Gone Fishin'

By Matt Dickerson

Photography by Jerry Swope

On a crisp Vermont June morning, Arch Tilford '36 slowly paddles a canoe along the flat water of Goshen Dam in Vermont's Moosalamoo region. For several minutes, Tilford is silent; the only audible sound is the slap of the wooden paddle on the pond's glassy surface. But Tilford is an angler, and anglers tell stories, so before too long Tilford turns to his fishing companion and asks him about the best fish he has caught at the pond. As Tilford listens to the story of a fat 18-inch brook trout landed on a dry fly from an angler's float tube, his face remains a mask of stoicism. And then a sly smile creeps across the old man's face. "You've broken the cardinal rule when telling fishing stories," Tilford explains. "Never go first." He then tells the story of catching a 19-inch trout on the very same pond. Chalk up another one—another fish, another winning tale—for the Green Mountain State's veteran angler.

Tilford grew up, the oldest of seven children, on a small farm in Buck Hollow, Pennsylvania. Though he didn't know it at the time, his family was "poor as church mice"—they had one cow and three acres of cleared land—and they couldn't afford to buy fishing equipment. To go fishing, Tilford bent a pin into the shape of a hook, tied it onto some sewing thread, and went down to the little creek that flowed through their property. He was only six years old when he caught his first fish, a small shiner. He proudly brought it home to his mother who, with equal pride, cooked it up for him.

At 17, Tilford went to Bible school, and three years later was ordained as a Congregational minister. He became disillusioned with the church, however, and, deciding he needed a college education, enrolled at Middlebury in 1932. As he told a local journalist almost 25 years ago, "I came up to Middlebury College for no particular reason except their brochure showed a nice picture of a trout stream." He arrived at the College with $50 in his pocket, and—as an example of Middlebury's long-standing commitment to need-based financial aid—was allowed to attend for the bargain price of $25.

Oddly enough, as much as Tilford loved fishing and as attracted as he was to the picture on the brochure, he had little experience stream fishing for trout before coming to Vermont. One weekend, though, a friend invited Arch to go fishing with his family on the upper stretches of the New Haven River. While everyone caught his or her limit of 25 trout, Tilford failed to catch even a single fish. Embarrassed, he figured he'd either quit fishing altogether or get really good at it. He chose the latter.

During his college years, Tilford would walk from the main campus all the way up the mountain to Bread Loaf several times a week. He'd fish all day, before starting the long trek back down the mountain at dusk. He claims he never skipped a class to go fishing, though. When he came to Middlebury he'd already been out of high school for seven years, and "it was hard enough if you went to class," he recalls. "I wasn't going to skip to go fishing."

After a brief post-graduation interlude working for Liberty Mutual in Philadelphia, Tilford, his wife Alice, and their three children returned to Vermont, where he took a job distributing wholesale goods. The lure of Vermont streams and lakes was strong, however, and in 1952 he started a fishing tackle company. In addition to selling night crawlers imported from Toronto, Green Mountain Tackle bought large lots from tackle manufacturers and packaged them for smaller Vermont stores.

Being an avid fisherman, Tilford had a good sense of which lures worked and which didn't work; more importantly, he had a feel for why they didn't work. One day, he concluded that most walleye were lost because they hit the lure too far back, missing the hook altogether (while still managing to steal the worm). So Tilford designed a lure that would work—the legendary Green Mountain Grabber—which included a third hook trailing behind the spinner blade. The lure was a great success on the water, so Tilford put it on the market, selling as many as 30,000 one spring. Though walleye fishing has declined dramatically, the Green Mountain Grabber is also effective with bass and perch and can still be found in stores today.

Tilford's life has slowed down a bit. At 93—"going on 94," he sniffs—he's no longer on the road selling equipment. But when May rolls around, he heads out fishing. Though stream fishing is pretty hard for him now, he manages to spend most of the summer in a canoe on one of his two favorite mountain ponds: Goshen Dam or Silver Lake. He works Goshen Dam in May and June, before heading to Silver Lake in midsummer, where he's a regular fixture at the lake's campground. With an elaborate two-tent camp, he serves as the campground's unofficial host, welcoming campers—feeding them, if necessary—and, if they're lucky, taking them fishing in his canoe. And catching fish. Lots of them. It is a success born not only of understanding the habits of his quarry, but of knowing every inch of the lake.

Tilford's fishing success certainly explains another aspect of his artistry as a storyteller: his ability to speak volumes with just a few words. Encounter him after he's returned from a fishing excursion and ask, "Catch any fish?" and you're likely to get one simple reply, dryly delivered: "Went fishing, didn't I?"

Matt Dickerson is an avid angler and fishing writer whose articles have appeared in Fly Fish America, the Burlington Free Press, and the Addison Independent. He is an associate professor of computer science at Middlebury.