If you ve ever traveled hundreds of miles and spent hundreds of dollars to catch a handful of fish, each smaller than a man s foot; or if you ve received facial stitches because your brother, cousin, or some other dimwit hooked your cheek instead of a fish; or if your bumper boasts one of those A Bad Day of Fishing is Better than a Good Day of Work stickers; or if you ve spent the dawn of Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving waking with the sparrows in a freezing stream catching nothing more than influenza; or if you ve purposefully jumped into the water to net a fish, or cancelled a date with a friend for a photo opportunity with a slimy beast, or got stuck in quicksand while crossing a no problem creek, Ed Zern is your man.
As the Merry Prankster of Outdoor Fanatics and leading candidate for President Emeritus of Anglers Anonymous, he frequently wrote about the mythical MARGBM LRBA the Madison Avenue Rod, Gun, Bloody Mary, and Labrador Retriever Benevolent Association and lampooned diverse topics from duck hunters to conservation groups to adolescent anglers. His wit knew few boundaries, and he was often the target of his own jokes. When asked about his Parkinson s Disease, according to an International Herald Tribune piece written by Arthur Higbee in March 1992, Zern replied, I shake a lot, but it keeps my wristwatch wound.
And as saltwater fly-fishing guru Jack Samson explains in his tribute to Zern on the , After watching him attempt to address an OWAA conference audience at one of the last ones he attended, I asked him how he was handling the debilitating trembling. Well, he replied, with a wry smile, at long last I can now fish a fly like a living insect. A long-time member of many important conservation organizations including Trout Unlimited, Ducks Unlimited, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, and the Federation of Fly Fisherman, the OWWA has designated Zern one of its legendary graybeards , a distinction held by only 47 other 20th century outdoor writers.
Although best known for his Field Stream column, his books, The Best of Ed Zern, Hunting and Fishing from A to Zern, To Hell with Hunting, and Are Fisherman People?, were also popular. Zern was born in 1910 in West Virginia and died in 1994 at the age of 83, but the laughter he generated still resonates.
Zern cast his wisdom behind a mask of irony and humor because through that lens his words and cartoons often make multiple, paradoxical points. In one swift jab, he could mock anglers, conservationists, fish, the government, and himself. In the Spring 2007 edition of Ralph, The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy, and the Humanities, L.
W. Milam reviewed The Best of Ed Zern, republished in 2003. Milam aptly captures Zern s essential theses: 1) There are people who hunt and fish; 2) They also drink and tell lies when they are fishing and hunting; 3) Or any other time; 4) They are not interested in anything else; 5) Like politics, wives, children.
..you name it; and 6) If you think they are dotty, you have another think coming.
Ironically, although he loved fly-fishing for salmon and bird hunting, Zern worked for an advertising agency in New York City. This dichotomy highlights his perverseness, and Zern knew how to bring disparate parties together. As William Washabaugh writes in his book Deep Trout: Angling in Popular Culture, Zern s passions and pastimes often seemed out of alignment, as if they were forced into a body that was ill-prepared to receive them.
His character was riddled with dramatic incongruities, as if competing forces met head on inside him, never to be reconciled and fully meshed Though a nattily dressed Madison Avenue man, he embraced leftist social and political positions. He was a corporate man with distinctly counter-corporate inclinations. Zern s paradoxical nature was no different than ours: he just embraced and publicly shared it.
Washabaugh reports that after a stint in the merchant marines, Zern worked for the N.W. Ayer Advertising agency in 1934.
Fourteen years later, he found work for the Geyer advertising agency, where he designed advertisements for Nash-Kelvinator, which later became American Motors. The car advertisements are filled with angling anecdotes and illustrations with titles such as Musky Fisherman Marooned! and Bait Outwits Fisherman .
A decade later he joined Field Stream. These ads are as contrarian as Zern himself, especially because in the late 70s, he became a leading opponent of American Motors s Jeeps because they encouraged driving in fragile ecosystems. Combine Zern s advertising and urban background with his self-effacing personality, commitment to conservationism, and maverick radicalism, and you have an author with multifaceted perspectives.
Take for example his Exit Laughing piece titled Good News for Anglers , about the Asian catfish. Exotic dealers of aquarium fish imported this catfish to the states. However, once discarded in local waters, the fish can anatomically crawl on land and live without water for several hours.
Zern good-naturedly finds hope in this species because it represents the new wave of fishing: eventually, since the Reagan administration has no intention of making a serious effort to combat water pollution, anglers will no longer need to get wet because more fish will evolutionarily follow this catfish to escape gross, polluted waters. In one swoop, Zern condemns with a smile Reagan s environmental policies, exotic fish dealers, water polluters, and anglers themselves. In an online article dated 19 November 2002 on the sponsored by Washington State University, Dave Engerbretson describes how Zern captured both the reverent and irreverent.
Engerbretson reports escaping graduate school one day in the late 60s to fish at a local trout stream. As he walked the riverside, he noticed an apparition ahead. It was the quintessential fly fisherman, a portrait extracted from the annals of Izaak Walton: the ghost was donning a tweed sport coat, Tattersall vest, Irish tweed hat, silk paisley ascot, and holding an umbrella and binoculars?
It was Ed Zern, and that, in a nutshell, is Ed Zern. During his tenure in advertising, Zern founded the Chevron Texaco Conservation Awards program, which in 2007 will be celebrating its 53rd anniversary. In a Chevron press release, Helen Engle, a director on the National Audubon Society s board, said, Ed had this idea about the awards at a time when conservation was a hard thing to talk about.
And he knew intuitively that nothing would be achieved unless we built partnerships. According to the press release, (Zern s) belief in the power of collaboration remains the program s cornerstone. Cold bird
News RSS