in the roof she had pans all over the house to catch what the cistern couldn't hold. She had to take in boarders including one of those Reverand Wright-like preachers, which was not her religion. You think her husband would learn to keep his mouth shut--they must have been really important arguments, like why couldn't he drink whisky while he taught 3rd grade. It was an awful life, but fun for Grandpa who took apart dead mice to see how to put them together again. Then two brothers, Dave and Ambrose Evans, who were operating a sawmill out of Hickory Ridge, planted a sawmill to rice, experimentally. This was the first time rice had ever been grown in Cross Country, or anywhere nearby in East Central Arkansas. It was a complete success. The sod developed to be ideally adapted for rice. There was a "hard pan" of clay about six feet under the surface which held water (accounting for the swamps), and under the layer of hardpan an ample supply of water for irrigation. It caused a sensation and investors hastened to buy up the wild land and clear the native timber for rice farms.

Grandpa's father remembered his old banker friend, D. J. Burnham in Columbus, Ohio, wrote him, and persuaded him to buy a tract of land ½ s and ½ w of Hickory Ridge Rd. on the county dirt road, with his dad as manager. They loaded their meager furniture in a boxcar and rode the caboose of the local freight train to Hickory Ridge and rented a house in town.

His father resigned from his job as teacher and they lived there awaiting negotiations to be completed. Paul had walking typhoid fever and his brother Cy, named after a distant relative, the baseball player, (I can prove this and that Grandpa is also descended from the same man who was grandfather to John Moses Browning, inventor of the most weapons patents ever--Ben, his brother,'s daughter was an attorney and she did all the research on that and is still very much alive and brainy like all the Youngs .) Anyhow, Ben almost died from an attack of typhoid. They mortgaged the family cow for $60 to get him to a dcotor in KC Mo. (Don't ask me why; it's weird; Grandma's mother lived there with her brother, too.) Paul no longer had to feed the family so went to the University of Arkansas.

An irrigation well was drilled, driven by a steam engine, land was cleared and crops grown but my great-grandfather was not a good farmer and after one year at the U. of A. Grandpa came home to help with the clearing, planting, etc., which made his little brother very happy.

He would take him to Bayou De View, 3 miles west of their home, and put him on a log at 'The Drift' where the stream made an abrupt turn and driftwood collected during high water, and equip him with a cane pole (wild cane grew along the stream), short line, and hook, and a can of 'Betsy Bugs' (grubs of some insect).Cy would collect nice strings of Bluegill and Black Perch while Paul fished for large-mouth bass with a rod and reel. Although he didn't use a fly rod in those early days, Paul was an expert fisherman. He was also a good hunter and an expert shot. Cy had seen him kill a running rabbit with a deer rifle at 30 yards. He was a good naturalist--he knew the names of the birds and flowers, and wild plants. He took a correspondence course in taxidermy, and his mounted birds and animals appeared as natural as if they were alive.
Grandma said," When a boy loves to be outdoors and wants to mount birds he learns to, if he knows them, if he can make them natural-looking. You can tell Paul's work. It isn't buggy, the ears on his deer aren't curled, there's no powder coming out of the mouths."

After 3 years on the rice farm, Grandpa's s dad just took off--just went--one day he was there, the next day he was gone. It was 1912 and he wasn't found until he died in Los Angeles 10 years later. There was a railroad strike going on and he had to be buried there; they couldn't get him shipped home. Cy wrote in his diary,"Of course there were things to be done--hired hands to pay, feed for the horses to be bought, etc. Mama wrote Mr. Burnham, who appointed Paul manager of the farm. Paul ran it 2 or 3 years. But Paul was not a good farmer. It was said that if Paul was off in the field planting rice and Ewal Pollet, his fishing buddy from town, came by and said the bass were biting in the bayou, Paul would tie the team in the shade of a tree and go fishing. This was not literally true but the story illustrated Paul's basic instincts. About this time Mama borrowed some money from Mr. Marr, a friend and a prosperous farmer from across the bayou, and she had a house built in Hickory Ridge. We moved to it in 1918. I decided that I would get a college degree in engineering. I did. (University of Illinois,General Engineering, with Honors, elected to Tau Beta Pi Honorary Engineering Society, class of 1924.) . From 1912 to 1915 Paul and I often went fishing or hunting.

