Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood Page 4

  That afternoon, Rip and I were building a dam across the creek

  that ran through our ravine when I heard Mom calling me from the back porch.

  “David Henry Crehore,” she yelled, “come here this instant!”

  The use of my full name meant I was in trouble; Mom must have

  discovered that I had raided her candy, but I couldn’t imagine how.

  When I got to the house Mom was in the kitchen waiting for me,

  her arms folded across her ribs. The box of candy was on the table.

  Somehow, she had found me out.

  “Shame on you, you greedy thing!” she said. “There were sixty

  pieces of candy in this box to begin with. We each had a piece last night, so there should be fifty-seven left, but I just counted and there are only fifty-three.”

  “Someone,” she continued, giving me a case-hardened look, “has

  taken four pieces of candy without permission, and it wasn’t me.”

  No one can be as outraged and offended as a small boy who has

  been found guilty on circumstantial evidence. I folded my arms in 28

  The Fannie Farmer Mystery

  duplication of Mom’s pose. “Well, it wasn’t me either!” I lied. “I didn’t even know where the damn candy was!”

  “You watch your mouth,” Mom said. “Just wait until your father

  gets home!”

  Turning on my heel, I stamped down the back hall and slammed

  the door behind me. I crossed the yard in big strides and went back into the ravine to sulk. Rip trotted along with me, and when we

  were out of sight of the house I sat on the ground and gathered him into my arms. He licked my face while I sniffled and muttered dire threats. “It’s not fair!” I said to Rip. “No one but my mother would actually count candy. What’s the matter, doesn’t she trust me?”

  After a while I calmed down and finished building my dam. A

  pool was forming behind it when I heard Mom calling me again.

  What the hell does she want now? I wondered, as I climbed the side of the ravine.

  When I reached the yard, Mom came running and enveloped me

  in a smothering hug. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Davy,” she said. “It wasn’t you who took the candy.”

  I looked up at her. “Who was it?” I asked.

  “Well, you’ll never believe it . . . ,” Mom said. At that moment Dad chugged up the driveway in the Studebaker. He got out of

  the car and walked over to us. “What’s going on?” he asked. Mom

  released me from the hug.

  “Mice or no mice, Fritz has got to go back to the shipyard!” she said. “Come inside and I’ll tell you about it.”

  Dad and I sat at the kitchen table while Mom dumped ground

  coffee in our big enamelware percolator and put it on the stove.

  “It’s like this,” she began. “I put the box of candy on the bottom shelf in my bedroom closet last night, and about two o’clock this afternoon I thought I’d have one of those raspberry bonbons. I

  opened the box and found that there were four pieces missing.”

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  The Fannie Farmer Mystery

  She reached across the table and took my hand in a warm grip. “I blamed Davy and gave him Hail Columbia,” she said, “but a little later I decided to put the candy somewhere else. I went back up to my closet, and you’ll never guess what I found.”

  “One of the neighbors,” Dad said.

  “No, no, no,” Mom said, laughing. “It was a chipmunk. The

  cutest little chipmunk, sitting up on his haunches and eating a

  Jordan almond. He was holding it in his little hands and licking the sugar.”

  “But I forgot that Fritz was with me—you know how he follows

  me around—and when he saw the chipmunk he went for it. For a

  minute there were animals everywhere, and then the chipmunk

  went under my shoe rack and just disappeared. I found a little hole in the paneling behind the shoe rack, so that must be how he got in and out.”

  “Anyway, that’s why Fritz has got to go back,” Mom said. “I don’t mind him killing mice, but if he killed a chipmunk and put it on the telephone stand, I couldn’t bear it!”

  She opened the Fannie Farmer box. “This will spoil our suppers,”

  she said, “but what the heck.” She took out a piece of candy for herself, one for Dad, and two for me. “I’m sorry, Davy,” she said. I blushed brick red, but I ate the candy.

