I went fishing with my brothers. The trip was the sort of
which most fishermen only dream, via float plane to far north Canadian lakes.
While Father Frank has been long dead, he nevertheless joined us on this trip.
To understand how this worked out, you must first know
something of the man.
The Rev. Father Frank Paulus was my father’s brother, my
uncle. His presence occupies my memories, from my earliest childhood and into
my adulthood. And they are good memories. Father Frank was a good man.
In fact my earliest memory is with him. I was just a toddler.
I was being carried by him in a hospital at night and after visiting hours. He
was taking me to see my mother who was very ill. Even at that early age I was
worried that because of the late hour we would be turned away. And as I recall
I even pretended that I was ill and that this priest was whisking me to some
sort of urgent procedure. In any case, I don’t think my little ruse was
necessary. At the time, a priest hurriedly carrying a small child in a hospital
was simply not someone to be questioned – a simple fact that impressed me
greatly.
Never Mess with a Priest in a Hurry
At that time, it seems, priests in a hurry were not messed
with, but given a free pass. It was an unwritten rule Father Frank believed
always applicable when he drove and he always drove large, powerful black cars.
As for his mild disregard of speed limits, he explained it
this way. Part of his job was to minister to and comfort the dying and more
importantly to send them on their way in a state of grace. It was important.
Even the most wretched scoundrel could receive a free pass to heaven if in his
last dying breath a priest might hear his act of contrition.
In this regard he was always on call. So if stopped for
speeding, he would simply say, “I must tend to the dying.” And it was always
true, whether a dying soul was his immediate destination or not. Though occasionally,
such a traffic stop would lead to a police escort to the nearest hospital.
A priest’s life is somewhat lonely. The company of
associates in a rectory is not the same as family. He would regularly show up
at our house, sometimes for dinner but more often just to spend awhile with my
father and mother. Sometime the visit would be for conversation but often he
would come and simply spend the time in the comfort of home, sitting quietly
with his breviary and smoking his pipe.
When I was young, sometimes I would wake in the morning and
aroma of his pipe from the night before would linger and greet me. It was a
mild and comforting scent. Father Frank was a marvelous story teller. On those
occasions I would feel cheated and complain ‘why had no one woken me to visit
with him too.’
Many years later, and I still have the photograph, it’s of
him smoking his pipe while happily riding on the back of my motorcycle. His
pipe, like his roman collar and the black Fedora hat with a two inch snap brim
were part of his persona.
After he died I somehow wound up with his bible. It must
have sat in my bookcase for more than a year before I opened it. When I did,
that same comforting scent from my childhood, that of his pipe faintly
enveloped the room and with it I was filled not just with memories but with the
joy the man had so often brought into my life.
Sometimes It's Best to Keep Quiet
Father Frank was a kind and generous man, but he was not a
man without a temper. On the few occasions he showed it, he spoke almost
snarling with clenched teeth like some men will just prior to throwing a punch.
Once in turmoil of the late 1960s and I was at that stage of life where I no
longer an adolescent but yet not a man, the conversation between him, my father
and myself grew somewhat animated, then heated.
It grew heated to the point where he stood up and snarled at
me with the full force of his anger. At that moment my father forcefully said: “You
are a guest in my house and no one speaks to my son that way in my house. Get
out of here.”
As he left I felt badly. It hurt my father to kick his
brother out of our house and I was ashamed to have so upset my uncle. More than
bad, I felt small. The incident was one we would laugh about later, yet in it I
learned a number of lessons. Not the least of which, more often it’s just
better to be quiet and listen.
My dad’s passion outside of work was fishing. He was a musky
fisherman. Our family vacations were to northern Wisconsin where he would rent
a cabin at Rudy’s Rest Haven on the Manitowish Waters Chain of Lakes. We would
fish for Walleye and Muskies.