"Paul meanwhile ran a threshing machine for a wheat farm in Kansas, worked for the lumbering industry in the Pacific Northwest, and became a foreman in the McDougal, Duluth, Minnesota shipyards.

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"Ben got sick in 1917. He soon recovered and became a banker (Vice President, National Bank of Detroit). Mama, with a small income from boarders and from the post office, made regular payments on the house to Mr. Marr and let me invest my small earnings in War Saving Stamps for college.

"In Sept. 1918 it all changed. There was a letter from Paul. He was foreman in the shipyards and Mama and I should come to Duluth and the company would furnish him with a house. Mama could keep house for him and he got me a job as rivet heater at good pay. So Mama resigned as Postmaster and Mr. Marr moved from his farm to live in the house. We had a yard sale and sold off the furniture and took a train to Duluth."

"We were awakened at night by the darndest noise you ever heard. We dressed and rushed down the hill to Main Street. Everybody in town was there, hollering and jumping up and down and hugging anybody close. The War was over!

"But they continued to build Liberty Ships. (There, in almost the middle of the North American continent, we built ocean-going ships.)

"We lived in Paul's house until Sept.1919. Paul bought a Dodge car and took me deer hunting and on Sunday trips. Then a great thing happened to him--he met a charming, vivacious, and beautiful young French lady named Martha Marie Moisan. Paul, Martha, her brother, his girlfriend, and me--5 of us in the Dodge on Sunday picnics. It was wonderful."

Grandpa took Grandma fly-fishing on the Boardman and set her up in a quiet little spot and took off for a nearby beaver dam he thought all the action would be at. He had no expectation of his teenage girlfriend understanding about rises; it had taken him years of studying trout. He went where he expected action a beginner couldn't handle. But the rise happened right where Grandma was. She was over-whelmed, had no idea what to do, and finally figured she'd better cast every time there was a ripple. Her creel poured over. She had many big fish, including a 23" brown I often saw on her cabin wall at "In the Pink" on the South Branch. Grandpa was never so surprised in his life.

They decided to get married and run a wheat farm in Saskatchewan. Paul had taken up farming in college and he made $22 a day running a big thrasher to get the field in for the fall. He'd read there was more money to be made farming in Canada but he didn't realize the seasons could be worse there. He planted hundreds of acres of wheat--Grandma's brothers Gus and Max came up to help-- had a huge crop, wouldn't sell it to brokers--then a drought came. Wiped them out. All these hired men wouldn't work, and gophers ate the newly planted seeds so she got a .22 and"shot 'em right and left," she said in her 70's. She hunted in rivers hidden in hillsides that were called coolies. Once she got two ducks for dinner and mounted police checked everyone in the area. Martha didn't mention her ducks, because it wasn't duck season. She was nervous, though.

They got a Japanese cook. He cooked prunes that glowed in sugar--and sugar was "way sky-high" at 35 cents a pound. ("It used to be 5 cents a pound.")

"We had a gang there," Grandma said. "We had to have a cook. All I knew how to make was bread. I raised it out in the sunshine."

The horses were let lose in the winter and brought in in the summer. They had big horses--Belgians. Grandma had to walk between them to feed them. She and Grandpa had a light mare they hitched to a buggy to make forages to town. Grandma kept a diary of the next five years, when she was 18-22. The life was far from easy and then she became pregnant with Dad.

Excerpts from her diary then:

Friday, January 09, 1920:Paul and his ma and I went downtown, saw art gallery, etc. Paul and I bummed around all p.m. We bought our Wedding Band and tickets--we leave tomorrow night. Madge and Ben came over.

1/10/20: Nice day, saw the parade, Pershing looked good, had dinner downtown. Paul, his ma, and I, we went to the convention hall. Heard Pershing's speech. It was fine. They presented him with a wonderful sword worth $10,000. Paul and I leave tonight on the 11:15 going north.

