Norm -

I have to tell you that I think these are among the prettiest flies that you?ve tied and shown here.

However, having known Sam Slaymaker from years back, maybe I just looked at these flies through different eyes.

Back in the early 1970?s when I was a young budding fly fisherman and fly tyer, a small group of us who were members of a relatively new at that time Donegal (PA) Chapter of Trout Unlimited met each month in the home of one of our members in southeast PA. Most of these meetings were at Ken Depoe?s home in Mount Joy (Ken was a well known active conservationist in Lancaster County, PA for many years) and Sam Slaymaker was another of our members.

The Slaymaker family was also well known in the Lancaster area. They lived in a historic old home, called White Chimneys, built around 1720 by one of the first Slaymakers to live in the area, and the family owned an old lock company, Slaymaker Lock Company, located in Lancaster that had been founded in the late 1800?s. I can remember that Sam also had our meetings at his home a time or two.

One thing that struck me about Sam was that I don?t think he was a particularly good fisherman or fly tyer, for that matter, at least not by comparison to several of our other TU members. He was probably a much better story teller and writer. Sam said the idea of tying these trout patterns just came to him, so he more or less dreamed dreamed them up, and put them in his book without knowing whether they would catch fish or not. But they did catch fish, and became somewhat popular patterns at the time, which I think somewhat surprised him.

We had another fly tyer in our small TU group at that time who was a much better fly tyer than Sam Slaymaker. I didn?t know it at the time, but learned it later, he was a recovering alcoholic. Good thing for him, and for other fly tyers around the world who learned much about fly tying from him. That was Poul Jorgensen.

John