Mom was a fisherman

In celebration of Mother’s Day and all our fishing Moms, here is a column that first appeared in 1991, looking back on one special Mom in Texas, who started her son on the fishing path that continues in Alaska today.  His only regret is that Mom never got to catch a salmon or a halibut…

BY LEE LESCHPER
Most folks remember their mothers in the kitchen, or at the bedside when they were sick, or walking them to their first day of school.
Not me.
I remember Mom standing knee-deep in Little Bay at Rockport, handing onto a screaming spinning rod as a big redfish tried to take it away from her.
And napping on a party boat headed for the gas wells in Aransas Bay, waking up just in time to catch twice as many speckled trout as any of her bullheaded sons.
And laying down the law about fishing:
“Leschper women catch the fish. Leschper men CLEAN the fish.”
Mom was a fisherman.
***
She was blessed with four sons and no daughters. Which may have been God’s way of compensating for making her the youngest of seven sisters. She grew up tagging along as the tomboy sidekick to her only brother, fishing and hunting.
Born Johanna Patricia Bilicek on St. Patrick’s Day, 1933, to first generation Czech immigrant farmers, Mom couldn’t speak a word of English until she started school. Her father had learned his English on the ship coming over from Czechoslovakia, before settling to farm the rich black farmland near Hungerford and El Campo.
Grandpa Bilicek was from the old school. Sons were for farming, daughters were for marrying off, as soon as possible.
Which is why Mom went to work out of high school instead of to college, even though her straight As had earned her a scholarship. Grandpa wouldn’t waste the gas for her to drive to the local community college each day.
She and Dad met at a Saturday night dance, fell in love and in short order married and moved to the little German Hill Country town of Boerne in 1956.
Running the local feed mill didn’t offer much prosperity, so they had to find cheap way to entertain their boys.
Fishing was cheap entertainment, and a way to supplement the groceries.
My earliest and fondest memories are of family outings to the sparkling-clear Guadalupe, tiny Cibolo Creek, rocky Canyon Lake and spring-fed ranch tanks. Plus weekend camping trips on the banks of the muddy little Mill Creek on Dad’s family land near Sealy.
We’d dig worms out behind the chicken houses, or seine crawfish out of a pond, or swat big yellow grasshoppers out in the Johnson grass, for bait. Store-bought minnows were an obscene luxury.
Fishing was always the excuse for the trip, though. We spent just as much time visiting, eating, exploring and laughing. Always there were friends or family along.
Of my parents, Mom was the more serious fisherman. Dad, in his usual unselfish way, came along just to be with us.
Mom didn’t care a thing about what kind of tackle, brand of reel or type of bait she was using. Just so it’d catch fish.
She wasn’t a lightweight when it came to handling the dirty work. She’d bait her own hooks with the dirtiest worms, slimiest chicken liver or wriggliest shiner. And she’d unhook any fish she snagged, even the mean little bullhead catfish that could inflict a vicious wound.
She never caught a fish she didn’t love, either.
“Whooopeeee!” she’d yelp when she set the hook. It didn’t matter the size; she loved ’em all.
***
Strong.
That was the best word I can find to describe her.
She worked her way up from that little farm where she was born, to a career in Civil Service, by determination and the strength of her character.
She wasn’t afraid of anybody. She’d greet the President and the janitor with the same smile, handshake and “Good Morning!”
Determined to overcome childhood shyness, she took every new meeting as a challenge. When it became obvious she’d have to go to work to help Dad feed the family, she took a clerical position at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, commuting 70 miles to work each day.
When she realized she’d never advance in her career without a degree, she went to night school for 11 years to earn her bachelors degree and later her masters, one class at a time, sometimes four nights a week.
Over her 20 years in Civil Service, she rose to a senior accounting manager, supervising more than 200 employees. Using herself as an example, she preached relentlessly about the value of an education.
With her prodding, 65 of her employees went back to college.
But the best story about her management style is one she told about a little lady, a dwarf, who worked on her staff for many years.
When Mom was put in charge of that particular office, Millie was the office joke. The co-workers ignored her, ridiculed her or gave her every dirty job that came along, just because she was three feet tall.
That lasted about one day after Mom arrived.
“Every one in this office is expected to do equal work, and will be treated with equal respect,” she said. “Anyone too good to work with Millie and I can transfer out right now.”
The next year Millie was the division’s employee of the year.
In 1969, we took one of our family road trips to a new destination, the little Coastal Bend community of Rockport.
The first morning, casting a dead shrimp off an old pier in Aransas Bay, Mom hooked and landed her first redfish. Today it wouldn’t even be a legal keeper, but it changed Mom’s life.
She fell in love with the Texas coast. The sun, the sand, even the brilliant sun that always scorched our fair skins–and especially the fishing!
Mom and Dad bought a tiny fishing shack a block off Aransas Bay near downtown Rockport, for the princely sum of $3,500. It would be our home away from home for the next decade, until I graduated from Texas A&M, money got tight at home and they had to sell it.
It was the best decade of our lives.
