We’ve written a lot about Bass Fishing Hall of Famer Jason Lucas in the past. Today in Jason Lucas 1949, we’re going to present an interesting find from the Salt Lake City Deseret News printed in that year.
The article, written by Hack Miller, doesn’t mention Lucas at all in the text. But, the images presented are nearly all of Lucas. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise since by 1949, Lucas had become the foremost authority of bass fishing. His book, Lucas on Bass, had just been reprinted and his pulpit as the fishing editor of Sports Afield gave him a lot of notoriety.
The subject of the article was how the bass was gaining ground on the trout and its supreme nobility amongst all gamefish. It was Dr. James A. Henshall who wrote in 1881 that the black bass would one day overtake the trout as the gamest fish in America. Now, 68 years later, his words were coming true.
Anglers like Henshall, Heddon, Arbogast, Jones, Fox, Knight, and Bergman all helped to put the black bass in the limelight, but it was Lucas who really took it to another level. His book, first written only two years earlier, was considered the most authoritative book ever written on the subject. It taught the would-be reader and aspiring bass angler the science of bass fishing. It put an end to a lot of the myths about the bass and how to catch them. It was the text on modern day bass theory.
But let’s get back to the article in the Deseret News.
What I found interesting about this two-page article was the images. First off was the main image on the first page, with Lucas and his “partner” Al Chandet, holding a big string of bass from Lake Mead, Nevada. The size of the fish isn’t what surprised me, it was the caption. Miller infers that Lucas and Chandet fished together. If you’re a Lucas fan, you know that he never fished with anyone.
Here is an excerpt from a private correspondence from 1954 between Jason Lucas and Stan Fagerstrom to illustrate this point.
Lucas to Fagerstrom: “Did I tell you that I always and absolutely fish alone? Anybody around sneezing, or maybe being so awful to speak, when I’m concentrated on fishing, would ruin my whole day. Farther I am from anybody else when I fish, better I like it – except that, when I’ve caught onto a place, I fish near others once in a while, purely to let them see that I really catch fish, ….”
He despised fishing with and around people. Now maybe by 1954 he’d developed this “lone wolf” attitude. From the pictures, it’s apparent that Lucas had someone in the boat and/or in another boat close to him at the time these pictures were taken.
Maybe Lucas, early in his career, felt he needed someone in the boat with him time to time to witness his exploits. It’s hard to say.
The other question I have is why would Miller use, almost exclusively, pictures of Lucas to fill his article? Was it due to Lucas’ popularity? Did Miller not have any images of himself holding bass? I feel it had to do with the former. Lucas was the bass angler at the time. It’s just too bad he didn’t mention him in the body of the piece.
I hope you Lucas fans enjoyed this look into some of Jason Lucas’ early bass fishing exploits. The full article is posted below. We’ll see you back here either Sunday but for sure Monday with more bass fishing history. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving holiday.
