It’s funny how things pop into your head.
Often things from a long time ago. Things you might not have thought much about in years.
Take Butch’s Bait Shop.
Actually, take Butch’s Bait & Radiator Shop, a quaint, Quonset hut of a building a block east of the Missouri River bridge in Chamberlain. There, decked out in his striped bib overalls with suspenders and a white t-shirt beneath, Butch Springer could fix your radiator as well as sell you a dozen minnows and a handful of doll flies and tell you where you might catch a sauger or crappie or northern pike.
There were still fair numbers of sauger and crappies and northern pike to be caught in the Missouri River around Chamberlain when I first started going to Butch’s in the late 1950s. That was because the reservoir called Francis Case was a new body of water, having flooded thousands of acres of Missouri River lowlands after the completion of the Fort Randall Dam in 1956.
All that flooded ground — including thickets and shrubs and grove after grove of cottonwood trees — was great spawning and living habitat for crappies and northern pike. So their populations exploded. And the sauger — a relative of the walleye that prefers a river-type environment and doesn’t do as well as walleyes in reservoirs — was still plentiful, for a few years at least.
Walleye would be king of the Missouri River reservoirs eventually. But then the big-eyed fish with the delicious flavor was just emerging as another sport fish among many. And Butch knew them all.
He knew as many fishing stories as he knew fish, then some. And some of those stories, I think, we’re true. But either way, they kept a little group of us Zebco-carting Chamberlain kids rapt in awe at the possibilities waiting for us in the big river reservoir just a block west of Butch’s Bait.
But Butch knew the other fish, too, and taught me the difference between a sheepshead and a crappie, a pair of fish that confused me for a while. He also unhooked an eelpout for me when I caught one fishing under the Old Highway 16 Bridge.
If you haven’t seen an eelpout, do a Google. Also called burbot, they’re a snaky, oddly colored, and oddly finned fish that looks like the ocean creatures its name suggests: eels.
I didn’t know any of that at the time. I didn’t even know such a fish could exist in the river I grew up with. I just knew the strangest creature I’d ever seen was flopping and squirming at the end of my line. So I didn’t even try to unhook it. I scrambled up the riprap under the bridge and headed for Butch’s, with my fishing rod held straight out in front of me and the eelpout dancing at the end of the line.
Butch laughed so hard he almost tipped over on his stool near the beer cooler when I came in with the fish, carrying it as if it were radioactive.
“So, you caught an eelpout,” he said with a grin. “That’s a good fish. Good eating. You want me to show you how to clean it?”
I did not want to learn that. But I did listen to him tell me more about the eelpout, which Butch either kept and ate or sent me hustling back to the river to release, I can’t remember which.
Years later, when I was still fishing for northern pike with smelt for bait up on Lake Oahe, I caught, unhooked — as Butch did, but not so casually — and released a couple of sizable eelpout. A fellow fishing down the shore caught a couple of them, too. But he cleaned his and fried them up in a cast-iron skillet over an open fire. Then he invited me to share some. I decided to give it a try, and while it wasn’t walleye, it was almost as good as Butch promised it would be years earlier.
Butch had standing in our family beyond the bait shop. My dad told a story about a dance he attended as a teenager. He strolled outside and suddenly found himself with three kids from another town who wanted to have a fight. Dad said he was preparing for the worst when he heard a growl of a voice somewhere off in the darkness say: “What the hell is going on around here?”
It was Butch, who was as burly as his name might suggest and not reluctant to rumble, and he wanted to know why those guys were bothering his friend Hank. There was no fight that night, at least not one that my dad was involved in.
I lost touch with Butch as I got older and eventually went off to college. And I can’t remember when an hour or so at Butch’s Bait Shop stopped being an essential part of every day. But it did. The stops got shorter and farther in-between. And eventually, they ended.
I went off to school, then marriage, then family. And the shop itself disappeared somewhere along the way. So did Butch, passing on into the enriched memories of countless kids long since grown up.
But both the shop and the man come back to me from time to time, without warning, along with the warm recollection of those youthful hours spent listening to Butch share his fishing tales and offer insights into the ways of catfish and sturgeon, gar and paddlefish.
And with that remembrance, I can still feel some of that excitement I felt as a kid when I’d head off with fishing rod and reel in hand toward the river a block away, believing that with the right bait and a little luck, anything was possible.
