Sportsman's Legacy

by William G. Tapply

  FORTUNATELY FOR BILL, HIS CHILDHOOD WAS FAR SAFER AND GENTLER THAN HIS DAD’S.

  “I took account for our supplies and we found we only had eight gallons of water, some canned apricots and pineapples, and a case of hardtack. We decided that all we could give a day was one apricot and two spoonfuls of juice twice a day. I will not go into details of the next four days, but will tell you of our sufferings when I get home…

  “Your ship wrecked boy, George.”

  They drifted in that lifeboat for five days before the British ship the Moorish Prince picked them up. Three days later, the survivors were transferred to the Grampian, a faster ship bound for New York, since neither of the British vessels had medical facilities.

  Of the twenty-two men who floated in that lifeboat, fourteen died.

  Of the approximately 240 men aboard the Ticonderoga, my grandfather was one of eight survivors. Other newspaper accounts support George Tapply’s report, although theirs are less understated than his in suggesting that the chief quartermaster’s courage and heroism and commitment to duty were extraordinary.

  When he arrived at the Army hospital in Brooklyn, George Tapply learned that his “dear little wife” had died of influenza.

  After he recovered form his wounds (which he’d downplayed in his letter to his mother), George returned to his hometown of Waltham. Since a single man could not, in those days, be expected to raise a boy by himself, he found families in Waltham for his young son to board with until he could find him a proper mother.

  When George remarried, he brought his son home. But the marriage was a disaster. It ended quickly in divorce and again the boy was boarded out.

  The families who took Horace in treated him well, he recalls, and his father did his best to raise his son, albeit from a distance. Ray Morse, one of those who boarded Dad, introduced him to fox hunting and trout fishing.

  Nevertheless, Horace (he got his nickname “Tap” in college, for which he has been forever grateful), knew no secure and stable home in his childhood. Life, Dad learned at an early age, was stern and earnest indeed.

  BILL AND TAP CATCH (AND RELEASE) A PRETTY TROUT IN THE 1950S

  PARTNERS

  I became Dad’s hunting and fishing partner as soon as I proved I could keep up with him in the woods, take my fair turn at the oars, and keep my mouth shut from the back seat. He didn’t abandon his adult companions. But somehow he must have made it clear to them that Tap’s boy went with Tap whether they liked it or not.

  My excellence at being seen and not heard, I’m sure, helped make it work, but I still find it admirable that Dad’s long-time partners—Put Putnam, Gorham Cross, Harold Blaisdell, and all the others—accepted me with good grace. I spoke to them, as Dad so often reminded me, only when spoken to, but they generally spoke to me enough to make me feel comfortable in their company. I can’t imagine that dad’s old companions wouldn’t have preferred to have Tap to themselves. But they never made me feel like an intruder.

  Dad did not believe a kid should call adults by their first names, even when they fished and hunted together. So I called them “uncle”—“Uncle Put” and “Uncle Harold”—a habit I continued well into my own adulthood, even when their kids were calling my father “Tap.” Those men I didn’t know very well I called “Mister,” although I found it easier not to call them anything at all—which I generally managed, since I had perfected the art of not being heard.

  Uncle Put took to calling me “Harm”—something about keeping fragile pieces of fishing equipment out of harm’s way in a canoe.

  Dad and Uncle Harold carried on long and sometimes acrimonious debates during the long drives over Vermont backroads to places like Otter Creek, the White River, the Battenkill, and Lake Champlain. Times like these, I knew, were important tests for my skill at not being heard, and I absorbed a great deal from the back seat. I clearly heard how intelligent grownups talked—and listened—to each other, for one thing.

  Mostly, though, Dad and I made a twosome. We spent virtually every weekend from April through November on the road. There were a few corners in the northern half of New England that we didn’t explore in search of trout or bass or ruffed grouse. Once my legs had grown long enough to reach the pedals, I did the driving. I would estimate that I logged 20,000 road miles before I reached the legal age of sixteen to go for my license. Dad liked to say, “Experience is the best teacher,” and he believed it was his parental obligation to provide me with experience in all important matters—fly casting, shotgun handling, and automobile driving.