1/19/20: Cool. Sunny. beautiful day. Our Wedding Day! We took the 6:30 to Ironwood, Mich. , then to Bessemer. Got license then got married at minister's house, everybody was singing. We got home at 8:30. Surprised the family all glad to see us. I am very happy, Paulie, too.

1/22/20 Paul left for Canada to fix things up. I miss him so --I feel lost n' everything.

1/29/20: I'm leaving tonight for Winnipeg. Anxious to get there.

1/31 Arrived in Tompkins. Pauly met me with cutter. Had wedding cake, fine dinner. This has been a pretty long month for us but now our worst troubles are over. I'm sure we will succeed. I'll stick no matter what comes along.

2/12/20 Bad day. Paul went hunting, got chickens. Nasty day out, snowing and windy.

2/13/20 Cold. In all day. Went to schoolhouse dance about 7 p.m., 7 miles out. Such a time! All hayseeds!

St. 2/14/20: Got home about 5 bells Gee! we were tired, slept til noon, then Paul and I went hunting. Got one chicken. Punk gun!

Sun Feb 15: Finished ironing--helped Paul pitch hay. Played with calf, bed 10:30.

March 2

We finished papering our parlor which is also our bedroom. Some job. We get up pretty late, do as we please!

March3- Went to Tomkins; nearly froze, never dreamed it was so cold in this world! Paul hauled oats and I made him a pie.

March6: Very cold, windy. Such a windy day! All the horses in the country were hanging around here. We sat near the fire mostly, bed early.

March 11

I went hunting gophers, killed two and a rabbit. Paul skinned them.

March 12

We collected 8 gophers, skinned them.

March 16: Worst wind I ever saw!

March 17: I'm getting mixed up in the days somehow--they are so much alike. In all day. Cold.

March 18: I hope our luck changes--we're broke!

March 19: Paul was home all a.m. Helped me, then let all the horses run out.

March 24: Holding got sore, took away all the horses trying to bluff us out but can't do it. We play cards at night; time passes.

March 25: Paul and Holding argued it all out, all ok now, horses back

March 27: Time passes somehow.

April 7: Well, of all the luck! Our men left, didn't like doing nothing. Cold again, wish the weather would change. Ducks are coming in--

April 11: Home all day .Paul and I went shooting gophers, lots of fun, I can shoot pretty good now. men out also, pretty good men we got.( Paul got 3 in Calgary.)

April 21: Can't work yet, snow storm on now, darn the luck

April 22: Snow again today dang it all. Hired a cook. I got a pony I care for myself.

April 23: I've named my pony "Fifi" . Rode Fifi up the coolie, Paul hiked along. I hunted gophers.

April 24: Men plowed p.m. Paul went to town. I fixed my room up, wrote letters. Took care of my Fifi.

April 25: Nice clear day, went duck hunting, no luck. Tonight about 7:30 my Fifi gave birth to a cute colt. I discovered it.

April26: Fifi is still crazy about that colt. I can't touch her. She took it for a walk up the coolie, got her back ok. Burned thistles, men plowed, moved Fifi to new barn.

A month later Grandma got pregnant with Dad. The colt had always been allowed to come in the kitchen and keep warm by the stove. Fifi insisted on coming in, too. Two horses in the kitchen! Grandma would say, still aghast 70 years later.Since Grandma always brushed the mare she thought she could brush the colt but the mare kicked her in the breast when she touched the baby.

But the reason they gave up the farm was because when Grandma went to town the colt followed the mare and the mare gave him the road even if in the process mare, buggy, and Grandma had to go off it.. One day when Grandma was quite pregnant, Fifi gave the colt the road--and buggy and Grandma went over in the ditch. Grandma made it home sputtering."That's it! I'm going to Mother's to have the baby--with or with out you!"

