HOMETOWN

I was a boy of two minds when the temperatures warmed up and the days got longer.

Spring brought baseball, of course, as it did for many kids of my generation. I’d read reports in the newspaper about the Citrus and Cactus leagues. Promos for the game of the week would show up on television. My friends and I would ready our arms in the backyard. Would this be the year I learned how to throw a curveball? Growing feet meant a new pair of cleats, which without question would allow me to run the bases faster and cover more ground as an infielder. The hopes of an aspiring ballplayer at the dawn of a new season are many. 

But as things began to bloom outside our house in Southern Pines — white dogwood at the top of the driveway, azaleas of several colors on either side of the front door — my mind also was on fishing.

No doubt my father took me with him to an area pond when I was too young to remember it. Even if an outing ended with a bare stringer, he went home happy, the weight of everyday life seeming to have lessened a bit with every cast — the cigarettes and beers probably played a part too.

In my earliest, vague recollections of fishing, I am holding a bamboo pole and doing my best to follow Dad’s instructions to pay attention to the movement of the cork signifying a snacking sunfish below the surface. (Despite the fact that most of our “corks” were white and red plastic spheres, we never called them anything else.)

With rare exceptions, our fishing dreams were much bigger than our catches. Curt Gowdy, the marlin-catching host of The American Sportsman on ABC, had nothing to fear. We never needed to look and see if there was a taxidermist listed in the Moore County phone book.

Once, casting a purple worm off a dock at Badin Lake, Dad caught a largemouth weighing 3 or 4 pounds. The size of his smile as he posed for a picture looked as if he’d landed a lunker. That same trip I hooked a large carp, but it wriggled away before I could lift it out of the water and document the catch.

Our best haul came late one afternoon at a private farm pond in Eagle Springs on the property of one of Dad’s schoolmates. Going for bream, earthworms were the customary bait. Occasionally, Dad would splurge for a couple dozen crickets. But for this trip, we were armed with a special bait, a jar of catalpa worms.

They were velvety, brightly colored creatures that appeared every couple of years on a tree in our yard. Once harvested, we’d store them, much to Mom’s displeasure, in the produce drawer of the refrigerator. Threaded on our No. 8 hooks in Eagle Springs, the catalpa worms worked like magic. We caught dozens of bream bigger than one of Dad’s large hands on an angling day like no other.

Fishing was mostly about the preparation and the quest. Dad had an old aluminum tackle box that opened to reveal two rows of slots to hold hooks and lures. I pored over its contents between fishing outings, envisioning a healthy bass being attracted to one of the topwater plugs. I graduated from a bamboo pole to a hand-me-down rod and reel from my father.

It was a big occasion when I had saved enough of my allowance money to walk into Tate’s Hardware and buy a Zebco Model 33 spincast reel. Buying a Zebco 33 was a rite of passage, like getting your first pocketknife.

The Zebco 33 was a revolutionary design when R.D. Hull invented it in the 1950s, when it sold for a whopping price of $19.50. With the monofilament line enclosed in a metal cover and featuring a push-button action, the design was backlash proof and easy to cast.

Appropriately equipped, I at least looked the part. A Zebco 33 did everything but make a fish bite what was at end of your line.