A Gathering Of Eagles, Page 13

A Gathering Of Eagles, Page 13

Around that same time a Vietnam-era vet named Harvey Naslund, who would say he ended up in El Cajon because he left his dad’s ranch, started walking and stopped when he finally got out of the snow, stopped by a local tackle shop. An inveterate chaser of big brown trout, he was intrigued by a long piece of soft plastic. “What the heck is this?” he asked. “That’s a rubber worm,” said the store clerk, a young man named Jimmy Patten. “You use them for bass.” “I’ll take three,” Naslund replied. Patten guffawed and rather than explain why you don’t just buy three plastic worms, offered to take Naslund fishing on nearby El Capitan Reservoir. “We get a rental boat and Jimmy gets both anchors out and we’re sitting off Conejos Point,” recalled Naslund. “We throw out those worms and he starts catching one bass after another. After he caught eight bass to my none he said ‘Let me check you out here’ and then said ‘You’ve been bit at least four times already, they’re hitting it on the sink.’ “What’s the sink? I asked,” said Naslund. Watching Patten catch chunky El Cap bass and, once Patten explained what was going on, finally catching a couple himself, looked like fun, and he said as much to Jimmy. “He says I belong to a club, Pisces Bass club, if you want to start fishing for bass, you ought to join, you can really learn a lot,” said Naslund. “So I joined Pisces. Little did I know Jimmy was Lunker Bill Murphy’s protege. Bill lost a son in a car wreck and took Jimmy under his wing.” The membership of Pisces was a “who’s who” of the top San Diego sticks and Harvey was soon learning from the best and com- peting, albeit not very successfully. A natural organizer and leader, it wasn’t long before Naslund was ‘kicked upstairs’ and starting his foray into the publishing business via the ubiquitous club newsletter. “I was in the club a year and they made me president, even though I never won a tournament,” Harvey. “They said get him out of the boat and get him in an office. Dave Coolidge started the California Lunker Club and in 1974 I resigned from Pisces, went with Coolidge and did his newsletter. I was the editor. “One day I was at El Cap, my second newsletter under my arm, and there’s a guy standing on the dock talking with (San Diego City Lake’s biologist) Larry Bottroff.

Gary Marshall, left, was a top pro and Ranger Dealer. Pisces Bass Club member Roger Dickson and a California record stringer, 40-10 for five fish out of Otay. Don Lee and daughter pose with a 50s bass catch.

It was Bill Rice, editor of Western Outdoor News. ‘What you got there,’ he asked and I said a newsletter. He looked at it — it had a couple paid ads, both probably sold for about 20 dollars — and he said ‘how often do you put it out?’ I said once a month, he said ‘Which one is that one,’ the second, I an- swered, and he said ‘The next one will be your last, they never go over three issues.’” Later, Naslund ran into Rice after Western Outdoor News founder Burt Twilegar had just taken over the Western Bass Fishing Association. “WBFA was well established, Jerry Abne and Wayne Cummings founded it,” said Naslund. “They tried to call it the Western Bass Anglers Sportsman Society but (BASS founder) Ray Scott sued them. California Lunker Club merged with Western Bass and I stayed on for a while in an advisory capacity. “Bill put me in touch with Burt. I was selling cemetery plots, making pretty good money and blowing it all bass fishing,” Harvey recalled. “I even went back East and fished tournaments at spots like Toledo Bend. I got sucked in with Mike Folkestad and Dave Nollar. It cost me a divorce with Eve, it wasn’t women, it was fishing. I never won a dime. “Anyway Burt said he wanted to find a di- rector. Bill was executive director, but he was also editor of the paper and Burt knew he couldn’t do both, so we put a deal together,”

Harvey noted. As early as 1968 after I got out of the service I was making $38,000 a year selling cemetery plots door to door. That was good money for the time. I started in June of 1975 as Western Bass Director at $800 a month with Burt. “Pretty soon I went to Burt and said I didn’t want a salary, I wanted to sell ads to the bass sponsors for 20 percent,” he added. “I wound up with Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana and Oklahoma — the heart of bass fishing. That’s how it started.”

July 2011 _ SILVER EAGLES 13