True story. Woman goes to a fly fishing show to buy a rod and maybe sign up for a lesson with a guide.
She's handed a St. Croix five-weight and nudged toward a casting field. After several minutes of flailing away at the air and almost wrapping the line around her neck, she's brought up short by a voice behind her.
"Are you looking at your backcast?" the helpful voice inquires.
"Um, no," she replies.
"Well, it's a good thing because it looks like hell," says the voice, laughing to beat the band.
The story still cracks me up, but you know what? When I'm struggling - which is to say I have a fly rod in my hands - I remember to look over my shoulder at my backcast to straighten things out.
A key lesson, but nearly as important, was that I became the proud owner of a Lefty Kreh story.
Thousands of people have a Lefty story: about a cast improved, a knot learned, a money-saving tip passed along, an awful joke told with vigor.
There's nothing we can do about his jokes, which come in two flavors, corny and salty. But we can, with an eye toward his 78th birthday on Wednesday, thank him for all the good advice he has dispensed.
"He's this little old chubby grandfatherly guy who knows everything about fishing you'd ever want to know," says commercial fly tier Dennis Goddard. "And he shares that with you regardless of whether he knows you or not."
Says Gary Tanner, executive director of the American Museum of Fly Fishing, "He's a national treasure, as far as I'm concerned. He's been there, done that. He's got the T-shirt, the hat and the video."
Although he doesn't much care for flying, he does a lot of it, attending shows and seminars around the country, usually 40 out of 52 weeks. As he likes to crack, "If I got paid by the mile, my wife would be a rich woman."
A tiny stroke and a mild heart attack last year have barely slowed him down. He was at a Colorado show in mid-January, Bass Pro Shop at Arundel Mills in early February followed by a fly fishing festival in Atlanta. On Wednesday, he fought his way back through the blizzard aftermath from a show in Canada.
"In a way, every fly fisherman in the world feels a connection to him. So everywhere he goes, people feel they know him," says artist Mark Susinno, who has illustrated some of Lefty's books.
Lefty has wet a line in every state and Canadian province, tons of famous places around the world and ones you've never heard of. But he has a soft spot in his heart for his local fishing holes - the Potomac, the Gunpowder and the Susquehanna.
