Take a boy fishing

Grant Grisamore holds up first fish he ever caught. June 1991.

(Photo taken by one proud father.)

I spent my entire Sunday afternoon at the river. It was a pleasant May day, soft and breezy.

After church, we went up to Jack Caldwell’s place at Dames Ferry and enjoyed lunch with our Sunday School class. Later in the day, we were downstream, where the Ocmulgee bends through the Shirley Hills neighborhood for a churchwide picnic at the home of Don and Norma Banks.

I didn’t do any fishing, although some of my friends did up at Jack's – casting lines into the shallow pools between the rocks. It was a perfect day to wet a hook, and the river wasn’t as low as I thought it would be.

When I got home, I pulled up an e-mail from one of sisters, who reminded me that my maternal grandfather would have been 100 years old on Sunday.

I hadn’t even thought about it until then.

My granddaddy, Mr. William Elmer Richards, died 15 years ago this spring. So he never even lived to see his 90th birthday, either.

But how will I remember him?

He taught me to fish.

It was somehow appropriate that I was hanging around the river on what would have been his 100th birthday.

Here’s a tribute I wrote on May 10, 1992.

What we choose to keep in this world reveals something about our values. The personal inventory we collect is like pages in a book, each forming chapters in a human story.

I’m glad my grandfather never threw away his fishing gear.

His name was W. E. Richards and he was 84 years old when he died last month. Although he had lived in Roswell for the past 15 years, he will be remembered for the many years he was a high school vocational agriculture teacher in Hawkinsville.

He taught countless young people how to plant a tree and fix a clutch on an old truck. On Friday nights, he helped sell tickets to Red Devil football games.

I will remember him for teaching me to fish.

My grandmother now has begun the arduous process of going through his belongings. It is sad because we miss him. Yet there are many happy memories enveloped in his keepsakes.

She wanted me to have his old manual Remington typewriter and a wooden walking cane.

While visiting her a few days ago, I opened my grandfather’s tool shed in the back yard. This was the kind of place where he was always in his element, tinkering with tools and planning his garden.

Wherever he lived, you always could count on his basement or greenhouse being a haven of wire, wood and old parts. He didn’t recycle; he restocked. He figured he could find a use for everything. And he practically could.

In a corner of the shed, I discovered two old fishing poles, his tackle box and a net. I doubt my grandfather had used them in several years. But he had kept them, and just seeing them stirred my senses.

Suddenly I was 10 years old and standing on the banks of the small lake in my grandfather’s front yard in Hawkinsville. He was teaching me how to bait a hook and blow gnats on a hot summer’s day.

I almost could hear the crickets chirping from the back room at the store where he would take me to buy bait. I remembered the familiar tug on the 10-pound test line, and the combination of fear and excitement that always rushed through me.

I never was entirely landlocked as a child, growing up around water no matter where my family moved. When we live in LaGrange, my father kept his boat at nearby West Point Lake. We could see the Elizabeth River from our home in Virginia. When we lived in Jacksonville, the St. Johns River was in our backyard.

But, of all the fish I’ve ever caught, the ones I remember most came from my grandfather’s lake in Hawkinsville. And it wasn’t actually a lake. It was a pond, with a tiny island near one end. As a youngster, I imagined the opposite shore as miles away.

Years before artist Butler Brown had his paintings hanging in Jimmy Carter’s White House, he looked out the window of my grandparents’ home and was inspired to do an oil painting of a little boy fishing from the dock.

There is no telling how many bass, bream and catfish my grandfather pulled from lakes and streams across South Georgia. Both rods he left are well-worn steel. On one of them is a South Bend Model 550A casting reel, first manufactured in 1936.

I opened his Sears tackle box and found it stuffed with the usual bobbers and hooks, but not the kind you find today on the shelves of Wal-Mart. There were nylon-braided and catgut fishing lines. Some of the lures were made of wood and hand-painted. But I be they still catch fish.

In one tray, I found a small tin box of split shot. It was the size of a match box, and opened in the same fashion.

On the bottom of the box was the inscription: “Take a Boy Fishing Today.’’

My grandfather live those words and left behind the legacy of those words. After all, he took a boy fishing.

And now, after years of waiting for my young sons to grow old enough to wet a hook somewhere, I expect it’s time for me to do the same.