The Side Saddle Fishing Club
Edited by Paul Johnson
© 1997 Marshfield History Project
Used with permission of Donald Schnitzler
 
The following story was excerpted from a typescript entitled 'Side Saddle Saga" found in the back of an old file cabinet which belonged to the Side Saddle Fishing Club charter member Herb Johnson. The author is unknown. Identification of individuals or additional information is placed in brackets ( ).

The Side Saddle Fishing Club is Marshfield's most exclusive and intriguing fraternity, probably because it has no obvious membership requirements and is totally without social significance. Each member is more or less peerless in the group, which has included shopkeepers and doctors, engineers and insurance peddlers, newsmen and other honest wage slaves, welders and lawyers, mail manipulators and judges, bookkeepers and bankers, door-to-door and electronic entrepreneurs, administrators and pharmacists, bill collectors and pedants.

The Side Saddle Conservation Club has no organization worth divulging. It is incorporated under the laws of Wisconsin, but there its physical structure ends and the metaphysical begins. In short, the Side Saddle is a state of mind-frequently disturbed.

As an example, 15 members, an unusually large turnout, and their wives attended an annual dinner at the Hotel Charles. Annual meetings, it should be noted, are held every two or three years. Members broke into loud applause when the master of ceremonies, confronted with the herculean task of explaining the organization to the ladies, lauded the Side Saddle as "a cheap outfit with no dues."

No one can pinpoint the Side Saddler's date of birth. It just grew. However, shortly after World War II, a group of Marshfield's angling enthusiasts loaded themselves and gear into a buddy's oversized sedan and headed north for the opening of the season. (the sedan was a 1938 Nash President owned by Herb Johnson) Most of them were veterans enjoying their first trek into the Wisconsin outdoors since the late unpleasantness and the unsympathetic directives of sergeants and bosun's mates. The habit of rest and recuperation leaves was, however, still firmly ingrained, with the result that many R-'N-R's were taken between Marshfield and their objective, and the first day of the season was waning when they arrived.

The eager fishermen disembarked while their car was still rolling, cresting the top of a hill which sloped down to the lake. Feeling lonely behind the wheel, the driver disembarked. The sedan, motor running and gears engaged, lumbered to the lake and submerged. Erstwhile anglers spent the weekend in salvage work, retrieving the auto from the depths and drying out the motor just in time for the long trek home. From this talented group of outdoorsmen came part of the Side Saddle's hard core.

The name came some years later from a neophyte who was to emerge as the club's elder statesman. Encamped at a Fifield motel (The Homestead Motel) on a chill spring night, the gang was thawing out before the hearth-convenient to the bar-after a hard day in the boats. Conversation ranged from amplified accounts of the day's feats of angling and the high praise for the morrow, to prowess in sports far afield, as the tales grew taller. "Humph!" intoned the late John G. Pinion, then office manager of the News-Herald. "If you characters went horseback riding you'd all have to ride side saddle."

Many Side Saddlers frequented Varney's Bar on the corner of Chestnut & Second, an area in which many worked. They subscribed to a credo, copies of which are still available on parchment and some day may yet rank with the Magna Carta and the Constitution, to wit: "A unique and genteel fellowship for the promotion and perception of thespian and terpsichorean perfectionism, music appreciation, astronomical observation, thunder and other cultural pursuit's for the mature development of kinesthetic and cerebral capacities to their absolute maximum."

(Parties were a hallmark of the Side Saddle Fishing Club.) By tradition, announcements of the Side Saddle soirees have been florid, as witness notice of an official meeting on the "Herbert Johnson Esq. Farm." By special permission of Mrs. Johnson a steak feed will be held at the farm. Bring your own potatoes and eating utensils. For 'Tony" Knott's benefit utensils mean knife, fork and spoon-not a shovel. This meeting includes the wives. All members can consider this an educational trip. Mr. Johnson will show the latest farming methods and how to get government subsidies for not producing anything. Ken Pucker will appear for the first time in his handsome cook's outfit. He will look like a plate from Esquire magazine. Drinks will be a plenty. A cow milking contest will be held after dinner. Herb will steal the cow from the neighbors."

The club lost its first member in 1956. (in a letter to a resort owner explaining its meeting, John Pinion wrote) "We're having our first wake for a member, Dick Paul, on September 13, 1956. He's moving to Illinois and that to any Side Saddler is almost the equivalent of dying."
 
(The Side Saddle Fishing Club, especially John Pinion did lobby for conservation.) At one time the Wisconsin Development Company, which controls the (Big Eau Pleine) flowage attempted to bar access to the waters below the dam, frequently the scene of excellent northern pike fishing. The firm had every right to invoke the ban, but Pinion and a Side Saddler who boasted an attorney-at-law bumper sticker, dipped into the statute book and came up with a prize catch. Anglers could come down the river, in this instance the flowage, by boat and the owner of the dam was required by law to furnish the man power and gear necessary to portage the fisherman over the dam. A word to the wise was more than sufficient, and the area below the dam continues to be open to the cars and boats of fishermen.

(The Side Saddle Saga ends) delayed for a year or two, awaiting the accumulation of data, is Volume IV, which will faithfully report Side Saddle hi-jinks in the Marshfield Convalescent Center, including marshmallow roasts, wheelchair racing, prune juice bashes and denture swapping. And so, sic transit gloria mundi, but that's another story.