One of my memories of growing up in Santa Fe was spending two weeks every July in Chama. We stayed at the Little Creel Lodge. It was on the chama river that my dad taught me how to fly fish. I still have the two bamboo fly rods we fished with on the river and on other streams and rivers in New Mexico and Colorado. Back in the 1950's there was no internal plumbing in the cabins. You had to go down primrose path to get to the outhouse. I once locked my sister Linda and a friend of hers in the outhouse. I finally told my mother what I had done. Did I get a whipping from my dad when he got home that night!! I can remember getting up early in the morning and going first to the ice house for blocks of ice to keep food fresh, and then to the coal bin for coal to stoke the stove with. I also remember the fields of alfalfa we would play hide and seek in for hours and the walks into the town of Chama to get ice cream cones on hot July afternoons.

The love of fishing that my father instilled in me as a young boy has remained with me all of my life. Over the years I have fished the waters of the 10,000 islands in southwest Florida, as well as streams and rivers in Colorado, Wyoming, Georgia, North Carolina and Louisiana. My wife Marilyn and I are going to Alaska this July to fish for salmon and trophy trout. I have never cast a line on the water when I haven't thought about my dad. Of all the places I have fished, my boyhood time on the chama river in northern New Mexico will forever be holiest in my heart and soul.

Doug Wycoff

Santa Fe High School-1964