Tom and Joe

My earliest Minnesota memories are of my brother Tom and I being allowed to row Dad's 14-foot Vic Pagansky cedar strip fishing boat along the shoreline, each of us on a varnished oar.

Years later I remember hooking Tom through his eye lid while casting for pan fish, and driving to town to Doc Koop's to remove the hook. Still don’t understand how I didn’t blind him.

We grew up on the lake 5 miles from Dads home in a small Stearns County village. As town boys we always thought ourselves superior in our 14 footer with a Johnson 5 horsepower motor, to those low riding green flat-bottoms all the local farm families seemed to use.

We with our moon hubcaps, smoking cigarettes, hanging at Betty’s cafe, separated ourselves from the farm kids in coveralls, and mud flaps, and endless chores.

30 years later, when I returned home, Tom took me to the lake with his pickup pulling his 17 foot Lund aluminum complete with a fish finder.

We were drifting off Johns Point hoping for a walleye, but getting only northers, when a large fiberglass inboard came up on us maybe 75 feet away. Seemed like a awesome craft for these waters. A bikini-clad woman walked to the rear and set down 2 mixed drinks on the free board, as a suntanned man called over to us, “Getting anything?”

“Not much,” Tom replied.

“Who are you?” he called out.

“We are the Conrad boys, Dad used to have a cottage right across the lake there.”

“Oh yes, I remember you. We are the Shrumels, our farm is over there. Don't farm much any more, we put the land in the soil bank, spend winters in Florida, but we still come up here to fish in the summer.”