Father’s day.    I have so many incredible memories of my daddy, and all the ways he showed his love through kindness, acts of service, wise advice, and time spent together.   I’ve written a lot here about some of those times and many of those memories.  He was a very special man, and I’m still trying to be like him and falling short.

Random memory this morning, brought on by a picture sent me by a friend.

My dad did not care much for fishing.  But he didn’t mind cleaning them after they’d been caught, and he certainly LOVED to eat fried fish, rolled in seasoned cornmeal and fried up crispy.  In fact it may have been his favorite thing ever.    I remember one time after I had already moved to Nashville, he and mom and Janet and I went to an Olive Garden (I know), and he looked in horror or disgust at the menu (dad was NOT a pasta guy) and asked the waitress .. “do you have fried fish?”.    Bless his heart.

So mom and I fished, and dad enabled us.   Drove us out to my sister’s farm, where we could fish in a neighbor’s lake.  Or out to one of the lakes around my hometown.   Or over to Marshall Diggs conservation area between Martinsburg and Wellsville, or to Little Dixie lake near my PaPa Shouse’s farm.   I had my trusty old Zebco 303 and a Zebco 505, both of which I had bought at Gibson’s with money from my paper route.   Mom had a bizarre looking Great Lakes Whirlaway enclosed reel and rod combination ….. a big bulbous plastic thing  on the end enclosing the reel and line) that she got from saving Top Value trading stamps from the grocery store.  I remember the day she got it at the Top Value store in Columbia (oddly enough, one of my favorite places to go with her …. To look at all the cool stuff you could get for “nothing” just by saving stamps!).

After we got back home to Mexico, we went out that evening so she could try it out, fishing from the bank at Lakeview.  I thought it looked weird, and was skeptical.  But she caught some catfish and a nice perch or two that very night.   Which dad cleaned, mom fried, and we all ate.   Along with hushpuppies, of course.

In order to supply bait for all that fishing, we needed worms.  Nightcrawlers.  Red wigglers.  In  coffee can or an old oil can with moist dirt.    We could go out to the C&A lake to the bait shop there and buy a can, which we often did.   Or, we could go out to the garden and turn over a few shovels of garden soil, and dig through it to collect the worms.

Dad did that digging faithfully, to make sure mom was well-wormed for fishing.   Er… well-supplied in worms.

However, dad was ALSO at least two things that add relevance to this story:

1. He was clever.
2. He was an ELECTRICAL man by god, and that COUNTS for something in this world.

So he started thinking.    Those worms are in the ground.   We need them OUT of the ground for fishing.

Hmmm.

He took a long iron rod and attached an electrical wire to one end.    The other end he hooked up to a VARIAC.  That’s a variable transformer to adjust the voltage.    Then we’d go out to the garden, take a small sledgehammer and drive the iron rod about two feet down into the ground and run a long extension cord out to the VARIAC.   Turn the contraption on, and start to crank up the voltage.   Not too high…. You don’t want to fry the little critters.   You just want to encourage them that the suddenly electrified soil is NOT the place to be.    The VARIAC would hum and start to give off a faint whiff of ozone.   As you cranked the voltage higher …. Higher ….  There would come a point where the magic happened.

Those worms would almost literally SHOOT out of the ground.  I swear you could almost hear them screaming.    Before long you’d have a few dozen big, plump, juice nightcrawlers wriggling around on top of the soil.

Just pick them up, put them in your oil can and with some loose garden dirt, and go fishing.

At some point, dad realized that there were more worms ON the ground than we needed for that day’s fishing.   As word spread among the various neighbors who also liked to fish, they’d occasionally come by with a forlorn look and sheepishly ask:  “Hey Shouse.  Any chance you can fire up that contraption and get me some worms?  Me and the missus are headed over to the lake after supper.”

And dad would gladly oblige.

Pretty soon he realized that a good strategy to always have plenty of worms on hand quickly, was to start a worm bed in our cool-dark basement.

So he found an old washtub on legs, rigged up a drainage system with a second tub underneath and some fine holes in the bottom of the upper tub, and filled the upper tub with soil and coffee grounds, etc.    And in went all the “excess” nightcrawlers. 

Before long we had hundreds, if not thousands of big, juicy prime nightcrawlers in that washtub.   And dad only had to drive the rod into the ground and bring out the VARIAC periodically to replenish the stock.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention.

That may be true.   But the FATHER of invention may just be my dad and his electric worm rod.

Love you and miss you dad.

Wish I had some of your worms right now, so mom and I and her big old weird rod and reel could head out to Lakeview.  To get you some fish to clean and we could have one more fish-fry.

love,

John