{ the big ca tch}
in 2000, just after he’d returned from a trip fishing for trout in the Tierra del Fuego region of South America. In- cluded with it was a photo of the former president casting. “Please don’t criticize the form on the attached picture,” reads the postscript. Upstairs is where Kreh tinkers
with fly patterns at his vise, works on lectures, and determines the break- ing point of certain knots with an industrial knot tester. His work space is littered with small flashes of an- gling insight scribbled on sticky notes. “NEVER LET THE FISH KNOW YOU ARE THERE.” “FISH HAVE TO SEE OR HEAR YOUR FLY FOR IT TO WORK.” As he clicks through a slide show of photographs from last week’s bass-fishing trip to a private ranch in Texas, Kreh tries to explain to a visitor how he developed such a vast bank of knowledge on game fish. “I’ve been doing it since 1947, and
I’m still learning all the time,” he says. “Nothing I can do I’m satisfied with. Ev- erything I do I know I can do better.” Kreh was outsmarting his first fish
during the Great Depression. Grow- ing up the oldest of four siblings in an impoverished home in Frederick, he took to the nearby Monocacy River as much for survival as for sport. As he re- counted in a memoir he co-authored with Chris Millard, “My Life Was This Big,” Kreh’s father, a bricklayer, had died when Kreh was just 6. His mother didn’t have enough money for food, let alone for clothes and school supplies. Kreh often suffered the humiliation of having to wheel a wagon home from a government-run food depot, the bags of flour and cornmeal emblazoned with the word “WELFARE.” Once he learned that a market in
Frederick was ponying up 10 cents a pound for catfish, Kreh started spend- ing his nights on the river fishing in a manner he and his friends called “bush bobbing.” Taking a piece of twine, they’d bait one end with clams or mussels, then tie the other end to a tree over- hanging the water. Sometimes Kreh hauled in more than 10 pounds in a night, yielding a better paycheck than many grown men earned at the time.
Top to bottom: Kreh helps elvind Forseth, a retired army captain, make a left-handed cast. Forseth’s right arm was injured in iraq. Kreh, in a series of steps, ties a streamer to his fly line. Knots are one of his specialties, and he has written three volumes on them.
He also trapped muskrats for a quar-
ter a hide and hunted rabbits for the table. “Back then, we’d walk half a mile outside of town, and we could shoot quail and rabbits,” he says. An expert marksman by his teens, he took a gig doing local shooting demonstrations with shotguns and rifles for Remington. Better than the modest cash stipend was the free ammunition, much of which was pumped into area critters. His childhood romps in the woods
marked the start of an exceptionally adventurous life. Four days after gradu- ating from high school in 1942, he was drafted into the Army, trained in the use of a howitzer, and shipped to England, then Belgium, where he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Around the time of the Japanese
surrender, he returned to Frederick and took a job in the biological warfare re- search lab at Fort Detrick. During the 1950s, Kreh and two co-workers were infected with anthrax. His two col- leagues died as a result. Kreh survived, and so did the bacteria that research- ers isolated in him. It is still identified today as BVK-1, short for Bernard Vic- tor Kreh, which surely makes Kreh the only man with both a fishing fly and a strain of anthrax named after him. He’d picked up his first fly rod at
Tochterman’s sporting goods store in Baltimore in 1947. After that, he started fishing and hunting in every spare mo- ment he had away from his night shifts at the lab, often pursuing smallmouth bass on the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry. He was a well-regarded billiards player, but that hobby gradually fell by the way- side. “I used to be a hell of a pool player,” he says. “I’d only lose when some son of a [expletive] would start talking fishing. I
28 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | september 19, 2010
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