The King of Fayetteville

      Here I am, just lying in bed. Its nearly midnight, and I should have been asleep by now. I've just finished writing about our early married life at Fayetteville,  and thoughts of those early days of Fayetteville are still running through my head, things I haven't thought about for a  long time. A story begins to emerge and slowly comes together, a really good story. I know what I've  got to do. If I wait until morning, that story will just have crawled back into the dark recesses of my ancient mind, where its been hiding for many, many years. And, it may never surface again.

     I ease out of bed, can't wake Barbara. Too late. “Where are you going?” I tell her. She said, “Are you kidding me?”

     When I was a kid, growing up in Wing, I caught lots of catfish, and we needed them. They sure tasted good, after a diet of salt pork. But they weren't real big. In the early days of Fayetteville, I had access to larger rivers, and I thought more and more about cat fishing. Now, I should tell you. Cat fishing in Fayetteville is nothing like the Delta. Catching two or three nice catfish in the Delta is failure. In the mountains, it's hitting the jackpot.

      The year was 1968.  I saw a picture in the paper one day, of an old man with what looked to me like, at the time, an unbelievably large string of catfish. The caption under the picture was, “ Dick Dyer does it again!” Seems Dick Dyer was about the best cat fisherman around Fayetteville. I wished I could do that, but it seemed out of my reach. I should also tell you, Dick and I were totally river fishermen. A completely different game from the big lakes of today.

     Well, as it happened, shortly afterwards we moved into a trailer park at Anderson Place. Would you care to guess who my neighbor, right across the street was? You guessed it. Dick Dyer. I befriended him, I cultivated him, I quizzed him. After a while, Dick's MO began to emerge. I studied his techniques. He even let me go fishing with him, once. Well, he began to see that I could be a competitor somewhere down the line, and Dick dearly relished being the best river catfish catcher around. Maintaining that status consumed his whole life. He pretty well cut me off from any more information.

     But I knew enough. I began to catch more and more fish, emulating his methods. Dick was OK with that, he was catching more, and bigger fish. We went along there, nip and tuck, for several years. Then I slowly began to catch as many fish as he did, and probably about the same in total weight.  He still had the largest fish, 16 pounds. Every time he saw me, he told me about that 16 pound catfish.. He never let me forget about that 16 pound catfish.

     Barb and I were coming into our last months at Fayetteville. One really deep hole I fished a time or two that spring, with my limb lines probably tied to limbs I know now were too  solid, with very little give, just kept getting broke. The lines were 120 pound test or so, and I couldn't understand it at the time.

     Barbara and I were walking along the river bank, one day in June, on a picnic. I saw two old watermelon rinds lying on the bank, and they were just covered with hundreds of June bugs. I had never heard of anyone using June bugs to catch catfish, but I knew that in the late summer, they often fed by just skimming along the surface, picking up floating bugs and whatever they could find.  I had seen them doing that at night. After Barbara had walked on toward the car, I went back, pitched the rinds in the river, and the June bugs all floated up. I just scooped them all up, put them in a paper bag, and stuck them in the car. When we got home, I wrapped them up real tight in a freezer bag, and stuck them way back in the back of the freezer, out of sight. Barbara put no stock in mixing fish bait and food in the freezer. Late in the summer, I was watching TV one day, and I heard Barbara scream. I ran to the kitchen. There she was, the bag in one hand, a handful of June bugs in the other. Seems she had been going through freezer bags to find something to cook, stuck her hand in, and pulled out the June bugs. I caught it pretty good over that. As Barbara settled down some, a little later, I said, “ I've just got time for one more fishin' trip before we move, and no telling when I'll get to fish again. I'll get every one of those June bugs outta' here then..”  She agreed. Catch Barbara when she's not screaming with a handful of June bugs, and she's a great gal.

      Next week rolled around. I asked John Philpott if he wanted to go with me. Said he guess so, nothing better to do. We went back to that hole, where the White river and the West fork of the White river join, where my lines had been broken last spring. This time, I had a new idea. We were fishing with cane poles, very limber, and we stuck them way, way back in that mud bank. I floated each hook right on top of the water, each with a June bug on it. We ran the lines at midnight, and had a couple of ten pounders and a whole passel of smaller catfish. But, right where the two rivers join, that pole was going absolutely crazy! Ever tried to get a 25 pound catfish into a small landing net? We finally did. The next morning, we had a couple more ten pounders and another bunch of smaller catfish.. Then, we approached that last pole, right where the two rivers join. The pole was completely pulled out of the bank,  but it was still lying there, mostly out of the water. Lying in the water, either just too worn out  for one more flip of the tail, or having learned that was as far as he could go, was the brother to the last big one. He was also 25 pounds. Well, when I got home, the first thing I did was take them over to Dick Dyer. Dick came out, I held them up as well as I could. Didn't say a thing, I didn't have to. He never said a word to me. Just turned sorta yellow-green, turned around, dropped his head, and walked back  into the house. I never saw Dick again. We moved to Hannibal a couple of days later.

     About two weeks after we got to Hannibal, a letter chock-full of pictures arrived. A 40 pound catfish, and a whole bunch in the 20 pound range. The letter just verified the weights,  And in the picture an old man was smiling. Smiling right straight out at me. That's all. Not another word. The return name on the envelope was Dick Dyer.

     I knew Dick didn't have my address. But he managed to find it. And I also knew he had found my Glory Hole. All I could figure out was, he must have ragged John Philpott into telling him. I was pretty put out by this whole thing for awhile, then after I settled down some, I began to think about it a little differently. I had used Dick's methods, and his hard earned experience. He used me to locate the Glory hole. Fair's fair.

     I've never been back to that Glory Hole, but some day I will. Over the years, I think I've figured it out. There is a dam on the White River, a quarter mile up stream. Catfish swim upstream. Until they're stopped by a dam. The small fish stay there, in that shallow hole. The big fish go back downriver to the first very deep hole. Right where the two rivers join. In the Glory Hole. And there they still lie. Year after year, just getting bigger and bigger. Just waiting for me to come back and challenge them again. But Dick Dyer passed away many years ago, and when he died, he was still the King of the River Catfish Catchers in Fayetteville---and it just won't be the same. Who else in the world could care as much about the size of the catfish I might catch there as Dick Dyer did? Nobody, that's who.

     For all you other fishermen out there, I know you can find my Glory Hole from what I've told you here. But where will you find a whole sack full of  June bugs?