REMEMBERING LEFTY, 1925-2018

What a great fellow Lefty Kreh was [“Lefty,” Winter 2018]. Lefty was doing a fly-fishing show in Thomasville, Georgia, maybe three years back, and somehow, after trying to explain how to cast a fly around a corner — and drawing it on paper for me — he wound up with the pen Power & Motoryacht editor Richard Thiel had given me many years ago. When I discovered its absence, I could come up with no theories as to where it went. Two weeks later, a package from Lefty arrived with a note saying something like, a “great writer should hang on to his great pen.” The pen was inside. I framed the note.

Capt. Bill Pike Executive editor, Power & Motoryacht

Tallahassee, Florida

A glance at the cover of Lefty Kreh’s Fly Fishing in Salt Water leaves me aflutter. That’s what I was reading one afternoon 30 years ago when my brother, Charlie, and his wisecracking friend Greg invited me for boat ride.

We were cruising the anchorage in Essex, Connecticut, when I pulled the loaned book, with its tantalizing visage of Lefty, from my daypack and started reading the introduction.

“Fly-fishing?” Charlie asked. “Why are you reading that?”

“I thought I might give it a try,” I said. Eyebrows rising, Charlie and Greg gave each other a knowing look. They chimed in, snickering.

“Oh yeah!”

“Right.”

I looked up, and they were staring at me. “Who is it?” Greg wanted to know.

“What?”

Then Charlie: “Who’s the guy?”

By then they were in full hilarity mode. I could feel my face starting to burn. “Nobody! Can’t a girl take up a new hobby?”

I protested when, in fact, they were dead on. I was daydreaming about my fly casting lesson the day before. My teacher, close behind me with my elbow in his palm. His breath in my ear. The line snaking above and my heart beating fast. It was love.

But not with fly-fishing. I couldn’t care less about that. It was Bill Sisson, now my husband of 26 years and editor-in-chief of Anglers Journal. Patricia Koller Sisson

Essex, Connecticut