When I was deputized to select the first author to be featured by ROLF, the task seemed daunting.  Where to start?  It’s not like fly fishing is bereft of splendid literature.  There are so many great authors on the topic, it is like selecting only one fly from an Orvis catalog.  There are any number of choices which can easily be defended as the best or most appropriate.  Men such as Nick Lyons, Robert Traver, Lamb, Haig-Brown, Hewitt and Brooks leap to fond recall.  How do we pick just one, the first-ever ROLF-featured author?

 Perhaps it helps to consider what ROLF is all about to begin with.  If you do that for any length of time, you will lose what remains of your fragile grasp on sanity.  ROLF is lunatic.  It is irreverent.  It doesn’t take much of anything seriously except a fly and a glass of Dickel.  It follows that the first featured author should adhere to similar strictures.  Now a new school of fish flashes before the mind’s eye.  Gierach, Holt, Corey Ford, Gene Hill.  But before them, waaay before them, was a great writer who perhaps defined the art with such grace, style, and humor that his works will never be surpassed.  ROLF’s inaugural Featured Author is John Tainter Foote.

 Born in 1881, John Tainter Foote spent some of his early life in Leadville, Colorado.  He eventually came down from the Mount to reside on the fabled Beaverkill, from whence he created some of the finest sporting literature ever penned.  He was successful as a novelist, short story writer, playwright, and screen producer.  He wrote magnificent short stories throughout the first half of the twentieth century (he died in 1950) about horse racing, sporting dogs, and fly fishing.  Some of his stories were poignant and heart-stirring, particularly the dog stories.  Ray Holland and Horace Little on their best days couldn’t surpass Dumb-Bell of Brookfield or Pocono Shot.  Horse racing fans should all be familiar with the antics of Blister Jones and such stories as The Look of Eagles.  But any fly fisher who has never wallowed in the pure joy of Foote’s angling stories has missed one of the greatest hatches of all.  There aren’t a lot of these gems, and they total only 210 pages in a 1947 compendium titled Anglers All.  Many of the stories were so good they were published separately, however.

 Some of the individual stories are classics by themselves.  You can luxuriate in the richness and good humor of Broadway Angler or Change of Idols.  These stories incorporate Broadway showgirls into fishing and deal with the age-old struggle that reposes in the soul of every true fly fisher—fishing versus sex.  They are more than just a good read.

 The very best, though, is Mr. Foote’s famous trilogy of stories about the inimitable George Baldwin Potter.  Potter’s credo was that he “either takes trout on a dry fly or he does not take them at all.”  This is strikingly similar to one of the Eleven Commandments of ROLF, which holds that dry flies only may be used (unless it is necessary to fish wet flies, streamers, San Juan worms, etc.).  The trilogy starts with A Wedding Gift, which is one of those stories that makes you laugh out loud.  In the story, Potter achieves a fantasy many might envy.  He marries a woman 20 years younger.  Lamentably, she knows nothing of fly fishing and can’t seem to grasp old George’s unabated passion for it. Naturally, he takes her fishing for their honeymoon  and is somewhat aghast when she presents her steamer trunks to be loaded into the canoe they must take over several portages to reach the fishing camp.  He is amazed that she won’t climb into the knickers he has provided for her on the premise that she would never allow a trout to see her so poorly adorned.  Perhaps she was a forerunner of the yuppie female fly fishers of today who all seem to look pretty fetching in their tight neoprenes, but probably wouldn’t have much interest in the old canvas or rubber jobs most of us started with.  Anyway, the story and the mirth roll on with great good humor, and Potter is a bozo we can all love and envy or pity.

 The next two parts of the trilogy are Fatal Gesture and Daughter of Delilah, in which the connubial bliss and angst of the Potter marriage are tested again.  These are truly funny stories, but they were sadly out of print until the author’s son, Timothy Foote, published them again in 1992 (A Wedding Gift and Other Angling Stories) with a fourth story, this one a more modern version about George Baldwin Potter III, entitled The Loch Ness Monstor.  Timothy is a chip off the old block, but can’t match his father’s humor.  It’s too bad that these stories can’t go on forever.

 If you like John Tainter Foote’s angling stories, or if you just like excellent writing, look also for some of Foote’s other assembled works, Great Dog Stories, Dumb-Bell and Others, Hoofbeats, Blister Jones, The Look of Eagles, and A Fowl Disaster.  Lamentably, I believe all these last-mentioned books to be out of print.  Perhaps a trip to the local library might dredge them up.  Now there’s a novel idea for a fly fisher!