  “OK, Fritz goes,” Dad said. “But Charlotte, there’s one thing I

  want to get straight. When you went to your closet the first time and discovered the candy was missing, you said you opened the box. Was the lid on it?”

  Mom was at the stove, boiling some wieners. She looked back

  over her shoulder. “Yes, I’m sure it was,” she said.

  “Incredible,” Dad said, and changed the subject.

  After supper, he and I went down to the workshop in the base-

  ment. He hunted through a pile of scrap lumber until he found a

  slab of elm about an inch thick.

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  The Fannie Farmer Mystery

  “I’ll nail this over the hole in the paneling,” Dad explained. “A beaver couldn’t chew through old elm, let alone a chipmunk.” He

  cut the slab to size and began to sand it.

  “A remarkable animal is the chipmunk,” he said, glancing over at me. “Your mother saw him in the closet, so we know that he found his way into the house, crawled behind the walls until he got to the closet, chewed through the paneling, took the lid off the box, and ate four pieces of candy.”

  “That much I can believe. What I can’t believe is that he put the lid back on when he was through,” Dad said. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  He winked at me and went back to his sanding.

  31

  l

  The Viggle Years

  I can’t remember the first fish I ever caught. It was probably a bluegill or perch that fell for an angleworm.

  But I do remember the first largemouth bass. I could take you to the same lake tomorrow, find the same little bay, and cast to the same lily pad.

  It was a Saturday morning in June 1951. Dad rowed a creaky

  rented boat across the flat calm of Hartlaub Lake, a thirty-acre pothole southwest of Manitowoc. Rosy light fanned over the horizon from the sunrise that was on its way.

  Dad rounded a point and let the boat drift toward a lily pad bed on the east shore. He held a forefinger to his lips and pointed to my rod, meaning that I should pick it up, very quietly.

  “Make an easy cast to the outside edge of the pads,” Dad

  whispered. “Wait for the splash rings to go away. Count to thirty.

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  The Viggle Years

  Then give the plug a jerk so it’ll ‘bloop’ on the surface. Reel up the slack line. Wait for the rings to disappear. Count to thirty and bloop it again.”

  We drifted within a reasonable cast of the pads. I was pretty good with my trusty, solid-steel True Temper bait-casting rod and precious Pflueger Supreme reel. I swooshed the rod back and launched a ponderous, red-and-white Heddon Chugger plug toward the pads.

  It landed with a splat, almost on target. The rings disappeared. A puff of predawn breeze riffled the water. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Bloop!

  Swirl! Hit! Bolts of lightning coursed up the line, down the rod, and into my hands. “Nail him!” Dad yelled, and I leaned back to set the hook.

  Wow! This was no fussy little bait-stealing bluegill, but a fish with a mind of its own! Nothing Dad said during the sleepy drive from town had prepared me for a fish that actually fought back,

  that yanked the rod tip down into the water and pulled line off

  the Pflueger against the pressure of my thumb on the spool. Down, down he bored, and then shot to the surface, jumping clear of the water and
shaking the hooks of the Chugger with a terrifying

  rattle.

  But in a minute or two it was over. Dad scooped up the bass with a flick of the landing net, and I was face to face with sixteen inches of mean, green largemouth. My bass was only three times as long as the big cedar plug he had tried to eat. He wasn’t Old Beelzebub, the ten-pound, bulge-bellied bass of my dreams, but as far as I was

  concerned he was the biggest fish in Wisconsin.

  Dad popped the Chugger’s massive hooks out of the bass’s

  mouth. He handed the fish to me. I held it fearfully by the lower jaw and felt the prickles of its teeth.

  “What d’you say we give him a second chance?” Dad asked. I

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  The Viggle Years

  knew what that meant. I slipped the bass into the water and watched it flash out of sight.

  My first bass, come and gone in about five minutes, only a

  memory. Loss and gain, pride and pain swirled around in my head. I had wanted that bass, and yet I didn’t really want it dead. I glanced up at Dad. He was smiling at me, a steady smile of approval, man to man. I swallowed hard and felt the aching throat that comes before tears. But I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was eight years old and had to take the rough with the smooth.

