couldn’t make a shot after that.” His plan was to become an out-
door writer and fi sh around the world. He wrote his fi rst magazine article for a publication called Pennsylvania Game News; it was about hunting for squirrels from a canoe. Hundreds of similarly arcane articles followed, most of the how-to and where-to variety. His reputation as an angler took
him to exotic places such as Cuba, where he headed in 1959, just months after the revolution, to take part in the annual Ernest Hemingway Marlin Tournament. Kreh spent the fi rst day of the tournament on Fidel Castro’s boat, the next two with Hemingway on his fabled vessel, Pilar, where Kreh picked the brain of fi rst mate Gregorio Fuent- es, a legendary billfi sherman who many people believe, rightly or wrongly, was the inspiration for Hemingway’s “The
Kreh developed a fl y pattern known around the world as “Lefty’s Deceiver.” It was featured on a postage stamp in 1991.
Old Man and the Sea.” Castro’s boat won the tournament. Eventually, Kreh landed a job as
outdoor editor for the Baltimore Sun, juggling his writing with his life as a lec- turer-entertainer. Soon he was traveling around the country doing casting dem- onstrations, using both storytelling and his technical ability to hold crowds. He wasn’t afraid to show off when he encoun- tered skeptical anglers of experience. “Nobody knew who you were,” Kreh
says, “so you had to do something to get their attention.” His bag of cast- ing tricks, which he looks back on somewhat embarrassedly as useless “hotdogging,” included a move where he
would knock the cigarette out of a wom- an’s mouth with the fl y line from about 60 feet. Ambidextrous, he could cast a fl y rod in each hand, switching them off in mid-air, and he also could cast eight fl y rods at a time in rhythm, one set be- tween each of his fi ngers. (Despite his nickname, Kreh actually does all of his demos right-handed these days, having torn a muscle in his left arm years ago.) “I realized suddenly, You know what?
This is entertainment; it’s not helping anyone. And I always wanted to help people become better fl y fi shermen. Gradually, I changed over from doing all that fancy stuff that didn’t do any- body any good to doing stuff that people could take home with them and use.” In this regard, Kreh was a new breed
of professional outdoorsman. He didn’t exactly get rich as an angler-slash-writ- er-slash-showman — “If this were some
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