By Darl Black
During the summer of 1959, I accidentally caught Bronzeback Fever and I’ve never recovered from it. With a two-piece fishing rod in hand, I pedaled my bike from my home to the Fruits Mills Bridge on the Shenango River. There I scrounged a small crab from along the shoreline, hooked it through the tail, and cast it to a felled tree in a shoreline eddy, hoping to catch a rock bass. Before the crab reached the bottom, the line went taut and I set the hook. Seconds later a huge brown rocket exploded from the water, going airborne before crashing back into the river. The bass was gone, but the exhilaration of that moment infected me.
Roughly 30 years later, I gave up a regular job...
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