  “Let’s see if we can catch a bigger one,” Dad said. And so we fished through our full battery of lures: the Chugger, a Bass-O-Reno, an Al Foss Oriental Wiggler with a pork frog on it, a Shannon Twin-Spin, a Creek Chub Pikie Minnow, a Jitterbug, a Flatfish, and a Pearl

  Wobbler made of genuine Ohio River clam shell. But by ten o’clock it was obvious that the bite was over. It was time to go home and mow the lawn.

  Dad rowed back to the little landing where a farmer rented boats.

  He tossed the anchor, a coffee can full of concrete, up on the grass.

  We unloaded our rods and stood looking out over the lake. Dad

  thumbed some Walnut into his pipe, struck a match on the sole of his shoe, and lit it.

  “This is a nice little lake,” Dad said. “We’ll have to come back some time.”

  But we weren’t back—not for two years. The shipyard at Mani-

  towoc was busier than ever, and Dad was the engineer who had to

  inspect construction and repairs. He started working six- and seven-day weeks. He’d leave before I got up in the morning and get home late, eating a warmed-up supper at the kitchen table, still wearing his dirty white coveralls. Men from the fabrication shop would call at two in the morning, demanding that Dad drive down to the yard to approve a weld or witness a hydrostatic test.

  34

  The Viggle Years

  For the rest of that summer and all of the next, there was no time for Saturday mornings at Hartlaub Lake. I began to hate the shipyard, even though it put gas in the Studebaker and meatloaf on the table. Then the yard paid an odd dividend.

  During the winter of ’52–’53, Dad got to know the elderly

  Finnish chief engineer of a small ship that was laid up at the yard for repairs. The ship’s captain and most of its crew headed home as soon as the boilers were cold, but the old chief, the cook, and the second mate were left behind as a skeleton force of shipkeepers. The cook and the second mate spent most of their time ashore at the Westfield Bar, but the chief preferred black coffee, fish stories, and his pipe.

  So did Dad, and before long he was eating most of his lunches and midnight snacks with the chief, who told tales of Finland’s giant pike and salmon in broken, out-of-tune English.

  One night in January, after a pot of eggshell coffee and a couple of corned-beef-and-onion sandwiches, the chief handed Dad a half dozen little cardboard boxes.

  “Second engineer, he’s coming back pretty soon, then I go home.

  You like to fish so you try these,” the chief said.

  The boxes held peculiar little minnow-shaped wooden fishing

  lures, painted blue above and white below, each with a U-shaped

  piece of celluloid under its chin. They didn’t look like much to Dad, but the chief was enthusiastic.

  “They made from balsavood,” the chief said. “They float. You

  pull them, they go down and they . . .” He made a sinuous motion with his hand.

  “Swim?” Dad said. “Wiggle?”

  “Ya!” the chief laughed. “Viggle! A man in my town make them,

  catch big pike.”

  Dad didn’t know it, but he had been given what might have been

  the first Rapala lures in North America, handmade in Finland by

  35

  The Viggle Years

  Lauri Rapala. Millions of fish that had never seen a balsa minnow were waiting, stupid and hungry, for the first Rapala to viggle by.

  But a foot of ice covered those fish at the time, and Dad left the lures on his desk at the shipyard until May.

  And then came a Saturday morning with no welding, shell

  plating, or tank tops to inspect.

  Dad and I were back at Hartlaub Lake. We rented the same little

  boat with the same coffee-can anchor, the same leaks and squeaks.

  We tied two of the balsa minnows on our brand-new Shakespeare

  spinning rods and rowed over to the lily pads that were the scene of my victory two years before. We cast our minnows to opposite ends of the bed. We waited until the rings disappeared. We counted to thirty. We pulled the minnows down to make them viggle.

  And Smash! Slurp! We each hooked a bass. After those two, there

  were two more. And then two more.

