(Book 2!)

Or at least you should have, considering I caught a whale of a lot of fish when I was growing up, mainly at Lake Thunderbird, plus the occasional family safari to Lake Texoma.

After my Dad left the Fire Department, he bought a modest tri-hull boat with a small Evinrude motor. It didn’t look like much, but Dad had done his homework, and it was a workhorse.

The tri-hull meant it could handle choppy water well, and its open design allowed five or more to fish at a time.

And since it was usually just Mom, Dad and me aboard, we had enough room to fish and play volleyball.

We went to the lake a lot.

And because my Mom was one of those naturally well-organised people, unlike her baby boy, when we mobilized for the lake, we did so with the speed and efficiency of the U.S. Navy.

From the time packing started mid-Friday afternoon at 1332 Nebraska, to the time we headed east to the lake, only about 15 minutes had ticked off the clock.

Okay, I might be a little off on that.

While the "Mom and Dad" Navy was moving along at 900 mph, I was in the backyard with my Zebco 303 rod-and-reel combo, casting a heavy sinker into a minnow bucket from 20 yards away, and at birds that liked to peck all the dog poop.

My only real jobs during the mobilization were to a) search the house and round up every single can of OFF! mosquito repellent… and, uh, okay, that was about it.  

One job, which I never seemed to do right.

So on the way out, Mom would grab the OFF! cans I’d overlooked, give me a “look”, and away we’d go.

My Dad only allowed two stops on the way to the lake: getting ice and beer at the quickie mart thingee, and minnows at Art’s Bait House, near the corner of Old Highway Nine and Alemeda.

I loved Art’s Bait House, hidden away under trees and an old roof; it looked like it had been there 100 years.       

There were separate concrete tanks for small, medium and Whale-sized minnows.  
And the powerful, algae-covered air pumps always had each tank bubbling like crazy.

When Mrs. Art or her helpers would scoop their big dip net out of the water, it would be filled with a million super-squirmy minnows, shimmering like silver.

I think three dozen small minnows cost $1. But Mrs. Art was always generous, and she’d give us a lot more than that.

Which was a good thing and a bad thing.

The good thing was we almost never ran out of minnows.

The bad thing was that each minnow was gripped in a life-and-death battle to breathe with the other minnows jammed into our three metal minnow buckets.

When we were on the lake, Dad would add a little bit of ice to each minnow bucket. More importantly, every few minutes he’d holler out to the young deck hand, me, to PUMP THE MINNOWS!

So I’d lift up the inside part and pump it up and down a few times to aerate the water. And usually to splash water on me and Mom, because I was not the most careful kid in the world.

If the fish were not biting, fishing was the worst torture ever inflicted on this hyper-active boy child.

And this hyper-active boy child would in turn be the worst torture ever inflicted on his parents.

“Can’t we go in? The stupid fish are never going to start biting...”

But my Mom was not a quitter when it came to fishing, no sir.

So Dad would once again pump up the Coleman lanterns and reposition them on the sides of the boat. If one of the twin mantles had been broken, he’d replace it.

For some reason I loved watching him do it.

He’d scrape remove the glass shield and scrape off the fragile, ashen mantle. He'd slide a new mantle onto the burner, like it was a baby sock or something, then tie it securely at the top.

Then came the cool bit.

Dad would use a kitchen match to burn the mantle. For some magical reason, only then could it emit light while burning Coleman fuel.  If I had yet to get under Dad’s skin, I might even be allowed to light the lantern.

The lanterns would attract and burn to death about a billion mayflies in a few minutes, which would fall into the lake and encourage the crappie to start biting.

You’d drop your minnows straight to the bottom, then slowly reel up a time or two, then wait, then reel, etc.

Woe be it to you if you caught the first crappie and couldn’t remember how many cranks you were off the bottom! 

We’d usually get back to shore late, too late to clean the fish, so they’d all be dumped into an ice chest. 

The next day, before we went fishing again, Mom would whip out her trusty electric kitchen knife. She could filet a whole ice chest of crappie before the battery would die.

If she’d been a surgeon, I bet she could have done a heart and lung replacement in half an hour.

She was like a filleting machine. And her skills were essential when the Sand Bass were running at Lake Texoma.

On those incredible occasions, you’d spend hours reeling in two, even three sandies at a time!

I don’t know if there were legal limits back in the day. But I think we only reached our limit when the boat started taking on water because it was carrying eleventy gazillion sandies, and the one black bass that Dad always caught near a tree stump.

Lake Texoma was way bigger and better than Lake Thunderbird, and it could be a million times scarier.

It was so huge that you could lose sight of the shoreline, like you were in the Gulf of Mexico or something (and I'd been there, once, so I knew).

I never understood how my Dad, and then my brother-in-law, Bill, could find their way back to our cove, even if there wasn’t a single star shining. Sometimes it the pitch-black darkness it got a little dicey, but they always came through.

Lake Texoma was almost like a separate state, complete with really interesting people who seemed to live there most of the year.

I especially a remember a guy named Gus Call, who was sort of a local legend.

Gus, and several generations of his progeny, had a big campsite that featured his name on a big sign out front, next to big, laminated photos of him holding catfish that were bigger than me.

Even though Gus was an old man, and missing most of his front teeth, his arms still showed off strong muscles and scars.

When Gus went catfishing, he’d wear a scuba tank on his back, and strap a big, thick harness on his chest.  A short rope led to a huge swivel. On the other side of the swivel was another short rope and a huge, savage hook.

Gus would swim wayyyy deep, and feel for catfish along the lake bottom. He’d rub their bellies until they were asleep, then gaff them with the hook.

All hell would break out then, with the enormous catfish spinning and trying to stab him with their poison spines.

I had been jabbed by a small catfish, and that poison plagued me for days. So I could not imagine in my wildest nightmares why anyone would want to be up close and personal with a huge, angry catfish.

I was almost tempted not to believe his story, but then he showed us a 65-pound catfish and a 35-pounder that he'd caught the previous night.

And he showed me his raw forearms that looked like he’d stuck him in a jet engine and ripped them back out.

The lake itself was even more dangerous than the huge catfish.

One time we were out in the middle of the lake when a really bad front hit. The atmospheric pressure dropped so dramatically that the caps were popping off bottles of Fanta Orange.

The wind and the waves and the thunder and lightning hit fast and hard. When my Dad and Bill double-checked my life vest and made me sit right next to them, I knew it was really bad.

They shouted over the wind that there was no time to make for our cove. So they aimed the boat to where they thought the nearest shoreline was. Then they cranked the throttle wide open.

They didn’t let off even though the bow was bashing against big waves, and every minute or so, the boat would ride up on a six-foot-wave and then smash back down onto the black water. 

The jarring was so hard it almost broke my teeth.

I truly don’t know how the fiberglass boat didn’t come to bits, but after an eternity we reached shore and took off for the trees.         

We knew that you shouldn’t shelter under trees when it was lightning. But since we were being hammered by golf ball size hail and broken tree limbs, we took our chances.

Eventually the storm passed, and we limped home, soaking wet and exhausted.

The next morning I was shocked to see the whole boat covered with thick, smelly mud, which we had to clean off before heading home to Norman.

At least Dad and Bill had to do that.

Someone had to pump the surviving minnows. And I was the only one qualified to do that.

(FROM: 'MORE Memories of an Okie Boomer; Growing up in Norman in the 60s and 70s'; available in paperback and Kindle at Amazon.com)

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