  So we were partners. But neither of us ever forgot who was the kid and who the parent. Although terms such as “friend” and “pal” come to my mind now, when I was growing up, Dad was my father, my elder, who by simple virtue of his adulthood commanded my respect. The line never became fuzzy for either of us.

  I was always acutely aware of the fact that he did not curse in front of me (he didn’t curse much anyway, I quickly learned), nor would I dare utter a “damn” within his hearing, although that word (and several other even more useful ones) rolled easily off my tongue in the company of my peers. Fathers and sons did not talk to each other that way, even if fishing and hunting partners sometimes did.

  I don’t recall his ever expressing anger toward me, or criticizing me, although I gave him ample opportunity for both. Uncle Put didn’t call me “Harm” idly. I was eager, impetuous, and—Dad’s word—“heedless,” which often enough translated into careless treatment of fragile equipment. Since we fished almost exclusively with split-bamboo fly rods when I was growing up, the results were predictable. Dad had an enormous collection of bamboo rods, many of which would be prized by today’s collectors. I’ve recently looked over what’s left of them (he’s given away dozens over the years). Virtually all of them have shortened and repaired tip sections—evidence that at one time or another they got in Harm’s way.

  Once I heedlessly slammed the car door while Dad was still backing out his strung-up fly rod. It shattered in midsection. Dad gazed down at the totaled rod for a moment, then smiled at me and said, “I’d hate to tell you how many rods I’ve broken in my life.”

  “Errors are part of the game,” he liked to say, a philosophy consistent with his belief that the best learning takes place though experience. Dad generally refrained from telling me how to do things. Partners did not instruct each other. He believed in experience, trial and error, figuring things out for one’s self. Occasionally he might say, “I do it this way,” and if I directly asked his advice or instruction, he gave it fully and freely. But his primary teaching method was to allow me plenty of opportunities to try and to err. I had a vast appetite for trying and an absolute genius for erring. Perhaps there are more efficient ways to learn. But I did learn. And Dad was philosophical about the inevitable errors his educational theory produced.

  I once rear-ended another car while driving the two of us home from an afternoon of trout fishing on the Squannicook. It was a clear case of heedlessness—I was driving too fast, too close to the vehicle in front of me, and had failed to react to the flash of brake lights. I was fourteen, an outlaw driver two years shy of my license. Dad knew the experience would serve as a powerful teacher, and that he didn’t need to criticize me or tell me what I had done wrong. His only comment was: “Accidents happen.”

  The next weekend when we went fishing I refused to drive. “I don’t feel like it,” was all I said, but in fact I had lost my confidence.

  Dad shrugged and took the wheel. But when we had unstrung our rods and loaded our gear into the car at the end of the day, he said, “Want to drive?”

  “No,” I said, “that’s all right.”

  He smiled at me and said, “I think you should drive.”

  I drove home—very heedfully—and made it without mishap.

  After a particularly egregious act of destructive heedlessness, Dad would roll his eyes and call me “a Bill in a China shop.” This was as close to anger or criticism as he ever came.


  Dad encouraged me to speak candidly with him by taking my thoughts seriously and refraining from judging me. For the most part I felt comfortable doing so, although I avoided those particularly embarrassing issues that whirled in my pubescent brain like swarms of caddisflies. My mother the nurse was my source of practical information on hormonal questions.

  I suspect that Dad sensed my reticence on these matters and took his paternal obligations seriously (although I can imagine Mum telling him, “You really should talk to Bill, you know”), because on one long road trip to some distant New England trout river he segued cleverly from an account of a Newfoundland fishing excursion into a long and detailed narrative of the life history of the Atlantic salmon. He admired this fish above all others, it was clear. It leaves its familiar home river at a young age, confronts the perils of the sea for three or four years, grows large, then returns as a mature adult to its natal place.

