Voices from the Past: World's Smallest Fly Rod? (1890)

Well, here at the Fishing for History Blog we are fascinated by extremes. Here we have what was touted at the time as the smallest fly rod in the world, a three feet model made in Japan -- and which came with a barbless fly. The article was run in The New York Sun in July, 1890. While not as small as the novelty fly rod we wrote about last year, it is still a small fly rod and reminds me of the bantam rod made by modern maker Chris Lantzy. I believe the shop referenced was Thomas J. Conroy's. Here's the blurb in full:

In the window of a fishing tackle store in Fulton street is displayed a fly rod three feet long, and tapering from the thickness of a lady's pencil at the butt to the size of a pin at the tip. It is made of Japanese bamboo with a tip of whalebone. There are three joints in the rod. The line of the length of the rod is of fine gut. At the end of it dangles a tiny yellow fly, concealing a barbless hook. The rod was made in Japan, and is a specimen of those in use there in the capture of minnows, which are regarded as a delicacy by the natives.

-- Dr. Todd

Don Robb, Pennsylvania's Cantankerous Old Rod Maker

I'm sick so I'm putting up some stuff I've been meaning to run for a few months. Here's an article about Don Robb, a rodmaker from Pennsylvania who was making split cane rods in Ligonier, Pennsylvania before World War II and was still at it in 1981 when this short article came out. I love how grizzled he seems in this interview. And, I'd not heard much about how the Japanese invasion affected the Tonkin cane crop. Anyone with any info on that? The article was an unattributed wire report from the A.P. dated May 31, 1981.

FLY ROD MAKER LEARNED TO BEND WITH THE TIMES

LIGONIER. Pa. (AP) — World War II messed up the fly rod business for Don Robb, who was making magnificent fishing gear before the Japanese overran China.

"I haven't made a bamboo rod for a long time. They're not worth messing with," said Robb. "The best bamboo came from pre-war China. Kwangsi and Kwangtung provinces. The Japanese ruined things when they overran the place in 1936."

But Robb, who gives his age as "75 plus," has learned to bend with the times. His tackle shop is crowded with meticulously crafted fly rods and home-spun philosophy.

In a recent interview, he talked while he worked. Spring and the opening of Pennsylvania's trout season had brought a flood of orders. "I'm always three or four months behind, which keeps me busy during the winter. But at a time like this, my! Everyone has the fever. Some of them, why you'd swear they weren't going to survive." he said.

He took a new rod outside and talked as he cast with different reels to find the best weight line for the rod. "Fly fishing is different than bait casting or spin casting in that there, all the weight is on the end of your tine. Here, you depend on the weight of the line itself"

He handed over the twitching, black graphite rod. It seemed to have a life of its own. The price? "One hundred and five bucks. That's rod, reel, line, reel bag and rod case."

Is that a bargain?

"Yep."

Are the high-priced rods worth it?

"Nope."

What type rods are the best?

"Just whatever suits you."

Back inside, he worked surrounded by racks of lures, line and hooks, stacks of material for making flies — among them marabou, english grouse, emu and ostrich plumes. Bundles of graphite rod blanks stood in racks on the floor like sheaths of dry grass.

A hand-lettered sign warned those who entered: "No lookers. There is no time to spare for just lookers."

His spare time is very limited; not so his reputation.

"I've had rods (ordered) in 40 states, four provinces in Canada, two each in England. Ireland. Scotland and Wales and two countries in South America." Robb said. "You see my rods get a little more traveling than I do."

His clientele, however, is not large. For some families. Robb is making and repairing rods for the third generation of anglers. Would-be customers are routinely turned away.

"I don't want any publicity," he said. "I got more work than I can do already."

Robb works mostly with graphite, sometimes with fiberglass, but not with bamboo. The reason, he said, is a lack of good bamboo. Among the areas conquered by the Japanese in the 1930s was a 25-square-mile patch in China believed to be the world's only source of Tonkin cane. Of more than 1,000 species of bamboo, it is coveted above all others for making fly rods. Rod makers have scoured the world in vain trying to find another source.

Modern China resumed exporting Tonkin cane, but the quality of the crop hasn't been the same.

