Joan Wulff: “First Lady of Fly Fishing”

Beth: Today's event is really the culmination of many years of interest in Joan Wulff, and her amazing career. When you think about the history of women in the field of Angling, there are not too many luminaries. You really have to go back very far in history to ...

Joan: Dame Juliana.

Beth: Exactly! To Dame Juliana Berners who in 1496 published the first book in English on fishing. That was only 20 years after the printing press came to England. She is really revered I think, but between 1496 and now, there’s not too many and no one that I know who has the kind of career and reputation that Joan has. So I'm so pleased she can be with us today and accompanied by her friend Jen Grossman, who has had a career in the environmental law field, and I just learned is now raising French Guinea fowl. Jen has really been a leader in the open space protection and preservation movement. So these two ... I'm so excited to have two women on the podium. I'm so proud that we finally have achieved this. They're going to carry on a little conversation here, and I encourage all of you to ask questions at the end, please. We're going to have a small reception upstairs afterwards with some refreshments. If it's too warm in here, we can open the windows. I think that's just about all of the business at hand. So please welcome Jen and Joan!

[applause]

Jen: Well, it is truly an honor to be here. And I have to say that it's not just how much I've admired Joan and been inspired by her as an example, as a fellow female angler. But I'm proud and really blessed to call you a friend and a fellow member of the woman fly fishers. We are the oldest fly fishing club, all women's club in the United States, and founded by Julia Fairchild in 1932. We are a proud bunch of women enjoying mostly the rivers, streams and brooks of the Catskill region. So it's near and dear to our hearts for many reasons. And it really connects us and keeps us together as, as a really important community. Let's start from the beginning. Let's, let's kind of get back to how you found your roots in angling, whether you were fishing for a bass on a boat with your mom and dad.

Joan: Oh, yes. You've heard that?

Jen: I have, I heard it might be a bass that really got you hooked.

Joan: No, it was my mother rowing the boat that got me hooked... I was four or five years old or six or whatever. And one night my dad, who was an avid bass fisherman and more, my dad was an outdoorsman. He hunted and fished game birds. He hunted Moose, he had an outdoor store in Paterson called the Paterson Rod and Gun store, so everything in our lives with hunting, fishing and dogs. So one night he wanted to fish for bass at Greenwood Lake, which is on the border of New York and New Jersey, and invited me to go along with mother. Mother was rowing the boat and dad was fishing with a fly rod with bass bugs and mother really didn't know how to row. And so all night long he was saying, Ina, you're too close; Ina, you're too far. And so I'm listening and I'm waiting and waiting and waiting for him to catch something. And he would put out the bass bug and wait ‘til all of the rings would disappear. And then he would pop it back toward the boat. And finally a bass took it. And for me that was, ahhh, this came up from this dark water, boom! That's what hooked me, that particular move of that bass. And so he played it a bit and then he handed the rod to me and I didn't know what to do with it and I didn't put any tension on it. The bug came out of the bass’s mouth and I was going to cry and he said he was gonna release it anyway. So everything worked out well except that I went home at night thinking it's better to be the fisherman than the rower.

But I commuted, and then on Saturday I was teaching dancing, and I had a partner who was older than I was. And so she, I was in one of her dancing classes, and the woman teaching tap became ill and had to stop. And so they took me to another teacher. I'd learned the step, come back and teach my class that step. So that was the beginning of teaching, teaching casting was what I was going to say, because teaching seems to be what I love to do most. And so we, we had a dancing school on Saturday and we finally had too many students for one day and so this gal said, her name was Eleanor Egg, and she had been a national 100 yard dash champion. So again, inspiration from a woman who wasn't a fisherman but a woman. And so she said, we either to give up or open a full time studio. So we did in 1944 and I was there until 1952. We got to have 265 pupils. She taught ballet and acrobatic. I taught tap and baton twirling. And I was casting and winning championships and things. And one morning I woke up and thought if I don't get out of that dancing school, I'm going to be happily teaching dancing at age 75 and never have done anything else.

