March 18, 2025
By In-Fisherman Staff
In-Fisherman Editor-in-Chief Doug Stange sits down with Thomas Allen to relive the early days of his youth in Iowa. He talks about how his fishing passion was born, why catfish are so important to American anglers, and the duo discusses the legend of Otis “Toad” Smith and his impact on Doug’s storytelling. Mr. Stange has contributed so much to the In-Fisherman platform over the years, and hearing him tell stories of the old day is an absolute privilege.
Truncated transcript:
00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:18.000: You're listening to In-Fisherman Storyline. North America's top voice in multi-species freshwater angling. Here is your host, Thomas Allen.
00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:47.280: >> Yes you are. Iowa, you were born in Iowa. I was not born in Iowa, but I consider Iowa my home. Yeah, where were you born? Wisconsin, Madison. I didn't know that, wow. Yeah, I'm a Packers fan by default, but I consider Iowa my motherland, if you will. And I've always appreciated the Packers too for that matter. We have that in common, how about that? Hey, if you recognize that voice, that's Mr. Doug Stange.
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00:00:47.280 --> 00:01:26.840: You're tuning into another special edition of, boy, I got that all wrong. I guess I need some more coffee Let's try that one more time. Okay. And we're not gonna edit that out because we like real life. Now this is In-Fisherman's Storyline, and we're gonna be digging into Doug's past. He's already kinda told me that he can't remember much, but I'll bet he's gonna remember a lot of it, and I know that that started in Iowa. So let's hear a little bit about your early Iowa fishing days, and was it catfish that captured you early on, or was it the Iowa Great Lakes?
00:01:26.840 --> 00:01:49.320: Yeah, well, it's such a long story, and it was a long time ago. I'm 75 years old, so I've been at this a long time. And the timeline, in my mind, looking back to those early days, doesn't fit. It doesn't go perfectly in line. There's these memories and so on, so that kind of thing.
00:01:49.320 --> 00:02:10.640: Catfish was always there for us. Okay, so the little town that I grew up in is Hull, Iowa, which is not far from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, about 60 miles to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Farm country. Farm country for sure, to the north, Worthington, Minnesota, and to the east, the Iowa Great Lakes, 60 miles away.
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00:02:10.640 --> 00:03:04.520: So in my immediate area, really no fishing except some of the smaller creeks had chubs, creek chubs. So a piece of liver, you're four years old, five years old, six years old, and there we would go to take a Sunday morning and go down to the crick and catch chubs. So there was that. Well, hold on, you said something, this is important. We gotta point this out, you said crick. And if you go anywhere outside of the Midwest, that is not acceptable. I gotcha, you're right. It's gotta be creek. If you go into the south, all the big reservoirs have creeks coming in. And if you've got something running through your backyard in Minnesota, it's probably a creek, but I grew up saying crick. Well, I never knew creek until later. Yeah, and there's no, you can't even look up crick on the Internet. I don't even think it's a legal word. I never thought of it, but you're right. Anyways.
00:03:04.520 --> 00:03:31.360: So that kind of fishing early on, to the north, there's a river, classic catfish rivers, Little Rock River flows into, even before that, there's an Otter Creek that flows into the Little Rock River, which flows into the Big Rock River, which flows into the Big Sioux River. So the Big Sioux River runs north and south, from Sioux Falls, South Dakota to Sioux City…
Click here to listen to the entirety of Episode 26.
