I started my first newspaper when I was in my mid-20s, in Grays Harbor, Washington. The harbor is the largest natural deepwater port on the Pacific Coast north of San Francisco, and has been an important shipping center since the days of the earliest settlement.
Located at the base of the wild and beautiful Olympic Peninsula, the area is a sportsman’s paradise like no other on earth. The dense forests are home to elk, deer, black bear, mountain lions, and many believe the legendary Bigfoot lives there, too. The rivers offer fishing for everything from trout to steelhead salmon, or you can drive out to the beach and surf fish or walk out on a jetty to wet a line. If you like shellfish, you can dig for razorback clams during the open season, drop a crab trap off a dock and haul up Dungeness crab, or charter a boat out of Westport, on the south entrance to the harbor, and go deep sea fishing. When I lived there, Westport billed itself as the Salmon Capital of the World due to the many charter boats that operated from there, as well as commercial fishing boats.
I had a friend who operated a very successful taxidermy shop in Grays Harbor and was well known to sportsmen throughout the Pacific Northwest. I was always amazed at the number of people who caught a huge salmon and brought it in to be mounted and didn’t want the meat. All they cared about was a trophy to hang on their wall. Not wanting to see all of that meat go to waste, my buddy tried donating it to local food banks, but due to some glitch in the law, they could not accept it. So if you were his friend, you could expect your freezer to be well stocked with salmon steaks and salmon fillets, and you always had a good supply of smoked salmon. By the way, if you are ever friends with a taxidermist, don’t ask when he hands you a piece of meat and says, “Here, eat this.” Salmon were not the only animals that came through the shop!
One day my friend got a call from a commercial fishing boat that had netted a seventeen-foot great white shark offshore. They wanted it mounted and contacted him. Now, just how in the hell do you move a fish that big? I borrowed a big flatbed truck from another friend, and we went to pick up the shark. It took a forklift in the middle and several men on each end to get it onto the truck. Just seeing that critter was enough to keep me out of the water for a year!
Driving home with the shark in the back of the truck, we stopped for fuel. While we were filling the truck’s tank, the old gentleman working at the station asked where we caught that creature we had strapped down in the back of the truck. We told him it came out of a small creek a mile or so south of there. His jaw dropped open and his eyes became almost as big as saucers. “My grandkids wade in that creek all the time,” he said. “But they ain’t gonna do it anymore. No, sir, no more!”
Sometimes I feel bad for those poor kids who were probably never allowed back in their favorite creek. And I’m sure that old-timer got razzed by his pals about his wild story since the creek was no more than a foot or two deep. But at the time, my friend and I laughed all the way back to his shop.
Today is your last chance to enter our Free Drawing for an RV camping journal donated by Barbara House. Barbara makes several variations of these, and they all have pages where you can list the date, weather, where you traveled to and from that day, beginning and ending mileage, campground information including amenities at RV sites, a place for a campground rating, room to record activities, people met along the way, reminders of places to see and things to do the next time you’re in the area, and a page for notes for each day. To enter, click on this Free Drawing link or the tab at the top of this page and enter your name (first and last) in the comments section at the bottom of that page (not this one). Only one entry per person per drawing please, and you must enter with your real name. To prevent spam or multiple entries, the names of cartoon or movie characters are not allowed. The winner will be drawn this evening.
Thought For The Day – Apparently responding to a wedding RSVP with “Maybe next time” isn’t a proper response. Who knew?
Nick Russell
World-Famous, New York Times Best Selling Author, and All-Around Nice Guy!
Nick
Thanks for by FCFTD (first chuckle for the day)
You “Ain’t Right” .
Poor kids….bet THEY could figure it out too!
Funny though .. LOL
Well done .
You have just earned your “Stinkin’ Badge” !
Welcome to the club !
Signed
The Weirdo Overlord
(you always suspected didn’t you ?)
I wonder where that stuffed 17′ shark ended up?
When I was stationed at the Coast Guard air station in Port Angeles (on the Olympic Peninsula), I guy I worked with had a buddy who worked for the forest service. He was way out doing some road work & down by a stream he saw a huge bare foot print in the mud…. Nothing like a good Bigfoot story where it was the friend of a friend who saw something… 🙂
Hey Nick
I was maybe 7 when I started my first (and only) newspaper. I would go around the neighborhood collecting info, write it up in my 7 year old prose, and then my mom, who was a single mom with a full time job, would type a newsletter that I peddled around the block for a couple of cents each. Now that is a mom who really cared. I didn’t realize it at the time. Finally a few people told mom that not all I wrote fit the circumstances, I embellished the truth it seems, and mom put me out of business. It was fun while it lasted, but I never did see any sharks, nor lions or tigers.
That’s funny, Frank, because I was about the same age or maybe a year or two older when I started my first newspaper, using an ancient typewriter and a mimeograph that was almost as old. Unfortunately, my mom didn’t type or proof it like yours did. An old newspaperman had told me to just write what people were talking about. So I wrote about the Jackson girl, who got knocked up and was spending the summer with an aunt out of state, and how Mrs. Baker had a black eye. I added that she said she walked into a doorknob, but my dad said everybody knew her husband had beat the hell out of her again. For obvious reasons, I only put out one issue before my parents put me out of business. Years later I was doing something in my room when my dad yelled for me to come into the living room, where an episode of Andy Griffith was on, and Opie was doing the same thing. Dad told me they should have paid me for my story!
Thanks for a good laugh…read it to Hubby before he went to bed…helps to put one in a good mood to sleep when something funny is read!! You know, we lived once in Grays Harbor for about 2 years…one of those years we only had 6 weeks without rain…had to move away due to health issues with all the mold and rain there. We enjoyed it otherwise. After living all over the place since then, we are back, but farther inland with less rain!!