Hearing about one of my life’s unforgettable characters having passed on at age 90, we needed to write this, as a lot of Granite Staters have also been influenced by him or his writing. Neil Duell (wrote under the name of “Old Hickory) of Catfish Creek on Lake Ontario, N.Y., met us through a common friend. We were at Lake Ontario to fish the Salmon River but Hick’s enthusiastic report of the fishing on the lake made me and friends Tom Decoster and Brad Conner change our minds. We met Hick the next morning with lots of doubt in our minds about his description of the lake’s brown trout fishery.

With Brad in Hick’s boat and Tom and me in mine, before were out of the creek and onto the lake itself we realized that we forgot to ask what techniques we needed to catch fish. “Just watch what I do and do what I do. Tie on a small Little Cleo or similar spoon and start casting,” he answered too casually.

So Decoster and I watched as Hick shut off his motor just a few feet offshore and started to cast and retrieve. He immediately hooked a huge brown trout. We also watched as Brad’s excitement made it tough for him to get his rod strung out. By the time Brad was in action Hick had also landed a huge rainbow trout.

Tom and I also had trouble stringing our rods out because of the excitement and watching fish being caught by the small fleet of boats and people fishing from shore, docks and the breakwalls. But when we got into action we were either missing hits on each cast or hooking a fish that would classify as the one of a lifetime at home.

This day started a friendship with me and several of my friends with this old World War II veteran that was to be precious for several decades.

Hick’s war stories were priceless and confirmed what we knew about this frail but tough man’s character. “We had encountered incredible flack on our bombing run with the B-24 in front of us getting a direct hit and our plane was so damaged we had to drop our bombs and limp back to England. The next day we got shot down by one of the fighter planes coming off the German airfield that we were bombing. Because of my size they had me in the bottom turret as the bombardier and manning a machine gun. So I always had a front row seat to the action. When our plane got hit most of the crew had been killed but we managed to pitch all the wounded out on chutes but never did know what their luck was until after the war.

“I landed on the airstrip that was pockmarked with bomb blasts. My back or neck or both were broken and was paralyzed. A German soldier picked me up and threw me into the sidecar of a motorcycle and on the way across the airstrip we were thrown out of the sidecar several times.

“For several weeks I laid on a straw tick in an abandoned factory with other wounded airmen from several allied countries. An English officer who was mobile picked me as his project and first worked on me being able to move a big toe. When movement did come then he worked on expanding this motion to other regions of my body for many weeks. He was the most kind and gentle person with enormous patience and spirit.

“Even though we all there had been wounded and were weak and malnourished, including my English saint, our spirits never weakened. And then one fateful day we heard our own bombers working the city over we were in and soon we discovered that the Germans had retreated and we were free.”

We’ve fished with Hick in my boat dozens of times on Lake Ontario and several remote lakes in New Brunswick, Canada. His toughness and love of life at his age was an inspiration to us all.

One memorable event was when a snowstorm had left four inches of snow in our boat. It became slush and we’ll never forget Hick crawling in the slush because he kept slipping and falling, rigging lines and unhooking fish we were landing. All this with one hand and arm that had been crippled by his war wounds. He was the most unforgettable character in my entire life, including close family members. We’re talking “character” here, not love or friendship, although there were plenty of that included.

His winning the New England Outdoor Writers Association’s Sportsman of the Year Award was only an inkling of what this man had accomplished in his many years of devotion to the outdoors, and at his advanced age he continued to produce columns and articles that were precious. He’ll live in my memory forever.

Dick Pinney’s Guidelines column appears weekly in the New Hampshire Sunday News. His email is DoDuckInn@aol.com.