Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories.
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When I was a kid, my dad’s favorite pastime was fly fishing. Whenever he had some free time, Spring, Summer or Fall, he went fly fishing. In winter, however, he switched to tying flies, and I think he enjoyed that just as much as fly fishing itself.
He did his fly tying at our kitchen table. He had a small vise that he attached to the edge of the table. There was also a small cabinet with several drawers that held his supplies, several sizes of fish hooks, cork bodies and things like that. It also had one divided drawer that contained several colors of hair.
He placed a great deal of emphasis on the color of his flies, and he was always looking for new shades of colors. Let’s say we were on a trip to the Columbus zoo, and he saw a baboon with unusual coloring. That’s when you might hear him say, “I sure would like to have some of that baboon’s hair.”
I always thought he placed too much emphasis on the color of his flies. I thought fish were color blind. And it all depended on whether or not the fish were hungry. If some small thing swam in front of a hungry fish, it would eat it, regardless of its color. And if the fish wasn’t hungry, it wouldn’t eat it, no matter what color it was. The two of us never agreed on that.
Two of my dad’s favorite fly tieing hairs came from dogs. One was coarse black hair from my cousin’s scottie, Louise. The other was from a rust colored mutt named Whiskers. It be longed to the Wall family just down the street. It often came to our house looking for a treat, and every now and then my dad would snip off a small tuft of its hair.
My dad’s favorite color for his flies was red. He had several shades of red hair in his supply box. But he was always looking for a deeper, darker shade of red.
Then one evening my parents and I went to the art show in the high school building on West Sixth Street. While we were looking of all the art exhibits, my dad saw a girl with red hair. He asked me who she was. I knew immediately why he asked that question. Her name was Harriet Edwards, and she had the deepest, darkest red hair I had ever seen. A few years later she did some modeling, and photographers loved to photograph that dark red hair.
When I told my dad who she was, he realized that he knew her father. I think his name was Beriah Edwards. A week or so later, my dad talked with Mr. Edwards. He told him the next time his daughter had her hair cut, he would like to buy some of the clippings.
A month or so later, my dad received an envelope in the mail. It containing some of Harriet’s dark red hair. Over the next few weeks, he used that hair to tie several flies. He later told me that the fish loved them. I took that with a grain of salt, however, because I still think that fish are color blind.
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