American Originals

Like short hop passenger rail service, free television and the daily newspaper, the independently owned and operated fly shop is slowly disappearing as an American institution. Oh, there are still quite a few of them around, but make no mistake, they are fading away and each year there are fewer and fewer whose doors are open for business. While many of the reasons for this slow passing from the scene are matters of simple business sense, the disappearance of the independent fly shops also mirror changes in our culture and our values. There was a time when most fly anglers would have agreed that the slightly higher prices at an independent shop were a fair exchange for the individual attention to customer service, sense of camaraderie and the good feeling of being greeted by name when you came through the door offered by the independent shops. Nowadays, these virtues seem to be poor competition for the ease, variety and lower prices that can be ours online with the click of a mouse. It isn’t just fly fishing. In general, there seems to have been a culture-wide devaluation of the interpersonal aspects of retail commerce.
Ask the small independent grocer or hardware owner who is watching the hinges on his front door rust from lack of traffic because he can’t match Wal-Mart’s price on a box of Cheerios or the variety of Home Depot’s mind-boggling selection of nuts and bolts. So, we’ve changed. I think for the worse, but then again, what do I know? I’m moving into the lead edge of the age group that tends to see most of these sorts of changes are erosion of the ways of the world as we always knew it. At our age, none of us want to go to all the work of adapting to a brand new world. So, we tend to resent the change.

While there can be honest debate as to whether these changes reflect badly on who we are becoming as a people, I know one thing for certain: When the last independent fly shop closes, it will also signal the passing from the scene of a great, long term source of entertainment for me as a fly angler, spending time in the presence of the eccentrics, huge-hearted folks and hopelessly fish-addicted people who owned and operated these shops. My experiences with them have been one of the high points of my angling life.

I used to visit a shop in the heart of northcentral Pennsylvania’s mountains. I’d stop to buy a spool or two of tippet or a new zinger. I was always losing zingers along the creek. My total obsession with fishing; the water and the promise of the next pool, combined with my hearing loss would often result in me snagging my pliers or nippers on a tree branch or clump of brush and not hearing the snap when the cord, stretched to its limits, would break. So, I was almost always in the market for another zinger.

I’d enter the shop through the front door and approach the counter. I could plainly see the owner in the back building a rod or just sipping a cup of coffee and staring off into space. Sometimes, he’d come right out and wait on me. Other times, he’d acknowledge my presence with a wave and yell that he’d be right out. Sometimes, he would. Other times, he’d be back there fadiddling around for five minutes before he finally came out front to see what I needed. Still other times, he wouldn’t acknowledge me at all and I’d stand there for 10 or even 15 minutes and finally turn and go out the door. Or sometimes, I’d wait him out. One thing I never was though, was miffed or upset at his erratic behavior. Actually, I got a chuckle out it. He had come from a large urban area and set up his business along one of Pennsylvania’s best trout streams so he could always be next to the water and far from the beeping, grinding chattering sounds of the city. The making a living part of the equation was secondary. He had what he wanted. The only way it could be better would be if these damned customers stopped coming around to interrupt his day and his reverie. I understood. I’d probably be the same way.

I used to frequent a small shop in my home town in Northwest Pennsylvania. The guy who owned and ran it may have been cut out to be an engineer or a tax accountant or any of a hundred other occupations. The one thing he wasn’t cut out to do was to retail sales. He had the disposition of a tomcat with a singed tail and the patience of a child seeing the stack of wrapped presents at his birthday party for the first time. I’d come through the door and before it even closed behind me, he’d look at me like I was a newly discovered flat tire and say: “What do YOU want?”. I’d tell him I was just looking. He’d mumble under his breath and go back to cleaning the top of the glass case with the reels in it. No more than a minute later, he’d try again. “You figure it out yet?”, he’d demand Sometimes, I’d say “not quite yet” and he’d go back to his sulk. Other times, I’d bring a few odds and end to the counter and check out. He’d ring the stuff up and say, “That’ll be all of $12.46” in a disgusted voice like I’d wasted nine minutes of his time for next to nothing. Far from becoming offended or upset with him, I actually got a kick out of the whole thing. Here he was being totally himself and absolutely defying the cookie-cutter, fawning and solicitous persona common to retail sales people everywhere. I admired this. I enjoyed him so much I eventually bought a three hundred dollar Orvis fly rod from the rack in his shop. This was shortly before he went out of business under the weight of his less than fully welcoming personality. I don’t know what the matter with some people is and why they didn’t like him. I considered him a regional treasure.

Another establishment, a destination shop on a large stocked stream not far from where I grew up was owned and operated by one of the most contrary and opinionated people I think I’ve ever met. You’d come through the door and say, “nice day”. He’d tell you it looked like rain. Then you’d offer, “Well, if it rains, maybe there will be an olive hatch”. And he’d tell you that the olive hatch ended for the year last Wednesday. So much for that ray of hope…

And on and on it would go. Eventually, I got to the point where I would go in expressly for the purpose of torturing him for 20 minutes or so at a time just by being in his shop and daring to speak. Usually, I’d buy something. A box of split shot or a bottle of floatant. I figured the four or five dollars I’d put down to be a bargain for the entertainment I got in return. Unless you go to the matinee, you can’t go to the movies for five bucks and it isn’t anywhere near as much fun.

Not all the independent fly shop folks I’ve dealt with were crotchety, eccentric malcontents. Some were men with hearts the size of continents, men who without ever being “famous” fully met the only definition of greatness that really means anything. I worked for such a man in a fly shop in the mountains of Northwest Pennsylvania. At the time, the beginning of the internet retail boom and a changing demography in his customer base were making it hard to keep the business afloat. Yet, this man, who had been a helicopter gunship pilot in Vietnam made a point of employing a guy who had done five tours in Vietnam and who bore all the emotional scars of his experience. The guy was like a walking skinned knee; hypersensitive to the touch and sore and easy irritable all the time. He came and went as he pleased and for whatever reason he pleased. Sometimes, he would deal with a modestly difficult customer and then simply just take off and leave for the day, the experience having worn the insulation off his already frazzled nerves. He refused to run the cash register or help take inventory. Too much pressure. Yet the owner always paid him for the hours he was present and kept him on the payroll. He may have been the only person in the entire town who, by giving him a job, took the time to thank the guy for his service to his country and recognized the toll it had taken on him. The time I spent with this man was a gift. It made me aspire to be a better person.

There are many more examples of this unique, but sadly disappearing species, the individual fly shop owner. The guy at a Pennsylvania shop who would let you take a new rod from his rack to try it for a few days before deciding to buy. The laconic, bearded Rebel in a North Carolina shop who invited me to sit and have a couple cups of coffee with him and just talk fishing on a slow day. We ended up talking for three hours. The central Pennsylvania fly shop partner who would visit with you for hours, now and then pausing to splatter a bit of tobacco juice in the wax-coated orange juice he always had handy. Guys that you knew from the first time you encountered them, held the same love and reverence for the water and the fish that you did.

If and when the last of the independent shops closes its doors in recognition of the inexorability of change, I’ll miss the service and I’ll miss the local touch and all the rest. But most of all, I’ll miss the people themselves. Their heart, their kindness and warmth and the delight of their eccentricity. All are American Originals and when they are gone, a piece of what I’ve grown to love about the sport will go with them.