Grandpa decided it had better be with, if he wanted to keep his spirited gal. So they gave up the farm and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where Grandma's mother, for who knows what reason, lived.(Grandma also said there were no doctors in Canada where they were.) Dad was born and then they moved to Denver a few months later where they fished, Grandpa worked for a famous taxidermist, and they had a second son, Jack, in 1923. They lived there for 6 months but the guy wasn't on the level with Grandpa so he took Lou Eppinger up on an offer to work in Detroit. Paul worked for Lou, famous for his Daredevyl lures, for two years but Eppinger didn't fulfill his promises so Paul quit and opened his own taxidermy in the basement of his house. Because he was so good at mounting, he was already known, and became established easily. He had too much business for the house so bought an established store on Grand River Avenue, and then the plumbing-fixture store next door to make bamboo rods in--but the rods ended up in the basement of their home and their boys lived with the sounds of the machinery. They used the store as their taxidermy.

Grandma was worried about the boys crossing Grand River to go to school , then found out they were already crossing it at 5 and 3.(It doesn't pay to worry.)

Grandpa trusted everybody. "He didn't believe folks stold," Grandma said. "He took in birds on faith, he took deposits, and he worked upstairs. This church-man he hired robbed him blind." Then the arsenic got to him and he had to get out of the taxidermy aspect so he sold it to Swede Al Hilde, husband of Grandma's sister. He and Grandma got a house on Ivanhoe and rented out the upstairs. That house was a black church in the 1970's. Maybe, still is. Grandma's explanation was that they sold it to "colored" and "we weren't the first to do so."

Paul H. had hired an engineer from GM to put up the machinery for bamboo-cutting. The two men wanted to incorporate but Martha said she and Paul would keep their corporation separate. Grandpa could never work with anyone who told him what to do. Grandma wanted him to remain his own boss. Plus she worked mail order all over the country and didn't want anyone else getting half of that. Grandpa then began making and selling tackle."He thought he had to have someone running that business, " Grandma reflected;" He couldn't get along with or with out me, so he got a lawyer to run it. There was a big fuss--I had to make the lawyer pay back what he'd 'borrowed' from Paul's business. Had to get rid of him."

Then Paul's sister Maybelle and CPA husband James came up but Paul found no use for them and sent them back to Kansas City with $500.

At the age of 23, Grandma stumbled on the Au Sable. Grandma said that the first time Grandpa saw the Au Sable River, he walked right in the stream with brand new shoes on so he could wade .Just walked right into the river with amazement and delight. The stream was so clear, swift, and lovely...and in the most wonderful place. They spent every Saturday and Sunday there for 40 years.

They had been taking the street cars, when they had to, to fish, which I assume to mean that nasty river called The Detroit, but not anymore. Grandma picked out their second car, a red one because it was her favorite color. It was a real lemon--all the tires blew up. She raised Cain with the dealer and the Better Business Bureau because Grandpa was no businessman. Grandma said she favored the 7 ½ ' Martha Marie rod and that was why Grandpa named it after her; I have seen "experts" online such as at a Washington State fly-fishing web site swearing that Grandma actually preferred a Perfectionist or Parabolic, but that is not what she said on tape the day I recorded her story at our cabin on Big Creek. She used a No. 5 line and Borscher and Adams flies."A little Adams fly, you can work anywhere in the country." She was then 83. "I fish only upstream," she said. "It's hard. No one does it anymore. I like it because you don't need such a long line--and the fish is looking up so you can put your fly in front of him." During the Depression, they put out a rod called "Depression." It cost $8.50 for a rod with two tips. When they saw prosperity around the corner, they introduced the two-piece Prosperity for $13.50. In 1982 the fifty-year-old rods sold for $600.00 apiece in good condition.

From the Detroit Tribune (now defunct), Thursday, April 17, 1930:"Mrs. Young is undoubtedly the outstanding angler in Detroit's ranks of female flycasters. She was the only woman to cast alongside the men at the recent Sportsman's Show at Convention Hall. In the woman's tournament, she took first prize."

"I would have taken first in the mens', too, but my line hit the ceiling," Martha said 52 years later. She says she never sees any fisherwomen but supposes there are some "in Wyoming."