Later in the fall he would take a long weekend to go fishing
again. Often he would go with Father Frank. I don’t know if Father Frank was as
avid of a fisherman as my dad. But they both enjoyed time away from their work
and everyday life, and enjoyed it together.
Sometime in the 1950s they returned from one of those trips
with identical new fishing rods. They had stopped at the St. Croix Company, and
bought them there. The rods must have been top-of-the-line. My dad kept his wrapped
in a muslin bag with individual compartments for each of the two sections. As a
child this fishing rod was like one of the crown jewels, something I could look
at but wasn’t allowed to touch.
My oldest brother, David, took dad’s rod with him on one of
his earliest fishing trips to Canada. He took the trip with a few of his
college friends, one of whom was new to fishing. The prize rod somehow wound up
in the novice’s hands. It didn’t go well. He managed to impale the back of his
neck with the treble hook attached to large spoon he was trying throw.
The hook was deeply imbedded in the fleshy part of his neck
just below the back of his skull. He collapsed in agony, snapping the rod in
two as he landed on it.
When Dave returned home, he needed some time and courage to
bring up subject of the broken fishing rod. Dad wasn’t pleased. He tried to
make most of it by mending with fiberglass cloth and resin. While the mend held
the two pieces together, it was ugly and only underlined the fact the rod was
ruined. Nevertheless, he took the mended rod with him on his annual fall trip.
Upon returning, among the things he unloaded from his car was Father Frank’s
identical fishing rod.
He said, “Opps, Father Frank must have forgotten to take
this with him.”
The rod was in a tubular aluminum rod case. Dad immediately
stuck a piece of masking tape to the case and marked it boldly “Father Frank.” And he could not have more forcefully said to
all of us “don’t touch.”
In truth, I’m sure Father Frank, knowing how badly dad felt
about the fate of his prize St. Croix rod, told him, here Larry take mine. It’s
just how Father Frank was.
It wasn’t for another four or five years until dad thought I
was old enough for serious fishing, to go with him on his fall fishing trips,
usually in late October or early November. We went to large undeveloped
Chippewa or Flambeau to fish hard for Muskies and Walleye and with a guide.
On those trips when we fished for Walleye, I found myself fishing
with Father Frank’s rod. It was still the best spinning rod my dad had and he
wanted me to fish with it. It’s a particularly good rod for Walleye fishing in
Wisconsin’s northern lakes. My dad was mostly interested in my success.
"Genuine Double Power"
Its label reads “Genuine Double Power.” The claim seems to
be more than just a branding slogan. There is some truth to it. The rod’s
action is light enough to detect and distinguish a light hitting Walleye from rocks
and bottom rubble while retrieving a baited jig. The lower half of the rod has
the stiffness and power needed to set the hook on a large Northern Pike or
Musky, that were encountered occasionally while Walleye fishing.
I don’t remember if I took sole possession of the rod when I
was married or after my father died. However, I did take it along on our honeymoon
to the Boundary Waters canoeing with my wife. We were sent off in marriage with
a sort of genuine-double-power blessing. It was officiated by my somewhat pre-Vatican
II, orthodox, Catholic Uncle, Father Frank and her somewhat Calvinist, evangelical
North American Baptist Minister. The two elderly ministers hit it off well and
put together a wedding ceremony that was so seamless as to make one believe the
Protestant Revolution was long forgotten.
It didn’t work out that way. In a short while she said, “I’m
hooked on the bottom again.”
I told her to give the rod a good jerk to see if she could
free the snag. I then followed the “snag” around the bay in which we were fishing
for ten or fifteen-minutes. She caught a Northern, larger than any I had ever
caught and larger than I had seen. I told her to release it. It was too large
to eat and we had no way to keep it, but she was having none of it.
“It’s got teeth,” she screamed, “you, release it.”
In the following years my attention turned to pan fishing
with my children with ultra-light spinning gear, and then to fly fishing with a
childhood friend who was a fly fisherman and was looking for a fishing partner.
