Trading Palm Trees for Bamboo (Fly Rods)

Affiliate Disclosure: This page contains affiliate links. We earn from qualifying purchases.

---

My dad grew up—or, as he jokes, tried to—in Beverly Hills, where there were more palm trees than trout, and the only water he navigated regularly were the water hazards dotting the fairways of his local golf courses. This world of celebrities and silk was far away from the world of bamboo rods and river guides and yet he would come to choose the latter. It was in that world, driven by a constant joy of discovery, that he would even leave a lasting mark. As with many good stories, it all started with a girl.

In the 1960s my dad was dating Lynn Scholz, a woman who liked to fish. At the time, my dad was an accomplished golfer; he had played many top-tier courses around the world, and had set a course record at Shinnecock. (He also has a great story about equaling Arnold Palmer after stepping on and denting his driver.) On their way back from the Montreal Expo in 1967, Lynn convinced him to stop at the Battenkill and go fly fishing for a day. Like any man in love, he agreed to give his girl’s suggestion a go. It was a day that changed his life.

“I caught nothing,” he told me. “I found it difficult to cast a fly. But what it did do­—it opened a big new world for me. I thought, ‘my God there’s a lot to this.’ Flies, rods, lines. Water reading. Reels. And these fabulous people I had never spent time with.” It was the people in particular that caught him.

My dad is Hoagy B. Carmichael, son of the famed American singer, songwriter, and actor. Today, many may not know the name, even if they recognize the music, including “Heart and Soul” and “Georgia on My Mind.” At one point, his “Stardust” was the most recorded song in American history. My dad, connected forever to his dad by their shared name, was both propelled by and held back in the Hollywood Hills from making his own name. He golfed regularly with Fred Astaire and worked for Burt Lancaster. A list of names of their notable friends would be long indeed. And so he came East, seeking to build his own life.

Once East, he worked as a producer for Fred Rogers and later started dating Lynn, who took him fly fishing. My grandfather took him fishing only once, in the Sierras, where the weather was windy and cold, and they didn’t catch a thing. My grandfather was apparently once on Curt Gowdy’s American Sportsman TV show. He failed at catching anything so they staged him hooking into a weight, and threw a flopping fish into the boat. What skill my dad has at fishing he came to honestly, and later in life.

What my dad did learn from my grandfather were his exacting standards. In 1969, only two years after he first fished the Battenkill, my dad was standing on the front lawn of Tuscarora, a private trout club in the Catskills, waving his custom-made orange fiberglass rod in hopes of showing it off. Instead, everyone was gathering around an older gentleman, admiring his bamboo rod. As my dad tells it, he quickly wound up his Pflueger Medalist and wandered over to meet none other than Everett Garrison—a meeting that would change his life and, I think it’s fair to say, the world of bamboo rod making.

After casting his first bamboo rod that day at Tuscarora, my dad fell hard for bamboo. His enthusiasm was such that he would sometimes fly from Pittsburgh to La Guardia just to spend the day with Garrison. As a producer and filmmaker at the time, he started by making the documentary of Garrison with his close friend Bill Wheatley, footage that led to the book. The trick was the tapers.

“I asked him, and he thought the book was a wonderful idea,” my dad said. “But what I really asked him is if I could put his tapers in the book, and Garrison said yes. And then before I really started, he died. We had made the film, Bill Wheatley and I, and thank God for that, because when I started to write, I watched countless hours of film to figure out what his hand positions were, how he used the lathe, etc., and all that.”

Considering that when he had moved East from Los Angeles he didn’t know how to screw in a screw with a screwdriver, this was quite the leap. But he had made a commitment to Garrison and he was bound to see it through. That book is now in its fifth printing, not including limited editions, and has been referred to by many as the seminal book of bamboo rod making.