"But not many even out there," she says.

Grandpa told me that pictures were reliable and words to be given only so much attention. Paintings were best, he said, because photography made darks too dark and so didn't see some things altogether. Of course, color photography had not yet been invented. Books, newspapers, and magazines always got something wrong. He showed me in a book that was written by a great friend of his, Arnold Gingrich, founder and editor of Esquire magazine, The Well-Tempered Angler, that Gingrich said Grandpa opened his first Detroit store in 1921. Dad was born in 1921 in KC Mo, Jack in 1923 in Denver, and then they moved to Michigan. He showed me an article in a newsletter for trout fisherman where a man had written that Grandpa opened his Detroit store in 1922. "This followed an interview", he said wryly.

One thing I learned quicky when I moved away from home at adulthood and was able to locate such books, was never to give Dad a book on Christmas or his birthday that mentioned Grandpa.

Invariably, they all mentioned Dad, too, the same line in each, that he preferred boat motors to fly rods. It came from his father. The father whose rods Dad was help making like an assembly-line worker, adding the same cork grip to rod after rod. He'd been told all his life he could be anything he wanted to be. What was with all these books, encyclopedia even, saying that son Jack took afer his father, had bamboo in his blood, while son Paul was more interested in boats AND motors? The reporters should have phrased the question thusly:"Do any of your offspring seem inclined in any of your talents? You know all the birds and bushes, you invent things--are your sons showing such inclinations?"

First of all, if nothing ELSE, he could have said,"Yes, one does..", rather than put Dad on the spot. He needed room to say "There's more in my blood than bamboo." And,"And Paul got that in spades.. he knows all the birds...that isn't easy. I'm proud." My father saw 732 of the 917 bird species agreed upon as being in North America. His world life list was over 3,000 . Grandpa did not even keep a life list--so his son was really doing what he loved, as his parents had always told him he could, in saying he could be anything he wanted to be. It wasn't fair to make it look like a put-down because he didn't want to make fly rods.He flew to Alaska and the closest city to the South Pole to see bird species.

Instead, it's a hurtful passage that repeatedly suggests a great man disappointed with the shortcomings of his son. What occurred was, one man asked Grandpa if either of his sons had gotten bamboo in their blood. Grandpa said what he felt that moment. Lazy reporters, writers without access to him once he died, encyclopedias, soon Wikipedia will do it, just lifted that quote, since there was little else to say about Paul A. Young, who was called "Paul Jr. " by the press. Dad agreed to talk to a reporter by phone in 2005 who was doing an article and wanted to know when Grandpa began giving his rods names (1946), but the reporter never called back, responding to an email Dad stood over me and had me type saying it was ok to call him,"I told you I wouldn't bother him until he felt like talking himself! Don't you know how to read?"

(Dad said, "that's one who'd muddle the story--I'm not talking to that one.")

Even Grandpa was peeved at the interview where that "Dad preferred motor boats" statement was wrestled from him; Dad wanted to add the Johnson line of boats to Grandpa's marine. After Grandpa died, some people even said that Grandpa said that Dad preferred motors and opened his own marina, as if Grandpa had ever known. (he bought it with his, yoo-hoo, inheritance from his father's death.) Back then Grandpa had just rented a store after having his fly-tying operation on the floor above Dad's bedroom and the rod-building company on the floor beneath it. As a high- schooler Dad heard the machinery in the basement hum whenever he was home studying "to be whatever he wanted to be."

When Grandpa said his son Jack (or John) would carry on the rod business, many took him at his word, and McClane's New Standard Fishing Encyclopedia, edited by the Executive Editor of "Field and Stream" and author of the notable The Practical Fly-Fisherman, assuming he would, claims that he did. No. Jack never did. Bob Summers knew the love of these rods in a much deeper way, and while he wasn't the genius behind my grandfather's rods, he did give the rod business his life, especially Grandpa's. Coming in as a youth and still at it as a septuagenarian. He was Dad's junior fan, his father's jack-of-all trades. The best way I saw it said of Jack was in an article I can't recall the author of : "Son Jack took over the business and moved it out to Traverse City's Mission Point, minus the rod-machines and fly tying. And taxidermy .The Paul H. Young Company now mostly sells boats."