I drifted away from lake fishing for Walleye and Musky to stream fishing for
trout and bass. During that time, if I fished with my father or brothers it was
mostly motor trolling on Lake Michigan for salmon.
After my dad died I wound up with his fishing tackle. Over
the years, on the occasions when my brothers and I could find an opportunity to
go fishing together, I fished with my dad’s bait casting musky rod and with Father
Frank’s spinning rod.
So it was when my brother Greg called and said you’re going
fishing. He and my brother David had been taking a fly-in trip together every
year for a number of years. Greg had booked the latest trip so that his two
son-in-laws could join them. To my good fortune, as the trip approached it
turned out one of them couldn’t make the trip – mostly because of a pregnant
wife with a conflicting due date.
The Buggy Whip
A few weeks later, while talking to David, he said I’d have
to come over.
“I want to look through your tackle box and put new line on
your reel,” he told me.
Dave has been an avid fisherman since before the trip he took
with his college friends and broke my dad’s fishing rod. With the exception of
fly fishing, he has fishing gear for every occasion times three. After putting
new line one of my somewhat dated Mitchell 300 reels, he said I needn’t worry
about having the right rod for big pike. I could use one of his. He also noted
that while my old reel appeared to be mechanically sound, I might prefer
fishing with one of his newer ones.
Still, I brought Father Frank’s fishing rod with me. It’s
always been kind of the benchmark by which I’ve judged other new rods. The ones
that have measured up to it have always been prohibitively costly. Though when
we boarded the floatplane to lakes we would fish for large pike and lake trout,
my confidence in Father Frank’s rod considerably diminished.
The first day out fishing, I took it and one of Dave’s newer
rods. I told him I wanted to catch some nice fish with Frank’s rod and take
some pictures. I wanted to print those pictures for the background of shadow
box frame to which I would retire the rod and hang it on a wall in my fishing
cabin.
And I caught some big lake trout and pike with it. I
switched over to the rod Dave had wanted me to use. I found I liked the old rod
better. The next day I put a more modern reel on it and fished with it
exclusively. Our guides took to derisively referring to the sixty-year-old rod
as a buggy whip, obviously unimpressed by its “Genuine Double Power” design.
But there is more to it. My brothers both recognized it as
Father Frank’s rod and referred to it as such. On this trip it took on many of
the same qualities that Father Frank’s bible had on me when I first opened it.
While it didn’t have the pleasant aroma of his pipe tobacco, from time to time
our conversation would turn to individual memories of the good times we had
with him and with my father.
During the trip we rotated fishing partners. The first day I
fished with my brother Greg’s son-in-law. We had a good day fishing, and except
for fifteen or twenty minutes I needed to lay out and relieve my back, the
young man who is the same age as my own children made me feel twenty years younger.
The second day, I fished with Dave. He’d had a lousy night
with an irregular heartbeat. It hadn’t improved by morning and he was short of
breath. It’s been troublesome for a number of years. He has had some surgery
with stents and the like for it. He took a nitroglycerin tablet that night to
settle it down, but without avail. Than morning, on the line between annoying
and alarming, things were tilting to the alarming side. He didn’t know if he
should go out fishing or not, and wasn’t in good spirits.
When we met at the dock he commented, “oh, you’ve brought
Father Frank’s rod,” somewhat disapprovingly.
When we got on the water he hooked into a nice pike. The
shot of adrenaline that hits when hooking a big fish restored his heart to its
normal rhythm. That day we caught a lot fish. More than ten of them exceed
forty inches. I caught one just shy of 48 inches and he got one that might have
been a bit longer, but not quite as large around the girth.
At the end of the day he said, “I think that’s best day
fishing I’ve ever had.” And then as we were unloading our gear from the boat,
he said sternly, “John, you are not going to retire that rod.”
I fished with Dave again on the last day of our trip. When
we met at the dock he smiled and asked, “Did you bring Father Frank?”
Yes, I nodded firmly, smiled and said, “I have.”