Our typical family weekend started after work and school Friday. We’d pile into the pickup camper and head for Rockport–about 150 miles from San Antonio. We’d be there by 10. Mom and Dad would head for bed and we boys would head for the nearest lighted fishing pier, to fish until daylight.
Then at dawn we’d get a fresh supply of bait, wake Mom and Dad and head for Little Bay or Goose Island to wadefish until it got too hot. We’d take a break for lunch and a quick nap. Then it’d be back to wadefish until dark, when it’d start all over again.
The only break was Saturday night or Sunday morning for Mass, which Mom would never let us miss, even for fishing.
Many mornings, instead of wadefishing, we’d pile onto an old party boat named “The Mary Lou” and spend the morning fishing the Aransas Bay wells and reefs for $7 a head.
And we always caught fish. Redfish, speckled trout, flounder, drum, croaker, whiting, sharks, gafftops. All prized.
Did I mention Mom was outrageously lucky?
That’s the only reasonable way to explain why she always caught the biggest fish of the trip–even though we all knew more about fishing, had better equipment and gave her the worst spots to fish. She may not have always hauled in the most, but she always scored the biggest.
Like the time we took a quick stop at the Ski Basin in Rockport, to fish the last few minutes before dark. First cast, the biggest speckled trout that ever swam grabbed Mom’s piggy perch. After an epic battle, she corralled the giant. Even though it somehow shrank to “only” 5 1/2 pounds, it was the only trout we caught that trip. And the biggest we ever caught.
Or another time, in that same spot, when we’d been feeding shrimp to the trash fish all afternoon. So she walked 20 feed down the sand, made one cast and hooked a six-pound redfish.
Mom loved to talk. Which was probably another of God’s jokes, since her husband and sons were all typical strong, silent Germans.
She’s talk about anything. Many a time she’d leave us wriggling like a worm on a hook by asking about our teenage love lives at the dinner table.
But our best talks always came in a boat, or at the end of a pier.
I especially remember one summer vacation, when she and I spent an afternoon in a little jonboat, fishing a little lake near Normangee, and she told me how hard it was to be a working woman and a working mother in the ’60s.
***
I’d just walked in from a late flight from Dallas, the night we got the call.
“Your Mom’s got cancer,” my wife Beth explained through tears, taking my hand. “They’re doing surgery tomorrow and you need to be there.”
For Mom, it was just another challenge to beat.
“I’ve got too much to live for. Don’t worry about me–just take care of your Dad,” she said quietly with a smile, as they wheeled her off to the operating room.
She took the worst of the disease and came back fighting. After surgery and a year of chemotherapy, she went right on with her schedule–even started teaching a college course.
Mom always loved to travel and the trips she’d planned for retirement became a lot more urgent now. She spent more time with her first grandchild, our son Will. She said being a grandma was the best job she ever had.
She had a really good year.
Then came the stroke, probably brought on by the stress of the treatments. She gradually recovered, but had lost much of her memory and even the ability to read. She sometimes couldn’t remember our names.
However, she overcame these setbacks through the same determination that was her way. She dug out the children’s books she had bought for Will and taught herself to read again, regained her strength and most of her memory.
Then the cancer reappeared.
She started another series of treatments with the quiet determination that she would not lose.
She regained her strength in time to see her first granddaughter, our daughter Mary Catherine, born on her birthday. And then a second granddaughter, Lauren, my brother Larry’s first child, soon after.
The week before she died, Mom was thinking about fishing.
She had taken to watching the fishing shows on television. More than once, she told Dad, “I’m going to get stronger, so we can take Will fishing this summer.”
But her heart just decided it was time to quite fighting.
She died April 8, 1987, at the age of 53.
***
Let me tell you about the last time Mom and I fished together.
My family, and Mom and Dad, were spending the weekend at Rockport. I’d been out since dawn wadefishing, without much luck. Mom was far too tired to try wading, but she still wanted to fish.
“Let’s try it out off the pier,” she suggested about 2 in the afternoon, looking out at Aransas Bay from the condo.
I’d never caught a decent fish off that pier during the day. But if Mom felt up to fishing, we were going to fish.
I gathered up rods and a few leftover live shrimp, and we walked out to the end of the pier. The wind, normally blowing a gale in the afternoon, was just a pleasant breeze. And the water was the prettiest green I’d ever seen in that bay.
I baited a double rig for Mom and handed her the rod. She managed a weak 30-foot cast.
“Since she’s feeling better, I’ll just humor her until she gets tired,” I told myself.
WHAM!
A two-pound speckled trout slammed Mom’s shrimp before it hit the bottom. She quickly fought it to my flabbergasted net. Another good trout hit on her next cast.
“Hey, how about letting me catch a fish?” I laughed, as she winched in the third trout before I could get a line in the water.
For reasons known only to the trout, and maybe the Good Lord, the biggest school of solid trout we’d ever seen had moved right up into range for Mom. We stayed there until almost dark, laughing, telling stories and catching fish.
Where did those trout come from?
Maybe it was a little preview of things to come.
Because, if there is a heaven, Mom is there right now, reeling in another big old speckled trout.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

Lee Leschper is publisher of Alaska Outdoor Digest and lives in Anchorage. This story first appeared on Mother’s Day, 1991.