Old Week part 2 – Wooden crickets

I turned 65 years old this week. I am a pack rat. I also have things that are much older than 65 years. Most of it has something to do with fishing. So I’m doing a three-part series on some of it in “Old Week“.  Here’s part 2. Hope you enjoy

Okay, it isn’t wooden crickets. But it is a wooden cricket box. The kind we used to have when I was a kid.  The one in the photo was my dad’s. It took crickets to Bussey Brake, RockPile, Gassoway, Irvin’s Lake, Long Lake, Aunt Lucy’s pond…all over. That was a while back. My favorite kind of wooden cricket box was always an empty one. That meant we had used all the crickets and probably had an ice chest full of big old bluegills.

Also pictured here is a wooden-handled solid steel fishing rod and reel. It was my Grandpa Haddox’s. It has no brand name on the rod or the reel. I know nothing about it except it’s about four feet long, has the action of a solid steel rod, is the only fishing rod I’ve ever had that rusted and seems to weigh about four pounds! I can’t imagine catching a fish on it, much less trying to make a cast on it. It has some sort of old green fly-fishing type line on it, which I suspect my dad put on there decades ago and did actually try to catch a fish on.

And, now, saving the best for last: a Brownie Hawkeye Flash Model camera. The kind you used to have to pop a bulb in if you needed a flash. You left the bulb out if you didn’t. I’m not sure when the camera was made, but I was able to find out that they discontinued production of it in 1961. I also found out that it was designed by a man named Arthur Crapsey, which may describe why it didn’t really take very good pictures (Hey, I don’t make this stuff up).

So what does that have to do with fishing? It just happens to be the camera I took some pictures with when I first started making up — I mean writing — fish stories way back there in the early 1970’s. I wrote my first magazine story about fishing when I was a sophomore Northeast Louisiana University Indian journalism student. The NLU Indians were  the forerunner of the modern-day and much more politically correct ULM WarHawks. That was also a time when journalism also involved facts, even in fishing stories. But no need messing up a good Old Week story with “new week” worries. Right?

And yes, the camera only used black and white film. Stop laughing and respect your elders!