The Terror of the Trout

All week long, curly-haired Jerome Cefalu, 19, was as busy as a major-league pitcher chucking baseballs at a country carnival--and he was just as unwelcome. Every 15 minutes he was back in line buying a ticket to fish the trout pond at the Milwaukee Sentinel's sport show. He paid his money all right--in seven days Jerry shelled out about $50--but he snagged so many fish that he drove the trout-pond operators frantic.

Jerry has been hanging up his own kind of fishing records for years. Last summer at the Wisconsin State Fair, he hooked ten in ten minutes (prize: a week's vacation). In last year's Sentinel show he won a $2,500 log cabin (which he traded to an uncle for a 1951 Ford convertible), plus a week's canoe trip and another vacation at a northern Wisconsin resort where he and a pal caught 72 wall-eyed pike in 3 1/2 days.

At the Sentinel's 1955 show, after a week of watching him work their pond, the authorities finally decided that Jerry was a public nuisance, and refused to sell him another ticket. Jerry's father, who had been serving the boy's catch at his New Colony Inn in Milwaukee, promptly got a court order restraining the show from barring his son. But the sport show managers still refused to let Jerry cast another fly. Before Jerry was banned, he had already caught more than 100 trout. Prizes: a five-day Las Vegas vacation, plus three one-week vacations in northern Wisconsin. He would like to donate the Wisconsin trips to local orphanages, but the managers are hard losers; they insist that the vacations are not transferable.

Jerry's system, born of innate virtuosity and years of practice: he flicks a fly behind a swimming trout, lets it settle, then pulls it forward until it is out in front of the feeding fish. Once he has the trout's attention, Jerry quickly snakes his fly away at a 45DEG angle and gives it a few artful twitches as if it were trying to escape. These tactics never seem to fail. Explains Jerry: "Hatchery trout are stupid."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.