General
Ed Van Put, Who Hooked Jimmy Carter on the Catskills, Dies at 88
A master fly-fisherman, author and conservationist, he guided the famous, including a former president, and the not-so-famous in the hunt for rainbow trout.
Thanks to Ed Van Put, Jimmy Carter and George Washington had something else in common aside from being Southern planters who ascended to the presidency.
“At one point when he was wading across the river,” Mr. Van Put said after guiding Mr. Carter on a five-day fly-fishing visit to the Catskill Mountains in 1984, “I remarked — which tickled him — that we now have had a Carter as well as a Washington crossing of the Delaware.”
“Mr. Carter made my guiding easy,” Mr. Van Put, a pre-eminent angler and fly-caster as well as a conservationist, guide and author, told The New York Times shortly after the president’s expedition to the Upper Delaware and nearby Beaverkill.
“He works hard at it, covers the water well and likes to catch fish,” Mr. Van Put added. “He is also fun to be with.”
Mr. Van Put, a principal fish and wildlife technician for New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation until he retired in 2008, died on Dec. 14 at his home in Livingston Manor, N.Y., his wife, Judy, said. He was 88. (Mr. Carter died 15 days later.)
Mr. Carter had fly-cast elsewhere for years but considered the Catskills a mecca for fly-fishing. It was where Mead Schaeffer, the American illustrator, once said that the rainbow trout may not have been invented, but it was where “they painted spots on him and taught him to swim.”