“It’s hard to overstate Hoagy’s influence on the bamboo fly rod community,” said Jonas Clark of Spinoza Rod Company. “When he published A Master’s Guide to Building a Bamboo Fly Rod in 1977 it peeled back the curtain on what had been a very secretive, closely guarded craft. All of a sudden anyone with the desire, passion, and patience had a starting point for building a bamboo rod. In the decades since then, thousands and thousands of people have done just that. He educated and elevated a whole community.”

From his time with Garrison and writing the book, my dad went on to build his own bamboo rods with the same dedicated fervor. He was single, and often would work all day. “Twelve hours or more for sure,” he said. “Oh yeah, I liked to listen to the Islanders hockey games on the radio while working—I’d never been to a game, but I couldn’t wait to get down to the shop after dinner. I was passionate.”

His rods reflect Garrison’s craft: they are simple. Something truly refined­—in its finest expression—has nothing unnecessary. Nothing is wasted, and the lines are clean, straight, even spare. It’s a simplicity born from hours of meticulous focus and working with one’s hands. In talking about this time, my dad will often hold up his hands, now weathered and gnarled like an heirloom vine, and observe, almost in awe, at what they were able to produce. His rod-making window wasn’t long: he produced only 103 bamboo rods, stopping in the early 1990s when he felt like he couldn’t make them to the same exacting standards anymore. Given their quality and scarcity, his rods can sell for upwards of $9,000.

When he stopped making rods, he turned his attention to buying and fixing them, alongside other antique tackle. And now, as Jonas says, “Vintage Hardy reels stick to Hoagy like glue.”

For years he would have breakfast and take his coffee out to the shop that ran the length of the backside of our barn. He might come back for a quick lunch, or he would be so absorbed in his work that he would come back only for dinner with his hands and clothes covered in wood dust and 3-in-One Oil.

These are smells of my childhood: a potent and sometimes head-spinning mix of metal shavings from the lathe, varnish from the dipping tanks, and an alchemical mix of oils, solvents, and glues from fixing and reassembling rods and vintage reels. I remember the first time I pressed the trigger on the pneumatic hose, staring down the barrel as a curious kid. My hair blew back and a core memory snapped into place instantly. I remember the sound of the lathe, hypnotic and cautionary at once. And I remember the sound of the heavy door and antique metal latch that separated the outside world from the magic of that shop for years.

There was no lock on the door, and guests were both frequent and welcome. It was a space filled with treasures like a bench from Leonard’s shop, a sign from Payne’s shop, a bookcase from Jimmy Derren’s The Angler’s Roost, various pieces from Garrison, photos of salmon and trout from around the world, and enough Walker and Hardy parts to make even an ardent collector blush.

Until it was gone. My dad’s shop was not entirely his: a lot of the equipment had been Everett Garrison’s—or, as my dad often still refers to him, Mr. Garrison’s. This level of regard and respect is due; Garrison’s rods represent a kind of rare, pure simple artistry. Given the fly-fishing world’s regard for Garrison, my dad always felt like his shop, or “their shop,” should always be accessible to people. It was why my dad was always happy to show people around the shop and to teach people how to make rods. And it’s why the rod shop is now a part of the permanent collection at the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum (CFFCM), where it’s used to teach people to build rods to this day.

While I believe this is the right thing, and am on the board of the CFFCM, what is right in the long run doesn’t always feel good at the start. When that shop left the house I mourned it like I had lost a member of the family. Today, I am happy to see it being put to good use.

In the time since, we’ve had plenty of distractions. When I was in high school, my dad got sick: his nose became congested, the bags under his eyes grew, and he lost that energy we all know him for. For over a year the diagnoses came in. The final verdict was frightening for us all: Stage IV lymphoma. It was in his stomach lining and it was aggressive.

That summer, I watched Hoagy undergo chemo. He was tired, in pain, and as a teenager, I didn’t know what to do. I just watched, scared, as he began to lose his hair. And then, late in the summer, his appendix burst. It was the straw that for many would have been the final straw.

