My mom recently uncovered some writings about trout fishing by my late Great Uncle Joe (my mom's mom's older brother), Joseph Drasler. Uncle Joe's story is too long and remarkable to tell here, full of world travel and a harrowing tour in Europe in the US Army during World War II. Born 69 years before me almost to the day, Uncle Joe's story foreshadowed mine in several ways, including a love of trout fishing and writing about it, living in Fairbanks, Alaska for much of his thirties (in the late 1940s), and traveling multiple times to visit parts of Slovenia where our ancestors (his parents, my great grandparents) lived and presumably fished in the 1800s.

Uncle Joe grew up fly fishing for trout near Forest City, Pennsylvania, in the 1910s and 20s, the only angler on little-known streams within an hour's drive of the Catskill waters where I would develop this website 90 years later. What follows are some of his stories about trout fishing, first in Pennsylvania as a child and young man, and later in Colorado near a cabin I visited when I was a child and he was in his early eighties. Upon finding these stories and the picture below, my mom has dubbed her uncle "The Original Troutnut."