I was making $150 a week, 1952. And so I decided I was going to give up dancing school and try to make a living in the fishing world. And I never have. [laughter] You had to be a man and you had to sell tackle, and of course you know, it was mostly plug casting in spinning eventually. So what I did was I went sportsman's shows and gave demonstrations and I would do trick casting. I would take cigarettes out from between two people's mouths with a plug casting rod. And I once did that to Johnny Carson [laughter]. And my husband, it was on a show probably 1956 or something like that. And Johnny Carson was shaking like hell.

And so I, I did that. And sportsman shows then could be 10 days long. I got paid $400 for 10 days paying all of my own expenses. I traveled to places like Cleveland and St. Louis and other places. And then in 1954 I was going to be doing a demonstration in the sport show in St Louis. And the emcee turned out to be an old silent screen movie star named Monte Blue. And I got there ahead of time of course. And he said, I want to talk to you, because what I usually wore was shorts. I had a creel over my shoulder and rolled down hip boots. He said, I want to talk to you about changing your costume to some kind of a dress. Well, to jump to the end of that, I ended up and maybe some of you have seen a picture of me in a strapless white and silver cocktail dress, high heels, glitter in my hair; and Monte Blue sold that so beautifully. He, you know, he did all the talk. I didn't do any trick casting and I had a better response to that than anything I ever did was I felt with trick casting and stuff because it showed just the grace and beauty of fly casting. And The audience responded to it. So that was another place where I got publicity. You know, if it weren't for publicity, none of us would be anywhere

Jen: But it moved even just from entertainment to real education where you were teaching and showing how it was done, not just getting a wow or a yay, even though you were getting both.

Joan: Right. And so all through that time I was going to sportsman shows and became friendly with Garcia Corporation, with a man named Dick Wolf. And so we would have, they would have contests at the sportsman shows. My father was one of the guys who would be a judge, that sort of thing. A little more about my father, come to think of it. He was an outdoorsman, as I said, he wrote a cast, an outdoor column for the Paterson Evening News and the Paterson Morning Call, one after the other. He was a, I can't think of the word that he, he represented sportsmen in the state. He helped start all of the clubs in the Paterson area. And it was all about bird shooting and hunting. I mean, uh, animals and birds. Where was I?

Jen: So your father, really being sort of a model, a mentor for you, but also allowing you and supporting you in a field that women just... daughters didn't do it. And his did and he was proud. So after leaving the dancing world, which is such a great analogy and also a wonderful art form, just like your casting is, it's this grace and beauty, you shifted and left and got on the road and became really a representative for casting and the Garcia company.

Joan: And it was my education traveling the country. I went to Canada as well as the United States. And so I was on the road a lot. And having been involved with, with Garcia at sportsman shows, they finally offered me a job. What I did for them was I gave them so many days out of the year and they sent me around the country, the whole country, you know, to, to tackle shops, and I was there and I would do demonstrations and talk about products and all of that sort of thing. So it was all promotional work for Garcia. They were the largest tackle company in the world. They had imported the Mitchell spinning reel which took the country by storm, which everybody old enough would remember and fly casting, fly fishing, was about two percent of their total sales, but that's, you know, so I, I did some of everything. And I went into a couple of casting tournaments, fishing tournaments. I remember being on the Garcia boat in Marathon in the Keys and catching a 60 pound sailfish, which was the largest that had ever been caught in that contest. And so they mounted it for me and put it in the Garcia entryway and so on and, and I have that sailfish in my fishing school in Lew Beach Right now. So a long bunch of years there.

Jen: And you must have given a lot of credibility to the company and the products and the tackle because here was a woman I could do it, and if a woman could do it then hey, a man could do it... not necessarily.

Joan: That's another subject. [laughter]

