Paul and Mary Ann Ford interview -- June 19, 2009

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Paul and Mary Ann Ford Edited Transcript – June 19, 2009
Paul and Mary Ann Ford Fly Fishing Collection
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Western Washington University Libraries Paul Ford
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This interview was conducted with Paul and Mary Ann Ford on June 19, 2009, at their home in Wenatchee, Washington. The interviewer is Tamara Belts.
TB: How did you get started collecting, books as a whole, but especially your fly fishing books?
PF: My first readings about fly fishing were in magazines: Field and Stream and Outdoor Life when I was probably eleven or twelve years old. The most popular book in America at that time about fly fishing was Ray Bergman’s best-selling book Trout. That had been published in the Thirties and then republished and republished.
There were very few fly fishing books published during my early youth (that is when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen). That was during the Second World War, with shortages of paper and there were not that many men around to read books. Books also cost too much. But a magazine on the other hand, was a dime or fifteen cents. So it was during that period that I developed great affection for writers like Jason Lucas, who wrote the famous book, Bass, and he wrote lots of articles in Field and Stream. Ted Trueblood wrote about steelhead fishing and about Atlantic salmon fishing.
One really funny part about this starting to collect books and reading about fishing was that I assumed that when Bergman or Trueblood said that a certain fly worked really well on trout, I assumed that same fly would work on chain pickerel and bass and perch, because we had few, if any, trout in the part of New England where I grew up. So I ordered the 9-3 landlocked Atlantic Salmon fly and the Grey Ghost. Now both these flies were tied to imitate fresh-water smelt and the landlocked salmon loved fresh water smelt. There were two problems here: there were no Atlantic salmon where I lived and there were no freshwater smelt. So consequently I was stuck with a bunch of flies that wouldn’t catch anything except an occasional pickerel.
You asked about how the book collecting got started, and so I move now into a mature period when I did buy a few books like the Lucas book, and a book by Sid Gorton called Fishing From Top to Bottom. I might say that all three of these books mentioned: the Bergman book, the Lucas book, and the Gordon book, were all how-to-do-it books. There was no romance to them. There was nothing much about appreciation for the great outdoors. They were how to do it.
There came a long period when I didn’t collect any fishing books at all, although I fly fished a lot. I didn’t really get started collecting fly fishing books until Mary Ann, who is the guilty party in all of this, began giving me fly fishing books for birthdays, for anniversaries, for Christmas, and just for the joy of giving me something. She started off with Steve Raymond’s books, and more especially I suppose Roderick Haig-Brown’s books. We visited the place that Roderick Haig-Brown made famous for fishing. That was Campbell River. I fished the same island pools that he wrote about.