-- Dr. Todd

Red Smith and the Fish Pole Factory

I recently posted a blurb from Red Smith about Jim Payne's secret oven that the local women loved to bake beans in because it was the perfect temperature. I received several emails asking where this came from, so I decided to post the article in its entirety. It came from a 1969 syndicated article. For those who don't know Red Smith, he was one of the all-time greatest sports writers. If you've never read him before, you are in for a treat.


The Fishpole Factory

by RED SMITH

MANCHESTER, Vt . The sign on the white frame building reads, "C.T. Orvis Co., Fishing Tackle," and this is where it started 113 years ago when Charles Orvis—"a feisty little man with a Vandyke beard," said Dick Finlay—set out to help men prove themselves smarter than trout. They're still trying.

Dick Finlay, vice president, was conducting visitors through one of the few plants left in the world where artisans still work at the "ticklish business of building fine flyrods. A visitor can see it all in about 45 minutes, but it takes a stick of Tonkin cane six weeks to go through the 20 pairs of hands that will convert it into an instrument for presenting a fly at the head of a riffle.

Tonkin cane, the only bamboo suitable for quality rods, comes from a tiny mountain area in Communist China, which means it hasn't been shipped directly to the United States in years. It used to arrive in rattan-wrapped bundles of 100 sticks, one-third of which would be discarded for various defects before the remainder went into a bin in the basement here.

There's still a supply in the bin, all imported before the Korean conflict, and in an adjacent bin is newer stuff that was shipped from China to Europe and split into triangular strips there. That work made it a European product that could be legally brought to the United States.

Six Old Drunks

A woman seated near the bins was running halved sticks through a gas flame to dry them out. She heard Finlay explain that even though the bamboo had been aged for many years it still retained moisture, and she lifted a stick to show how the heat was bringing out bubbles of sap.

At a power saw a few steps away a man was splitting the dried cane into triangular strips about a quarter-inch thick. They came off long and limber but, the sawyer said, "They're like old drunks; six of 'em together hold each other up."

From the saw the strips go to a milling machine designed by Wes Jordan when he was with the South Bend Bait Co. before he became Orvis's foreman. When South Bend stopped making bamboo rods, Jordan went out and found his machine in the basement. It is a 12-foot tangle of cams and cogs and gears and gadgets and grommets and gismos that would give Rube Goldberg the vapors; it even has little wheels with tires made of rubber from surgical bandages.

Next is a machine called a flatbed miller that shaves the bamboo down to size within 1/1000th of an inch of specification. The machine has a bed of rock maple that swells on a rainy weekend and must be returned on Monday. Thus refined, six strips are fitted together to make a rod section, bathed in a phenolic resin glue that can't be removed from anything, and tied with shoemaker's thread on a machine that makes a spiral binding from left to right, then back from right to left.

Hot Dogs and Beans

Now the cane goes into the ovens for heat-tempering. Jim Payne, the great rod maker of Highland Mills, N.Y., never would reveal the temperature or time for cooking his bamboo but Highland Mills housewives always brought their bean pots around because his oven was exactly right for baking beans. "We've got a small oven upstairs," Dick Finlay said, "that we use for hot dogs sometimes."

After cooking, when the bindings have been removed and all excess glue filed off, the rod sections are impregnated by Wes Jordan's secret formula. This consists of a week-long bath in a mixture of water and phenolic resin that makes the bamboo diamond-hard.

Then it's back in the oven and on to a shop where everything is put together. All metal parts—the locking reel seat, the ferrules, and guides—are made here in the machine shop. Walnut dowels are shaped for the base of the reel seat, cork handles are fashioned and pulp removed from the pores with a jackknife.

The rod is given a final straightening over dry heat; it is sanded down and down and down with finer and finer paper; the butt, tip guide and ferrules are fitted and the ferrules are buffed to a high shine, then darkened and dulled by oxidization. (Thus do umpires rub a mud from New Jersey's Rancocas Creek on new baseballs to remove the factory gloss.)

No Shakes

Abstemious ladies innocent of the morning-after shakes apply silk windings which fasten on the chromium-treated guides of stainless steel and four coats of spar varnish glue the windings tight.

"Don't you ever overlap just one turn with that thread?" a visitor asked a lady twirling a rod tip between practiced fingers.

"Once in a while," she said.

"Like around four p.m. Friday after a hard week?"

The lady shrugged. "We all have our bad days."

No fisherman lie, the visitor shuddered. "All this work to kill a fish," he said. "Wouldn't dynamite be quicker?"

-- Dr. Todd