The above post has me crying,and our nearest neighbor lived a mile away,he!! you can barely live 10 feet apart nowadays!Is there anywhere on earth that your nearest neighbor lives a mile away anymore?!If so i want to live there!In NC some western autos still exist in very small towns but no longer sell sporting goods related objects. 
My first fiberglass flyrod was from Western Auto. ACtually, the local owner back in my MO hometown let me tie and sell a horribly horrid set of what might have been wooly buggers ? little tail, some chennile and a palmered hackle. I’d staple 20 to a card that he’d staple to the display case. I was about 12 at the time. When I graduated from HS he had sold maybe four flies off of it and gave them all back to me, cards and all. Said he didn’t think fly fishing would catch on 'round there. JGW
White43-I’ll bet your home tied flies were better than the card of flies Montgomery Ward sold that were flatened out against the cardboard, all size 6 and appeared to be an atemp to look like Atlantic Salmon flies. Each one gaudier than the next. I think to hook the buyer, not the fish. Not a Atlantic salmon for miles from the Wards in Portland, Oregon. I must admit, I would spend hours on the sixth floor sporting goods department at Wards while my folks shopped for hardware or clothing. I can still hear the wooden floor creaking as I walked around the bins of lures, weights and lines.
The above post has me crying,and our nearest neighbor lived a mile away,he!! you can barely live 10 feet apart nowadays!Is there anywhere on earth that your nearest neighbor lives a mile away anymore?!If so i want to live there!
Come to the Idaho fish in, there are places in Utah Idaho and Oregon that this is possable, just no jobs.
Eric
NderdaFilm, I have that very rod. It is a lovely thing and it casts just fine. I have it strung with a seven weight line and you could use and eight weight on it also I believe. The rod is a beauty for certain. Enjoy your treasure.
It is funny, the person who taught me how to fly fish didn’t like my rod and reel, said it was too slow and that nobody uses automatic reels anymore. :roll: To me the rod is priceless as well as the old automatic reel my father put on it. Thanks for sharing in my nastalgia.
Another funny thing, I broke the automatic reel when I was a teenager, It was fun to strip out all the line and push the button to bring it all in. I fixed it using parts from a ballpoint pen to hold the spring in place this last month. The reel works great now. :lol:
Gardenfish, I will try it out with my eight wt and my five wt line. I will let you know how it goes. Is your rod very slow in its action?
Is my rod slow? Hmmmm. It is not fast. I use it for bass fishing and tossing big streamers. Okay, I can tell you that it is not sluggish in anyway, so rather than slow I would say, at least for me, that it approaches moderate with a WF7F on it. Have fun with it. My 8 wt. Albright GP and my FlyLogic FLP+ are faster, but of course they are graphite. The FLP+ is the fastest of the three. There is nothing about the Western Auto that would cause me to replace it with a newer 7 wt.
Paul