In the hospital, Hoagy wore a sun-faded hat from Middle Camp, his beloved salmon camp on the storied Grand Cascapedia River. We fished out of that camp for almost two decades. It’s a soothing, warm place of bright, salty people and Atlantic salmon larger than you can imagine. The fly-caught river record is over 50 pounds.

In his delicate state, Hoagy convinced his doctors to let him return to Middle Camp. He was a ghost of himself, so much so that his favorite guide didn’t recognize him and walked right past him. Once safely at camp, he went out fishing for 10-15 minutes, which was all the energy he could muster, and then crawled into bed. “I could hear that water, and I smelled those smells that you associate with that place,” he said. “I buried myself in my pillow and cried.” And then, miraculously, he got better.

We Carmichaels are not religious people; we don’t pray or proselytize. But they say that water heals and that rivers bring life. And I swear to you that on this trip he started to recover. Would it be too much to say that that trip to the river and its people saved his life? Sure. But by the next year, he could stand on his own and cast. And those, as they say, are just the facts, ma’am.

It was following this healing trip that he committed himself to writing about the river and its people. While most people know him for his book on bamboo, his research on the Grand Cascapedia led to the definitive work on the subject. The resulting two volumes are of a scale and depth I’ve not seen pursued about any other river. The two volumes are hundreds of pages, with hundreds of photos, and the books are beautiful: raised leather spines, slipcases, and all.

While he worked on these volumes he behaved like a possessed treasure hunter. But instead of gold, he was hunting for information. He would fly to Chicago or London in search of archives, looking for deeds and photos or letters that helped him piece together the story of this river that everyone loved but whose story had never been told in full. Just like in the Garrison book, he threw himself into it, and would stop short of nothing but what he felt was the full picture. He would call and excitedly tell me about an old photograph he had found, or about a letter he had found proving a long-held theory about who built which camp, or about how he had begged and cajoled a librarian into ignoring policy and aiding in him scanning a page from a manuscript. His enthusiasm was just too much.

“Like any book that I’ve worked on, it’s about discovery,” he said. “Piecing the chronology of what to do and how to do it, in the Garrison book. In the Cascapedia book it was who was it when and how big was the fish. Different stuff, but the same process of discovery.”

This constant joy of discovery has carried him through five books: A Master’s Guide To Building A Bamboo Fly Rod, A Grand Cascapedia Volume 1 and 2, Eight by Carmichael, and Sidecasts. The latter two collections are not as well known, but are worth reading (and I don’t say that just because I’ve edited many of them); his piece on bamboo rod maker Jim Payne is without peer, from what I know.

But this joy is also the light that I find every time I am with him. When I walk into his house, he always has new vintage reels spread out on the table in front of him, and he can’t wait to show me some curiosity, some new discovery. It’s what carries him to make the long drive north every year to Canada, if only to fish for a few hours and sit on the riverbank with the guides he’s known for decades.

And so it is that my dad traded the glamour of Hollywood Hills for the hallowed waters of the Catskills and Grand Cascapedia. He traded names like Astaire, Crosby, and Reagan for names like Harrison, Coull, and Sexton. If you don’t recognize the latter it’s because they’re not household names, beyond ours: they’re the river guides who call our house regularly, regardless of season. They’re the ones who cheered him from the riverbank when he was sick, and the ones we Carmichaels feel like we can, to use my dad’s words, settle in with. With my daughter joining us, they’ve been lighting riverbank fires for three generations. They may not be widely known, nor do they want to be. And that’s the whole point.

People often focus on what my dad has contributed to the sport, but what they can’t see is that it’s given back all that and more. I asked him recently about this, and he said, “You know, these people and this sport opened up my world.” He paused. “I love it, and I just can’t help it.”

Ben Carmichael is a writer, editor, and photographer based in New England. He was lucky to grow up fishing with his dad’s bamboo. He fishes wherever he can, and is a strong advocate for conservation. View his work at bencarmichaelphotography.com.

---