Muskies

Sometimes a fishing trip is more than a fishing trip.

It was just the three of us – Pop, Phil, and me fishing for Muskies.

What in the world is a muskie?  It’s a type of pike found in the lakes of Canada and northern Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota.  Muskies are big old badasses with a mouth full of sharp teeth and an unpleasant attitude.  It’s the top predator in their territory; they eat what they want, when they want.  If you hook one, they’re fighters who will jump out of the water and make powerful runs away from or under your boat.  The state of Wisconsin only allows you to keep a muskie that’s at least 50 inches long. That’s over four feet, about the size of your average fourth grader.

On the day of our trip, a Thursday in August of 1968, Pop was 49, Phil 22, and I was 13.  Phil was my oldest brother. 

This was a most unusual group.  Normally there were several more of my four brothers, a couple of uncles and a handful of male cousins.  Never any females.

The following week Phil was going to Vietnam, and he wanted to try for a muskie one more time, before joining that mistake of a war.  Pop probably wished to be alone with Phil, his favorite son.  I still don’t know why I was there.  It may have been because I could row a boat all day without complaint.  If I rowed, Pop wouldn’t have to rent a motor.  I was kind of a free two horsepower Evinrude.

Phil had graduated from college about fifteen months earlier.  He did very well in school and immediately went to work for the CIA, where he re-wrote reports that came in from field agents.  He produced documents that were read by the President.  Apparently he hated the CIA because after less than a year he quit, despite knowing that the Army would ship him to Vietnam as soon as it could.  He never wanted to be a soldier. Phil wanted to be a journalist like our old man.  

Pop wrote for The Chicago Daily News, an afternoon newspaper.  He started there in 1937, the week after graduating from Morgan Park High School on the south side.  While Phil was a good student. Pop wasn’t.  He liked to sleep late, smoke cigarettes on the corner, and hang out in the park.  It took him five years to escape Morgan Park high, and no college would touch him.  By 1968, he had worked in journalism for thirty years, except for a grim four year stint in the Army during WWII.  He was drafted and fought the Japanese in the jungles of Papua New Guinea.  He was injured and due to nerve damage, he couldn’t move his right foot.  He could bend his knee but not his ankle or toes.  He had more PTSD than anyone was aware of, at the time.  Nonetheless he had a spectacular newspaper career.  He saw the world and met Presidents, Popes and murderers.

So there I was with an emotionally and physically wounded WWII jungle fighter who was seeing his first born son off to another jungle war.

The weather was awful – with temperatures in the low 60’s, intermittent rain, and strong winds out of the north.  We were the only ones on the water.

They started fishing at about 9:30.  At this point in my life, I had quit fishing.  Since I had never seen anyone catch a muskie, I stopped believing in them. To me they were a myth created by the fishing tackle – industrial complex.   Also, I noticed that fish did not like  getting caught; they’re not thrilled by the experience. So I made a deal with all the fish;  I won’t kill them, if they won’t kill me.  That’s worked great, so far.

Pop and Phil flailed the water for the next two hours and didn’t get a bite.  When it started raining harder, Pop told me to row over to the bar on the other side of the lake.  That’s another thing I noticed.  Pop only fished at lakes with bars within rowing distance.  Apparently he thought the fish liked bars, as much as he did.

Lunch consisted of three cheeseburgers and twenty pounds of fries.  They ordered  Kingsbury beers and I got a coke.  After we finished the burgers, Pop ordered another beer.  The rain persisted, and we started playing pinball.  That went on for an hour.  Pop won consistently.  I guess part of his misspent high school career and time in the army involved playing pinball.

During the games Pop and Phil remembered covering Richard Speck, who killed eight student nurses in Chicago one night in 1966.  They both reported on the story.  Pop for the Daily News and Phil for the United Press International, a wire service. That was Phil’s summer job.

The Speck story led to another tale from our father.  In the early sixties, as a columnist, he took up the cause of a man on death row named Paul Crump.  Through Pop’s efforts and the help of many others, the Governor of Illinois commuted Crump’s sentence to life.  In their last meeting after his life had been saved, Crump told our father this story. 

Inmates on death row in Cook County jail had an agreement.  They never interfered if any of them attempted suicide.  Crump and the prisoner across from his cell had a side deal, an addendum, if you will.  If either man chose to kill himself, he agreed to make a fist with one of his hands if he saw an afterlife.  If he saw no afterlife, he would make a fist with the other hand.

One night the man in the cell facing Crump’s hung himself.  When the kicking and gagging stopped Crump looked at his friend and saw the right hand  was closed.  The guy had sent the signal.

Unfortunately Crump had forgotten whether the right hand meant there was an afterlife or not.

This was a typical Pop story.  Most people would have been taken aback by all this, Phil and I were not.  We grew up with this guy and knew he had seen things during and after the war.  We were just learning about more things.

Around 1:30 we got back on the water.  Again they didn’t hook any muskies – remember they’re a myth.

The rain came back and they gave up around 4:30.

On the hour-long ride back to the resort, for the first time in my life, I heard Pop talk in detail about his war experience.  He didn’t talk long.  We knew he was a scout who went into the jungle with native Papuan soldiers as guides.  These guys knew the jungle like my father knew his southside neighborhood.  My old man favored the leader of the Papuan battalion, Tapiole.  

(source: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C171238)

As a scout, our father was expected to walk into the jungle, sometimes for days, and observe the enemy, but not kill them. Then he would return to division headquarters and report on what he saw. Here’s the story he told, as I remember it.

Tapiole and I went on several patrols over about two weeks.  Each time we reported that the Japanese were chopping wood on a particular ridge.  Finally Major Archie Roosevelt, President Teddy Roosevelt’s son, said, “If they’re chopping that much wood, there can’t be any jungle left.

On the next patrol, Tapiole and I heard another lone Japanese soldier chopping away.  I whispered to Tapiole, “Get the ax.”  He crept away and came back ten minutes later with a bloody ax. Tapiole never used a gun; he preferred using his knife or a club.

We came back to the camp and reported to Major Roosevelt.  I put the ax on the table and stated that one Japanese soldier wasn’t chopping wood on the ridge any longer.

The car was very quiet for the rest of the ride.

The next week, Phil went to Vietnam.  He came home a year later and our brother, Pete, was shipped across the Pacific to continue the battle.

Over the last fifty years, I’ve thought about that day and why Pop told his story about Tapiole and the bloody ax.  Maybe our father wanted to let Phil know that he might have to do some awful things, but he’ll be okay.  

I’ll never know because Phil and Pop are both gone now.

I do know that neither of them ever caught a keeper muskie because they’re a myth.