Ernest George Schwiebert, Remembrances of
Although the dry fly trouting here in SE Pennsylvania has been the best for decades, I decided today to forego yet another day astream and drive the hour to New Jersey to celebrate and pay homage to Ernie?s life and accomplishments at the Memorial Service. At the end of the day, this was a much more memorable way to have spent the time.
The Service was at the Princeton University ?Chapel?. Some of the other guests, unfamiliar with the school grounds, were looking for a small building, which most chapels around here tend to be. They were taken aback by the scale and grandeur of the building. I suppose with understated Anglican aplomb, the Princeton Chapel was one only in the manner that the grand Newport beach houses are ?cottages?.
The acoustics were wonderful, abetted by soaring arches that looked to be 80-100 feet high. The many stained glass windows were magnificent and remarkably rich in detail, reminiscent of rich tapestries.
The Service was Episcopal, and High Church at that. The first hymn was Beethoven. The reading was Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, in my estimation, the most excellent and meaningful passages for the purpose from either Testament. Ernie?s family read from various works and reminisced.
The guests were not terribly diverse, though there were ladies present. Not a baiter in the crowd. I suspect a few may have been furtive nymphers. And there were few admitted users of plastic rods, except for Salar and the salt. Male pattern baldness prevailed, and the hirsute were in shades of gray.
The reception afterwards was in Prospect House, and many stories were related. White and red wine were the main libations. When I first began treating Ernie to wine at dinners a couple of times each year, I expected him to prefer Chardonnay, misjudging from his writings. Picasso had his Blue Phase: I guess I caught Ernie out of his white and italic phase and into his red phase. So Cabernet it was.
For the ones who preferred ales and pilsners, the choices were Amstel Light and Samuel Adams.
Guests flew in from many places. An hour?s drive still marked me as a relative local. A chap from Britain thought he was the guest who had traveled the farthest to make this Service. I told him that three folks had come up from Argentina just to be here, and though they had fewer time zones to traverse, it was a longer plane ride.
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Many of the guests looked familiar, and it was difficult to remember names since they looked strange in suits and not in waders and vests. I tried to use the mnemonic algorithm of thinking about streams and clubs and trying to match up names that way, but finally I gave up and introduced myself to the ones I thought I was supposed to know.
When it comes to dry fly trouting, I have met less than a handful that I look up to, and Ernie was one of them. His seminal ?Matching the Hatch? sparked my lifelong passion as he did for so many of us. Ernie transformed the way fly fishing for trout is done and thought about. This first book presaged the explosion of how-to and scientifically valid publications that continue to reverberate to this day. And this was well before magazines devoted to fly fishing and tying, and even The Movie (ARRTI). In fact Maclean hadn?t even written the eponymous book ? in those days, books were written before the movie.
With so many new books each month now, it might seem to the casual observer that publishing in our field is easy. But I still remember the struggle to garner support for his 2-volume ?Trout?, still a durable masterwork.
Ernie appreciated beauty in many aspects. There are many who are aesthetes, but very few are in the same league. Ernie had a massive intellect, a world class education, but beyond that, was deeply and widely erudite. And most relevant to our sport, he was exceptionally knowledgable and sharing about waters, fly rods, flies, the rich history of flyfishing, entomology.
And unlike so many of us, Ernie was a creator of beauty: as a writer and author, an artist, an architect, an educator, a raconteur.
Why are so many of the fly fishing greats also technically competent and proficient? If memory serves me, Garrison, Dan Bailey, Lee Wulff also had degrees in engineering or physics.
Ernie was also quite the Clubsman, a dying art form these days. Among many other groups, he was a member of the New York and Philadelphia Anglers Clubs, Harrisburg Fly Fishers, and Henryville. And he has a Trout Unlimited Chapter named in his honor.
In a thousand years, when the politicians, corporations and countries in the headlines of our lifetimes will have evaporated into the dimmest chapters of history books, Ernie will be remembered and read by the sportsmen of the new Millenium. Ernie truly was a giant for the ages: The Compleat Angler, Gentleman and Scholar.
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