January 30, 2008

Beginning a Blog
Flirting Octogenarian

     I envisioned starting this blog last October. I knew it wouldn’t be an everyday thing, but it would be reserved for outdoorsy things that didn’t belong in the weekly newspaper column, deserved more coverage, or simply a different perspective than the column slot might provide. Or something I knew the editors would change drastically. Finally, I knew I needed a place like this to write when I met an older woman for lunch in October and just had to share the tale.
     Carrie Dooman Emilio’s eyes sparkled as she flirted with the younger men giving her their undivided attention. At 84, she was one of an iconic breed of Southern California women who did things women didn’t do in the 1950s and 1960s, she was a fisherman. She didn’t go with her husband; she went by herself or with other women from Pomona Valley Lady anglers. She did it before there was such a thing as women’s liberation, knowing she was as liberated as she wanted to be.
     “I wanted to get away from my husband,” she laughed like a school girl.
     She must not have wanted to get away too badly because she was married to James Dooman for 57 years. He was a teacher and a football coach at Upland High School. She was the angler in the family.
     “He was so jealous. He went out for yellowtail. Once. He didn’t catch a thing – not even a cold. So he quit going,” said Dooman.
      Then the fishing stories started. Mostly, they revolved around handsome men.
“I had to be really careful back then,” she said, smiling. There was a story coming.
     Dooman met Lee Marvin on a fishing boat out of Davey’s Locker in 1965, the year he won the best actor Oscar for his role in “Cat Ballou.”
     “He was gorgeous,” she swooned, envisioning it all again. “I was the first one to hook-up a yellowtail and he said to me, ‘You get ‘em tiger.’ I just fell in love with him. He quoted poetry to me. He was divine.”
     She was less impressed with actor Vincent Price, who she also met on a fishing trip, this one out of Ensenada.
     “Vincent Price? All he wanted to talk about was his art, and I wasn’t interested in art,” said Dooman.
     And she fished with a group of the nation’s first astronauts who’d chartered a boat in the 1960s. The landing operators asked a group of the girls to go along to show the guys how to fish.
     “They were watching our rear ends while we were fishing,” she said, looking over the top of her glasses.
     She laughed when I told her that we recruit our brightest and best to be astronauts.
     Dooman spread a few pictures out on the table. Here, she was whitewater rafting. There was her with a dorado, another with a yellowtail, and a marlin. There’s a shot of her on a boat going through the locks in Panama, and here was Dooman with a wahoo caught off Florida.
     I noticed the smile hadn’t changed with time.
     She pointed at the wahoo from Florida. She and her husband had chartered a fishing boat and she landed the fish – stealing the fishing spotlight from her husband as usual. The captain said he didn’t have a flag for wahoo because one hadn’t been caught in the area for seven years.
     “He told me, ‘you go into the head and take your panties off and we’ll run those up the pole instead. Then when we come into port everyone will still ohhhh and ahhhh and come to see what we caught.”
     Then she almost blushed.
     She looked up at me. “I’ve lost two better halves,” she said. “But my grandmother had three husbands, so....” I told her I didn’t think I could keep up with her, and then I almost blushed. We both laughed.
     The July 21, 1961 cover of Western Outdoor News featured Dooman with an albacore, and “Tiger” was sporting the same smile in that photo she had been flashing all through her stories. (A copy of that cover is displayed in the Islamorada Fish Market Restaurant at Bass Pro Shop in Rancho Cucamonga. While the store may seem to be devoted to Otis Chandler memorabilia, Bass Pro has also tipped its hat to rank-and-file anglers like Dooman who make their own history.)
     We all have our stories. We always have. Whether we chip them on cave walls, scrawl them on parchment with ink, jot them in notebooks around campfires, or tell them across dinner tables, the best stories involve the outdoors. They have trees, to use an old literary jab. This spot will be devoted to stories.