  It’s a journey of thousands of miles through treacherous seas and over great waterfalls. Salmon are guided by a mysterious navigational instinct and fueled by the overwhelming, single-minded urge to reproduce. Nothing can stop hen and buck salmon from their rendezvous back home. The female builds her redd and lays her eggs. The male lies by her side and fertilizes them in a cloud of milt. Soon little parr are born, grow into smolts, and after a year or two they head to sea to recapitulate the cycle.

  “You know what milt is,” Dad said, not quite a question.

  “Sure.”

  “Oh. Okay. Good.”

  Of course, I thought he was talking about fish. Unlike Mum, Dad had always seemed bashful when it came to matters of the flesh. He had explained to me the significance of a mayfly spinner fall—strictly in the context of selecting the right fly to match what the trout were eating. He had led me to field edges in March to witness the elaborate courtship rituals of the woodcock. But it didn’t occur to me until sometime later that his version of the requisite paternal “birds and bees” sermon would naturally use a fish for its dominant metaphor.

  Usually, though, it was democratic give and take. I cannot imagine another father and son spending more time together—in the car, in a canoe, around campfires, in restaurants and motel rooms. Virtually every weekend from April through November throughout my childhood, Dad and I hunted birds and fish in New England—sometimes with his adult companions, but mostly just the two of us. We talked constantly. We debated Red Sox prospects (always bleak in those days, though Dad was more of a realist than I). I pumped him for fishing and hunting lore. I loved to get him talking about places he had been, fish he had caught, people he had known.

  His own childhood was a subject that remained ancient and mysterious to me. He referred to it rarely, and then only in a cursory way. I never asked him about it. I suppose I sensed that if he wanted to, or if he thought it would interest me, he’d talk about it. Besides, he had plenty of other fascinating tales to tell.

  As much from his example as from his words, I absorbed a value system and philosophy that remain operative for me still—the poetry of fly fishing, love of nature’s mysteries, respect for all wild creatures—along with more fundamental and important values such as honesty, self-respect, humility, cooperation, and family.

  I sensed that he respected my opinion and was genuinely interested in hearing it. We learned to disagree amiably. I’m a middle-aged man now (though still occasionally heedless, I admit), and Dad’s into his ninth decade. We continue to enjoy our philosophical discussions. Now we debate politics and economics and religion the way he and Uncle Harold used to up in the front seat. Our conversations often become heated, but never personal, although they sometimes upset my mother, who insists on calling them “arguments.”

  Dad is thirty years my elder. In a lifetime, I haven’t closed the gap by a day, and both of us still know which is the kid and which the father.

  In a trout stream or a grouse cover or a canoe, though, we functioned as cooperative equals from the beginning. We took turns, we divided the labor, and we shared credit for whatever fish we caught or birds we shot, because that’s how partnerships worked.

  You couldn’t predict a grouse’s escape route, but if the two men plotted and executed a proper strategy, one of them would get a shot. It didn’t matter which one. I learned to enjoy the success that our teamwork produced, regardless of who got the shooting, and I soon understood that it was proper for either of us, when reporting to other hunters, to say “We got three woodcock and two grouse today.”

  At first I suspected that this was Dad’s way of sheltering a pitifully inept wingshot (me) from the obvious comparison, for in his day Dad was a deadly grouse and woodcock marksman. On a good day I might have scratched down one of those three woodcock and none of the grouse. But the law of averages legislates that the day would eventually come when my game bag was heavier than Dad’s. When it finally happened, I listened carefully to his account of that day’s hunt. “We had a good day,” he told the gathering at the Valley Hotel that night. “Five woodcock and three grouse.”

  I learned, too, that when the man in the bow landed a trout, he ought to know enough to glance over his shoulder and say to the man with the paddle, “Good guiding, partner.” We caught fish in the first person plural, as well.

  We still do it that way.