And they actually had another woman who was doing that kind of work too. I ended up, I started out doing, in the meantime, I had been married. I started in '58 with Garcia, but I was married in '54 and I have two children from that marriage. And so we lived in Florida at the time and I would only give them one third of my time for the year because of being a mother, wife, and all those good things. And then, well, I was working for Garcia in 1966. The phone rang one day and it was my boss at Garcia. Dick Wolf was his name and he said, how would you like to go fishing in Newfoundland for giant Bluefin tuna with Lee Wulff? My mind went––aaah––I get seasick, Newfoundland, fog, Lee Wulff's kind of a hermit, isn't he? That kind of thing. At the same time I'm saying yes! When? [laughter] So that was a phone call that changed my life. Lee was making a film for the American sportsman series. Did anyone here ever watch that? On Sunday afternoon? Right. And when Lee made films, he had made films for Garcia by the way, but when he made films, he was always trying to teach you something. So he wanted to show that giant Bluefin tuna fishing was a team sport. You didn't have to do it all alone. The crew on the boat would set up the bait and all that sort of thing. And they wanted to have a woman who had preferably never fished before to show that it was a team sport. And They wanted her to catch a tuna five times her own weight. Well, they had chosen, they had chosen Kay Starr, who was a singer who sang Wheel of Fortune. Does anyone remember that? Yes. Okay. And she became ill and couldn't go. And so ABC called Garcia and said, do you have anybody else? And my boss said, yes. And it was me. And so Katy Starr's Wheel of Fortune turned to me is the way I always say it. So I went to Newfoundland. I caught a 572 pound tuna; and Lee and I connected. [laughter] And so we then went. We got married in '67 and we then were both working for Garcia. Lee's idea that Fly-O, the little rod, and the yarn, that was his idea and the first thing we worked on when we went to work for Garcia together, and that was because he said, you know, golfers are able to practice indoors with soft golf balls and we should be able to practice with a soft fly line, whatever. So I went out and bought five different yarns and we had a, you know, took two pieces of a fly rod and stuck them together and tried and we found the yarn that worked, and so Garcia named it Fly-O, which is a dumb name, but that's what it is. We were of course doing what we called the rubber chicken circuit, which is every Saturday night at, different clubs that are having their dinners. And so Lee would talk about conservation, and I started talking about casting, you know, not really knowing anything much except how just to do it without thinking. And so we did that, and when I started standing up there in front of an audience and having to say, do this, do that, don't do whatever, whatever. And so I started thinking about this, about how to talk about casting. I had to end up analyzing it, and I really didn't do that until we had opened a fishing school. Now we lived in New Hampshire and we started talking about having a fishing school, but the waters in New Hampshire are more acidic than they are in the Catskills. And so in 1977, Lee was asked to be the speaker at a federation of fly fishers event in the Catskills in, Roscoe and we went and there was somebody walking down the street in waders, they had just done catch and release on the Beaverkill. And we'd looked at each other and said, this is the place to have a school. So we went home and put our house on the market and we were in the Catskills in 1978.

Joan: It's true. Women come and start at zero and you give them something to learn and they will take it one step at a time. Men come at zero minus x. [laughter] So it takes a while to get rid of "minus x, because you men are brought up to believe you have to know how to do everything without being taught. Is that true or not? You're not going to admit it. I know. And so that's why guides would rather have women customers, you know, because they listen. And they don't think that they could be competitive but they don't have as much competition to start with I think or whatever. So that's women and men in the fishing world.

Jen: What about the gear? You know, in terms of tackle and rods, that's universal. But as I mentioned before, I started fishing, I was 14. I had no choice but to buy a men's boot and stuff it with plastic and several pairs of socks. My waders were Red Balls. They were way too big. But if I was going to fish with my father and brother, I had no choice.

Joan: Well when I was young, we could only wear men's hip boots, because anything that was a full wader, I used to call them killer pants or something like that because they were rubber and, rubber and what ... canvas, canvas and rubber. And, I thought ... walking in them like this... [laughter] And so in the 1970s, Royal Red Ball, which was a well established firm, came out with light weight waders that either men could wear or women could wear. And I have a picture of me clicking my heels in them at a conference in Chicago, because it made such a difference to women's fishing life. And now we've, we really are having a, an upsurge in the, in, in women coming into fly fishing and to having companies like Orvis and Patagonia actually making gear, clothing and so on for women, and advertising it. So we have something going on now that we've never had before for women in the field. And I always used to say... I'm saying it now... I've been waiting all of my life for women to embrace the sport and for men to welcome them. And I am seeing it now, so I can die happy. [laughter]

Jen: Absolutely. Absolutely. And in sharing again, your skill, your experience and knowledge, the written word wasn't the only way that you transferred all of this great information. You, you did a video. Several videos.