I bet Dad laughed out loud. Although it wasn't exactly true-the rod stuff went to Traverse, too, and so did Bob Summers.

Trout and Salmon magazine said Grandma " casts with a tireless precision and force that would be remarkable in a man half her age."

The late writer Donald Overfield said "A Young rod is so well-bonded that it defies multiple twisting, even boiling, which has been attempted: so accurate was the initial machining, assembly, and subsequent bonding that a standard rod section could be twisted into a complete circle without failure in the cane or bond. Such a display hung on a wall of Young's shop for many years. It is worth noting that this was taking place during a time when many commercial rod makers were having to place other whippings almost every inch of the length up the rod to assist the inferior glue used in the bonding."

The Thursday, April 15, 1930 Detroit Tribune (now extinct) gave front page prominence to an article interviewing Grandma. It begins:

"And I learned about fishing from her.

"Some of Detroit's most successful trout anglers can say this about Mrs. Paul H. Young, and as well of her husband, a taxidermist whose greatest hobby is outwitting the wary brookie.

"The writer strolled into Paul Young's taxidermy and sporting goods shop at 8065 Grand River. It looks vastly more like a fly-fisher's private den than a store, with mounted specimen of fish and game adorning the walls, fishing tackle and guns here and there, fly books filled with dainty flecks of color, fisherman's creels and wading boots, in fact, everything you would find in the collection of a veteran sportsman." It goes on to say that fishermen popped in all day to meet each other and hang out with the best.

The late Al McClane, founding editor of Field and Stream, wrote "The best fly rod gives the line momentum, then velocity, then has the common sense to get out of the way...if the rod is too slow or too fast there is no harmony and you break up the flow of the line as it unrolls. Once the line loop is formed, which is almost instantly, all the pushing you do...the harder you try, the worse it gets. The virtue of any good rod is that it waits for the line to unroll without vibrating excessively, and harmonically does nothing to destroy the flow, providing speed without making the line deviate from a straight path. (Paul Young's ) Midge will pick up and give velocity to 118 to 125 grain line, (IFI or HEH), leaning back with it, then revealing it at a rate that doesn't exceed the capacity of the line."

"Are any of your sons inventors?" The writers should have asked Grandpa. Well, Jack invents reasons not to make rods, Grandpa could have responded. The truth is, Jack never took over the rod-making end of the business. A son of his tried but could not make a rod fast enough to suit a client and quit and put all the equipment in storage in Traverse City, where it still sits. Grandpa was the inventor. Although Todd's sister and I are very impressed with the way you guys seem to like Todd's work and we wish he'd get out of Afghanistan and come back and take it back up--all that stuff is just sitting there being wasted.

Arnold Gingrich says that even in the 1960s people who fished with midge rods (now a generic term) didn't know who Paul Young was (the inventor of the midge). Even those using the Strawman Nymph had not heard of its inventor, Paul H. Young.

Gene DeFeow wrote in 1975: "The name Martha Marie may only be a poetic woman's name to the unknowing. The words "midge" and "parabolic" may only symbolize smallness or terms found in college calculus to the workaday world. However to the dedicated fly-fisherman these words conjure up wonderful thoughts of an aqua-ribbon of riffling water, sweepers jaunting out from unnamed sources and the gentle rise of a trout to a tiny artificial fly. The Key which ties the mental picture altogether is the beautifully burnt Tonkin cane rod that has mysteriously leaped into your hand as you strike to the rise off that trout. That split-bamboo rod would have one of those seemingly insignificant names written in India ink just above its grip. yes, to the knowing fly-fisherman, these are Paul H. Young rods. They spell the name of some of the world's most cherished fly rods..."