  H.G. “TAP” TAPPLY LAKE FISHING IN THE 1960S

  WHEN BILL TAUGHT OR SPOKE TO A GROUP, HE OFTEN TALKED ABOUT THE PRINCIPLES OF INVINSIBLE WRITING.

  INVISIBLE WRITING

  Another of Dad’s aphorisms: “Any job worth doing is worth doing well.”

  The operative word here was “job,” a synonym, more or less, for “chore” or “unpleasant task.” Fly casting and wing shooting were not jobs. These activities could be done well or poorly and it didn’t matter very much. Besides, you didn’t need an aphorism to inspire you to try to do them well. Accurate casting and shooting produced their own rewards.

  Heedless boys—especially those who had earned the nickname “Harm”—needed to be reminded that it took very little extra effort to mow a lawn neatly or to wash all the dirt off the family car. Even if nobody else noticed—and the significant thing about “jobs” was that people tended to notice them only when they were poorly done—a person should take pride in everything he did.

  Dad’s jobs in one way or the other always involved writing which, he persistently maintained, was about the hardest work known to man. I didn’t buy it, any more than I deep-down agreed that life was “stern and earnest.”

  Weeding the gardens and shoveling snow were hard.

  Writing was like fly casting—natural and fun.

  In the beginning, writing came easy to me. My teachers always loved my stories. They came back to me with comments such as, “Wonderful descriptions,” or, “Excellent use of vocabulary words.”

  When I showed them to Dad, he just smiled and said, “Another ‘A’. Congratulations.”

  I noticed that he never had much to say about the stories themselves. But what could be said about an “A” paper? Dad was a writer. He knew talent when he saw it. I figured he was proud of me, glad I had inherited his good writing genes. I was a natural.

  In my junior year I was assigned to Mr. Cheever’s English class. The older kids warned me: Mr. Cheever was tough and mean. “Miniver,” they called him behind his back, after the Edward Arlington Robinson poem he always made them read. “Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn.” Old Miniver did not give “A”s.

  Of course, he hadn’t seen my stuff yet.

  First impressions, I knew, were important. So I worked especially hard on my first assignment for Mr. Cheever. I took extra pains to create elaborate descriptions and sprinkle in lots of good vocabulary words. It was the best thing I’d ever done, I knew, but just to be sure I showed it to Dad.

  “You haven’t handed it in yet?” he said.

  I shook my head. “Mr. Cheever’s a hard marker,” I said. “I just want to be sure it’s perfect.”

  “So you w
ant my opinion?”

  “Sure.”

  He arched his eyebrows. “Or do you want me to tell you it’s fine?”

  “Your opinion,” I said, which I felt confident amounted to the same thing.

  He read it with a red pen in his hand. Fifteen minutes later he handed it back to me. Every page had eight or ten words circled in red.

  “Verbs,” said Dad.

  “Huh?”

  “You depend too much on the verb ‘to be.’ Use active verbs. Put them to work. Find the right verb and you can eliminate all these flabby adverbs and fancy adjectives.” He pointed with the tip of his pen at those excellent vocabulary words I had strung together to make my wonderfully descriptive passages.

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “Verbs. Otherwise, how is it?”

  “There are some other things,” he said. “But first, the verbs.”

  I took the paper back and found some good verbs in my Thesaurus. Mr. Cheever gave my story a “C+”. “Don’t try to impress me,” was his only comment.

  I showed Dad the draft of my next story. “Help, please,” I said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m desperate,” I said. “Miniver’s tough.”

  He smiled. “That’s progress.”

  I watched his face while he read my story. He gave nothing away. When he finished, he looked up at me. “You’ve certainly attended to your verbs,” he said. He jabbed at the paper. “Where’d you get this one?”

  “Nictitate? I learned it last year.”

  “Good word,” said Dad. “What’s it mean?”

  “Wink.”

  “That’s a better word,” he said. “Who’re you trying to impress?”