Joan: Yeah! Well. Lee and I did a video about the school, but then in 1997 a man named Jeff Pill came to me and said he wanted to make a video of me teaching casting. So we did it. It has sold more than 50,000 copies of it, and it was 1997 when it came out. Yeah. And so now of course it's not high definition or any of those things. I'm afraid that that's it, but it is, it's gradually that the sales are going down because other people are doing videos, you know, you can have a jillion videos anytime you turn on your computer. But I'm happy with it.

Jen: Was that filmed up here?

Joan: It was filmed on my property. In Lew Beach, yeah.

Jen: Okay. How long did it take to put a video like that together versus writing the book and...

Joan: Oh, much shorter because that's, you know, that's all the thinking of the producer. We had an indoor session which we did in California, just, you know, one day that was about Fly-O that we did, and then at my property it was probably five days that we did it in. And we had a full crew and so on. Even had somebody who came up and made sure that I had some rouge on my face. [laughter]

Jen: Were you wearing a cocktail dress and heels? [laughter]

Joan: Right. I'm very glad we did that video. If I, you know, I could do another one now that I've learned more. Every time I teach. I learned, as I said earlier, and so you can always improve on whatever you have done. But we're not going to do that. [laughter] There's one other thing I would like--maybe more--but I call it the evolution of a fly fisher. And It came out of the fishing school. At the end of the school and trying to encourage people to go fish immediately within the next two weeks, you have to go fish and even on the way home sometimes take your hand off the steering wheel and go... [casting motion] So to try to encourage them, I would try to tell them where they might look to go. And so I came up with what became my evolution of a fly fisher, which I've written about; it's in my latest book, the last book. And at first when you first start out, you want to catch as many fish as you can; and then you want to catch the biggest fish; and then you want to catch the most difficult fish. So you're moving ... and then stage four is really about thinking about the resource and you get into the conservation end of things and join Trout Unlimited and federation and all of the good groups like that. And then stage five is being able to fish all by yourself. You don't have to have anybody building you up, tying your flies, or any of those things; that you enjoy fishing all by yourself. And then the next step is that even if you don't catch fish, you have wonderful days on a stream. It's just that it's being there. Those are the two words that describe that stage. And then you come to a stage when you are mature, when you can fish through somebody else, meaning that you can be as happy that they caught that fish as if you had caught it yourself, because you have caught enough fish, and you know the feeling. So that maturity comes sooner with women than with men. [laughter]

And then; I don't know if I'm up to seven or eight yet. But the other thing is to now teach your kids or teach other young people, but teaching it to young people is to try to produce people who will care about the streams and the resource as we do. And the eighth, the last one has just come to me in the last few years. I have a friend whose name is David Goodman, who has a house on the Beaverkill; and he was fishing, he told me, in the salmon fishing, you can only catch and release so many Atlantic salmon in a day. All right. And so instead of stopping when he had caught his four fish, he would cut the hook off, cut the bend of the hook off. So he was still casting; fish would still hit the fly. He just wasn't getting to play them. And so this was brought home to me, this whole idea of, of not having the full hook. Couple of months ago he was on the Beaverkill, and the water was high. I walked along with shore while he was casting. He was using a two handed six weight rod. He had a big bushy salmon fly on the beaver kill with the hook cut, and he was casting 90 feet and presenting a fly under an overhanging hemlock branch. It was incredible. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in casting, and every time that line unrolled, I felt that in my soul, so I was casting through him. And so here you know, to be this old and they have a new kind of thrill is quite wonderful. And another thrill has happened which has to do with women, and it is that there's a young girl in California named Maxine McCormack and she was written up in the New York Times about a month ago. Many of you saw that. Well the fact that the New York Times gave her that much space has never happened. Anything like that had never happened before. And this girl is 14 years old and she recently won international championship in Europe, and in one of the events she cast a fly 161 feet. [laughter] You remember that that's...

Absolutely. If you're fishing here in this area, what would be one of your favorite spots to look for a trout?

Jen: Well, it's going to be on the Beaverkill. And it's going to be either on a mountain pool... That's our home waters for our fishing club. Beautiful spot.