He says that Grandpa caught his first fish at age 4 on a bent safety pin. "The bayou and tributary streams of the St. Francis River and the mighty Mississippi (in northeastern Arkansas) provided Paul with more fishing opportunities than trout streams (did) those days." "Fishing provided him with the opportunity to watch nature in its natural surroundings. The swooping of swallows, the erratic butterfly flight of warblers, the very fast, tight formation of teal and the swift, direct, agile flight of wood duck lured Paul into a special interest of taxidermy on birds. This interest in birds and feathers floated him down to an interest in fly-tying. And you guessed it. The fly-tying hooked him into serious trout fishing. The full circle was complete when fly-fishing tugged him into bamboo rod building."

"An old book called Amateur Rod Building stepped him through the sequence of building a rod....Paul accepted a position in Detroit with a well-known taxidermist called L.J. Eppinger of Daredevil lure fame....it was not long before Paul rented a first floor location on Grand River Avenue, one of Detroit's busiest streets...it was quite a setup, not overly neat but very functional. His shop soon became a Mecca for outdoors men. Famous trout anglers from all over the Midwest came to his shop when in the metropolitan city on business. These fishermen brought their favorite bamboo rods into the shop and requested his opinion on the suitability of the action. Paul flexed and tested his clients' rods. These rods bore the names of many already-famous builders of the time. Payne, Thomas, Cross, and Leonard were but a few of the better known artisans.

"Young began to develop an instinctive knowledge of rod actions. His extensive knowledge of trout streams and the various demands of casting in that environment led him to modify the usual 9 and 10 foot wet-fly rods into a more suitable short rod....he redesigned the tip sections of many rods to provide a more suitable action for upstream dry-fly and nymph fishing. His young analytical mind began to probe the problems of rod design for more effective trout fishing on brush-lined Michigan streams."

"After several years of experimentation and exhaustive research he...felt confidant enough to build his own line of rods. This experimentation included cutting expensive rods down in both butt and middle and rebuilding them. He also measured the tapers on dozens of other rods...his early rods were lighter than most on the market and he constantly modified his tapers and handles to lighten them even further... (In 1927) he created his first version of a compound taper rod." There is a part missing out of the letter Grandma had but it finishes with," traveler to appear on vacation when he was actually going to war. Many American and foreign streams were secretly fished by fly-fisher addicts with Young rods." I don't quite get this, but I am not here to critique writing ("stepped him through the sequence"?) Grandma told me it was so Grandpa's and her boys could fly-fish while overseas that Grandpa began selling the midge rods. In 1946 he had twenty-nine 2-piece models and twenty-seven three-piece models.

"There are those," DeFeow says,"Who say Paul was a fine-looking man. He was a lean, lanky character who looked like a western rancher and had a very expressive face which could change with his feelings toward a person..."

"As every student of fly-fishing knows, the execution of perfectly-controlled curve casts is extremely difficult. Yet Paul Young could make it look deceptively easy. His leaders were specifically designed with cure-casting in mind. His flies had just enough air-resistance built-in to accomplish the necessary lag in the execution of the curve cast. Chauncey Liveley of Pittsburgh related to me an instance... when Paul demonstrated this technique...a large trout was rising in an eddying pocket amid heavy, broken water where a drag-free float was not possible through conventional casting. Paul simply crossed to the "wrong" side of the stream, delivered a perfect backhand curve cast and took the trout on the first float.

"...he was equally adept at fishing nymphs and wet flies. He was one of the pioneers of the upstream nymph fishing technique. He became known for an artificial nymph by the name of "Partridge Spider."

"...When trout weren't rising, Paul would often employ two small wet flies: a partridge spider on a point and a hard-bodied black ant on a short dropper. He contended that the ant kept the spider at just the right level below the surface and generally trout took the point fly, although doubles were not uncommon."

