The Snook We Didn't Catch

Stephanie and I would often go fishing with Norm and Jill Nilsen when we first bought the house in the late 60's. Norm had been a friend for about ten years already at that point. I'd first met him at The House of Snook, a fishing tackle shop here in town, back when I was still in high school. He was a few years older than me and planning on getting famous by writing The Great American Novel...LOL Even back then he was dating Jill. She worked in the family print shop, Jones Printing, on N.E. 6th Ave. just south of the post office. They had a small printing press, a darkroom for making halftone negatives, and a Linotype machine for making type.

That Linotype also supplied me and Norm with lots of "lead" (actually a lead and tin alloy) for molding sinkers, jig heads, and bullets. I still have probably 25 pound of the stuff three decades after the print shop closed. Eventually reality set in on Norm and he got a job as a planner with the Dade County Department ofTraffic and Transportation that was in charge of deciding which intersections should be signalized. They had one daughter, Cricket. Eventually Norm had a heart attack, and I soon lost touch with Jill.

The night the photo was taken we'd gone snook fishing. Some nights are successful, some aren't. I had some film in the Minolta Autocord "just in case" and we decided to grab a shot of these big imaginary snook just for kicks before heading off for pizza, or maybe it was coffee and donuts, and then home to sleep.