Joan: Oh, the other thing I haven't even mentioned is the, the Catskill fly fishing center and museum. I was a founder; I'm the last living founder. There were 13 of us and when we first moved to the Catskills, Elsie Darbee was still alive and she and her husband used to fish in Nova Scotia every year for Atlantic salmon and they had a small museum. And Elsie thought we should have a museum in the Catskills. And so that started with the fly fishing center and museum, and she died I think in '81, something like that. And we really started the museum that year. So we're up to 30, yeah, 30 some years, whatever.

Jen: There's some great water to fish there right in front of the museum.

Joan: Yes, right in front of the museum. And catch and release is the other thing that Lee introduced to all of us. Lee raised the bar. He, he brought sport into the sport and so on. He just never... one of the things I learned from him is if you catch three fish on the same fly, change the fly! Learn something! Find out what else they'll take. So he always made challenge in our sport. Very, very big thing. And the catch and release, he first wrote about it in 1939. He said game fish is too valuable to be caught only once. And in 1939 people were eating what they caught, of course, and so it took, God, you know, 1939... just figure out how many years it took before that started to be important enough for areas to be set aside. Catch and release only.

Beth: I think we should have some questions so we have time for refreshments...

Mark Loete: Your husband Lee is the person who was reputed to have invented the concept of the fishing vest?

Joan: Yes. He sewed the first one in about 19... he did the first flies, the with the hair wings. And the fishing vest in '29... '30 and '31. Those were the years. By the way, I have another husband [laughter]. and Ted... The reason that we got together to start with is because when Ted was in law school, he spent his summers with Lee Wulff flying in Newfoundland and Labrador in the super cub. And he was a photographer for Lee. And so we can live together with Lee's stuff in the house yet, and he's not jealous of it [laughter] and so he also worked for and with the government. When the ... the EPA started under Nixon and he said he was one of, what, 16 lawyers? ... So stand up and just tell a little bit.

Ted: I flew with Lee Wulff and did the series with Curt Gowdy for CBS and NBC [wide world of sports]. So I was lucky because I didn't have to do all the casting. I just took pictures and it worked out very well. After I finished my law school at Columbia Law School, I worked for a law firm ... New York City, Wall Street practice, but in the sixties I turned environmentalist and I was hired by the Justice Department to form a new environmental enforcement station. I started that. But Stewart Udall, who was secretary of interior, caught a hold of me and said I was working for the wrong agency, and he hired me to be the water counsel for the federal government. And I was responsible for writing some of the clean water act provisions, especially about oil pollution, which are very important. And, setting up the environmental protection agency in 1956, which President Nixon stole with an executive order. You see a lot of that going on, now. The Republicans built the agency, but then that agency was started with 16 people and within six months we had 1,600 people, and helped form agencies at every state in the United States. And I feel that that simple political gesture of requiring states to have independent pollution control agencies, free of federal involvement, and you see the play right now in California of fighting the federal government, because California has to go further in their laws than the generality of environmental protection regulation. Now I've got to stop here because I'm getting to be political. [laughter] We're really too close to the elections.

Joan: No, I only fished on the Esopus once or twice, and once was when I was a teenager, and I came up with my father and two other members of the casting club, and I don't think any of us caught a fish [laughter] but we came and stayed and whatever and I just remember trying to get to sleep before the other guys started snoring. [laughter]

Beth: Well, thank you so much. We're really honored.

Jen: Just to close, and Joan and I talked about this and there's so many folks in the audience that are here because of Joan, then because of your love and admiration and respect for this wonderful terrain and environment we're in, but realize the capacity you all have. We're the hook and bullet community. We like to fish. We hunt, we love the hiking. We have the outdoors. And we vote. Whatever party you vote for, vote for conservation, vote for protection. It's really our opportunity now to get out and really make a difference in whatever kind of work or background you have. If you enjoy what we are, we are here today and I'm honoring and respecting, we really want to make sure it's here for the next several generations and, and it's up to us now. And we have capacity as a unified front, so don't just use your rod, use your pen, talk to your legislators. Make a difference. Really. I mean this is going to protect something that's precious to us all.

Beth: Advocacy. That's one of our missions. Thank you so much. Let's go upstairs. [applause]