Ted Williams and Bobby Doerr were two Red Sox who looked Grandpa and Grandma up every time they came to Detroit. Ted had Grandpa teach him what Grandpa knew about the sport. It wasn't that he didn't know how, but he wanted to be the best. There's an article about him and my grandparents by John A. Feldenzer in the fall 2005 "The American Fly Fisher." Like everything else in print about Grandpa, it says he saw bamboo in his son Jack's blood. It also says that he and Bobby Doerr called Grandma "Mrs. America." Grandpa took some pictures of her fly-fishing with Mr. Doerr and I have about a dozen copies of her reeling in a big guy while Bobby sits in the boat. I also have slides of Ted with fish but they are completely red when I made them into photos and there is no way I can color them on computer to put them online.I've tried--you can't add color where it isn't, except for all one color, unless you work it pixel by pixel and that's not my field. I'm terminally ill and can't waste my time on things I didn't intend to do with my life. Grandma said Ted was afraid of snakes and wore boots everywhere; Grandma told him Michigan had no poisonous snakes (not true) "or he'd never have gone fishing." Grandpa developed rods for each of them, but Ted had just signed a deal with Sears where he could only promote or be seen with their fiberglass rods. His favored rod was a Young rod but he got good money for this deal. Grandpa kept the fat, sea-fishing Bobby Doerr rod but changed the name of the Ted Williams' to Powerhouse. The only Ted Williams rod I know of Grandpa made for Dad and says "Paul A. Young, (my father),1951 "on it; Bob Summers just found it and bought it and will always remember Dad when he fishes with it, he says.

Once Williams and Grandpa were fishing in the Florida keys and Ted caught his first bonefish on an 8' Young rod, "a nice, limber rod for 15 pound test", Ted wrote me. When Grandpa got him home, Ted's wife inexplicably grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen and chased Ted around the kitchen table. Grandpa didn't know what to do and backed away speedily. It turned out that Ted's wife had been pregnant and had had their first (and only) child while he was gone.

Grandpa's brother, Cy, wrote me that Grandpa and Grandma were often the last to leave the shop and close it down and they'd hurry home to find many youngsters in their front yard. "Seated on the porch would be Ted Williams, waiting for his friends to come home."

I know Grandma cooked many dinners for him but Bobby Doerr was usually with him, and turned out perhaps to be the better friend. Although Ted Williams wrote in 1992 that Grandma was a lovely lady he respected greatly, it was the Doerrs who signed their Christmas cards with ink; Ted's were always stamped. Dad said it came of a fiasco where his real autograph had supposedly helped orphans. The only autograph I have of Ted's is one in a letter he wrote to me--his son must have been asleep.

I was a little kid and my father talked as though he stood next to a fellow scientist, not a kid at all. My father used to watch Jonny Quest with his sons just to be with them (where son was father's scientific equal). We were equals until Ted Williams came by Dad's boat store 3 times with tickets to All-Star games etc. and Dad took my two late brothers each time, resulting in a very angry, insulted female scientist.

"You're a girl, Deanne," Dad said from safely between two boys tall for their ages.
"So was Grandma," I argued, to no avail. But he did give me a baseball signed by all the Tigers in '68 when they won the World Series (for sale if the offer is good enough.)

A few years before Dad joined the service in the 40's, Grandpa tried to grow his own fly-tying feathers by buying a farm in Ortonville. Everything that could go wrong, did. Dad said, "Dad got 2,000 roosters and 500 hens and at any given time you could look out and see 50 roosters fighting. The hens got loose, the turkeys drowned--we raised 75 turkeys from eggs and they were so stupid they stood in water that was freezing, because there was an oil leak there and it began as warm liquid but then their feet froze into the ground when it cooled, and they froze there. Dad( PHY) said the hens would come back to where they were fed but all the loose ones went wild. We raised 100 quail from eggs and dogs got them all ...it proved cheaper to import feathers from overseas."
Again, Grandma said "The farm or me." Grandpa chose her, "wisely," she said frankly.
But you see how someone will research something someone got wrong and everyone contnues to say it and as you just said, call it "well-researched and documented."
Anyway sorry for the confusion. Ted certainly learned what he could from PHY. Thanks for letting me get this off my chest. Have a great day--I did enjoy your article. I hope I have cleared up a few misconceptions that keep being repeated and "end-noted."

Edited to remove "smilies" to preserve this valuable piece of history.