  Imagine yourself an innocent farm boy who’s at the circus for the first time. You blunder into the wrong tent and discover the beautiful bareback rider in the act of removing her tutu. You’ve never seen such a thing. She looks over her shoulder at you, tosses her long blonde hair, and crooks her finger. You know it’s too good to be true, but you figure, what the hell.

  That’s the way the bass reacted to our balsa minnows that morn-

  ing. The lonesome bass of Hartlaub Lake didn’t just bite the Finnish vigglers, they slobbered over them. They knew they’d regret it, but it didn’t stop them for a second.

  Our first slow row around the lake yielded thirty-two bass. The

  second time around we caught seventeen more, along with a couple of walleyes and a pike of nightmare size. We let them all go.

  Dad was counting. “Enough,” he said. “That’s forty-nine bass,

  and there’s no point making pigs of ourselves for an even fifty.

  Besides, I’ve got a backlash here that’s like the Sunday crossword—

  it’ll take a week to work it out.”

  36

  The Viggle Years

  Dad picked up the oars and started to row back to the landing.

  “Cut off those vigglers and hide them in the tackle box,” he said,

  “and tie on some Pikie Minnows. The farmer who rents the boats

  has been watching us, and I don’t want him to see what we’ve really been using.”

  At the dock, the farmer was enthusiastic. “Jeez, you guys were

  really catching ’em, enso?” he said, all smiles. He looked carefully at the lures dangling from our rod tips. “Pikie Minnows, eh? Green

  Pikie Minnows. Well, well!”

  After the farmer left Dad sat down on an overturned boat and lit his pipe.

  “I have never, ever, had a day of fishing like this in my life, and neither have you, nor are you likely to again,” Dad said. “If we’d kept all those bass, we would have cleaned out the lake. We’ve got to keep these vigglers quiet. Very quiet. Otherwise everybody will be wanting some.”

  And then began a halcyon time in our lives: the viggle years. Our vigglers caught bass on High Lake in Vilas County and just about everywhere else up north. They caught walleyes and muskies on the Big Chip. They caught giant crappies on the Mississippi. And there was a day among the smallmouth on the Red Cedar River that was

  absolutely obsc
ene.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out what was happening. A fish is a simple soul, and if you show him a lure he’s never seen, chances are he’ll take a shot at it. But if he hits that lure and gets off, or watches other fish being caught on it, he’ll think twice the next time it comes by.

  The fish we were catching had learned to avoid the big wooden

  plugs thrown at them by thousands of fishermen. In time they

  would learn to avoid vigglers, too. But it would take them a long time to learn about vigglers when only two fishermen had them.

  By now you’ve guessed the drawback to all this success: We

  couldn’t tell anybody about it. For awhile, Dad and I were probably 37

  The Viggle Years

  the most productive fishermen in the state of Wisconsin, but we

  couldn’t let on! It was awful. Other fishermen would see us catching fish; they’d ease over our way to see how we were doing it, and as soon as they’d get within a hundred yards, we’d have to cut off the vigglers and tie on something else, usually Pikie Minnows. It got to where we’d keep a pair of Pikie Minnows hanging on the gunwale of the boat, so they would be handy.

  But it wasn’t long before the gods of fish and fairness got their revenge. Our vigglers began to disappear. On one horrible day, two were stolen right off our rod tips at a boat landing. A month or so later, another was lost to a musky that simply overwhelmed us. Then a smallmouth bass the size of a sewer lid ran off with one in Jackson Harbor. After that, we fished the remaining two vigglers with heavy line and tuna-gauge wire leaders that killed their viggle.

  The final blow was a stump on the bottom of the Manitowish

  River that claimed viggler number five during a bass fishing trip in 1956. We spent a half hour trying to pull it loose before the line finally snapped.

  There was a brief period of silence. Then Dad cut the last viggler from the end of my line and held it up. “We should have kept a pair for seed,” he said. “As it is, this guy’s like the last passenger pigeon.

  He’s extinct and doesn’t know it.”