FLYMPH FORUM

Mike62 wrote: ↑Sat Feb 04, 2023 8:14 pm There's something about that photograph that keeps drawing me back. I'm not sure what it is. Maybe it's that I'm looking at Rube Cross, one of the seminal tiers of the glorious Catskill age (of any age), in his natural environment. But maybe that's it, his 'natural environment' is so... provincial; almost quaint. It's a sepia tinged black and white of the days of yore. A time that was entirely, and very specifically, different that the one we live in today.

I've tried to digest his tying space, the way he sits, his tools, his body language, the sparseness of the materials he has hanging on the wall; ...and I feel so inadequate. Here is a man, doing things with very little. Things that we still talk about today, over half a century after he conjured them. I have a thousand times more stuff than ol' Rube ever imagined could exist, and my tying will never hold a candle to his. There is a wonderful lesson in this photo, if only I have the sense to listen.

I read somewhere, ...that he could be a difficult man to know; that he guarded his secrets religiously. I don't see any of that in the picture. I see a man confident in his skills, doing so much with so little.

It's a wonderful picture, it really is.

Updtate wrote: ↑Sat Feb 04, 2023 6:56 am P_20220112_104925~2.jpg
A Spider tied by Rube Cross himself!

Reuben R. Cross - Rube at his Fly Tying Desk! - Screenshot 2022-04-25 154404.png
and Rube at his tying desk.