In today’s Throwback Thursday historical photo, we give you two great shots of another professional women’s angler, Fran Wade of Texarkana, Texas.
Fran was involved in bass fishing very early in the game. A May 1976 story in The Times (Shreveport-Bossier, Louisiana) mentioned she was then President of the Texarkana Bass’n Babes, “one of the first and now the most active all-women’s bass club in the United States.”
Their club was holding an open regional event, a ‘women-only’ tournament, and it ended up drawing 85 entrants from half a dozen neighboring states. It was one of the earliest such events in the sport’s history.
In 1980, she captured the Bass’n Gal World Championship on the Ouachita River and cemented her name as a world champion. The win catapulted her into the spotlight at a time when women’s professional angling was gaining recognition. She found sponsor opportunities with companies like Stren, Lew Childre, and Lowrance Electronics.
For the next few years, she was a regular at many sports shows, seminars, and fishing institutes, where her name would appear regularly alongside such notable men’s anglers as Al Lindner, Billy Westmoreland, Roland Martin, Bill Dance, and Basil Bacon.
A piece in Sports Afield around 1983 gained widespread newspaper coverage, stating, “The genders are no longer poles apart when it comes to fishing, according to an angler who should know.
“Fran Wade, the 1980 woman’s national bass fishing champion, believes that, unlike sports such as tennis and golf, fishing presents no barriers to women.
“It’s obviously not a sport of strength. It’s one of experience, patience and finesse. In experience, the best women fishermen are still behind men, but are catching up. In a few years there won’t be any difference.”
By then, she had qualified for 6 Bass’n Gal Classics, and would later add Lady Bass Classic appearances when that circuit rose in prominence.
