I didn’t know Sam Roberson during the first years of his life. I didn’t know about his service in the Navy when he was caught directly in the open onboard a naval war ship when the Japanese launched a surprise aerial attack against the bulk of the United State’s Naval forces at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.  I heard the stories, though. How Sam and his shipmates fought Japanese bomber pilots that were flying just above the ocean’s surface with nothing more than Irish potatoes. Miraculously, Sam survived the attack and the rest of World War II where he was stationed mostly in the Aleutian Islands that extend off the southern tip of Alaska. For a Tennessee lad with a strong sense of adventure, the then wilds of Alaska offered every thing a young man and his new bride Eileen could ever wish for! The war ended and Sam and Eileen headed north.

From the time the young couple stepped off the north-bound ferry onto Alaskan soil and discovered their baggage had been lost, leaving them with only a few bucks and no winter clothing, Sam and Eileen lived a life of awesome adventure for more than four decades.

The first time I met Sam was during a SEOPA meeting somewhere in the South, when I was introduced to the man that would become my great friend for the next 30 years. Sam was a man’s man. A hard scrapple, no nonsense outdoorsman who was tough as nails. That evening Sam was wearing his cleanest dirty shirt. He had a stubble of salt and pepper colored beard, and a clear, far-seeing snap in his eyes like a man looking for the next major challenge in life. I could tell the moment I shook hands with him that this was a man worth knowing.

By that time, Sam’s beloved wife Eileen had died of cancer at their home in Alaska. Sam said he couldn’t live there after his partner and love of his life passed on. He took his savings, purchased a motorhome and cruised the highways of America for more than five years, looking for an off-beaten place to find another story.

Eventually, Sam purchased a farm near Lobelville in his home state of Tennessee. Tennessee. Years would pass. Sam joined the resurging Kentucky Outdoor Press Assoc. and attended every meeting. One time he showed up with a strikingly beautiful woman from Alabama. Her name of Annie and she and Sam had just gotten married.

What a pair! A gracious southern belle and a rough and tough pioneer. Over the next several years, they traveled, built a new home and live a wonderful life on the farm. Sam was writing a column for the local paper and continued to do so until the last few days of his life.

I never faltered in my assessment of Sam during the decades that I knew him. Wanda felt the same way and through all these years, she never passed up an opportunity to dance with Sam who was famed for his ancient Alaskan back-shuffle style that most of the gals found a bit too much for their assorted two-steps. Four days before Sam died in mid February; Wanda phoned her long-time buddy and told him with tears in her eyes that Sam was one of the greatest men she had ever known in her life.

It has been a sad time here in Fern Hollow.

Like Wanda, I don’t expect I’ll ever cross trails with a person of Sam’s magnitude his honor, his integrity.. He was a straight shooter, and one of the finest examples of an outdoor scribe one will ever cross tracks with.

They don’t make many like Sam anymore. Wanda and I have been blessed to be a small part of his life and the members of the Kentucky Outdoor Press Assoc. who knew him can also boast of knowing a real sourdough, a real man!

See you over there Sam….

end

CINCINNATI HUNTING & FISHING SHOW
January 25-29, 2012
Duke Energy Convention Center Downtown
(concurrent with above show)

We even have a BIG Golf Show on our first weekend Jan. 20-22 for boaters and anglers that like Golf!

All information, directions, exhibitor lists, & seminars are at our web site below. For KOPA Members wishing to attend, they can email me directly to have press passes left at our will call for pickup located in the center’s Fifth St. Lobby. Thanks Tom for the time!

Chip Hart
HART PRODUCTIONS, INC.
60 North Second St.
Batavia, Ohio 45103
Main: 513-797-7900
Fax: 513-797-1013
Cell: 513-310-4923
Toll Free: 877-704-8190
www.hartproductions.com

Author G Sam Piatt

If you enjoy fly-fishing or spinning rod fishing for rainbow, brown, brook and golden trout in a clear mountain stream, you need to know about the adventuresome trip I took last weekend to the Great Smoky Mountains with the Kentucky Outdoor Press Association.

Soc Clay, our professional long-distance driver, showed us it’s a six- to seven-hour drive from the Ashland-Portsmouth area by taking U.S. 23 all the way to Asheville, N.C., driving west on Interstaye-40 from there through Maggie Valley, making a 15-minute climb up a high mountain, then dropping down into the valley of the Eastern Tribe of the Cherokee Nation.
Frieda Huskey, marketer and promoter of the good things offered the visitor by the good Cherokee people, was our host. We spent that first night, Thursday, April 14, in the El Gamino Motel. The next day we were able to move into our two log cabins in the Cherokee Campground, located just across Paint Town Road from the motel.
The cabins lay back under the trees along the banks of Soco Creek, a happy little stream that sings and murmurs as it winds by just down a gentle slope from the front porch.
The stream, like others in the area, is stocked three times a week with trout reared at the Cherokee Fisheries & Wildlife Management’s own hatchery. Trout often reproduce, too, in these cold mountain streams, setting the stage for battling wild, native trout. A two-day permit from Cherokee Fisheries is reasonably priced.
Our affable guide, Steve McCoy (he said he is 5/8ths Irish and 3/8ths Cherokee) took us to other streams earlier Friday and everyone in our 10-person party seemed to catch a few fish.
I watched McCoy, fishing just on the other side of the stream from me, catch and release three straight trout on his fly rod. After he supplied me with a fly like the one he was having success with, even I managed to catch one. The fight these trout put up is magnified by the run they make through the swift waters of the stream.
That afternoon, back at the cabins where we would spend the next two nights, Chris Irwin of Ashland, KOPA’s secretary and a former fishing guide on Cave Run Lake, decided to try his luck in the stream in front of us. In a short time he caught and released 14 trout on a spinning outfit using small spinners. KOPA President Tom Clay, who hosts a weekly outdoors show on WSAZ-TV News Channel 3, also got in on the action.
That night, as we all got together for fellowship on the front porch of the cabin, the rain began to fall. It fell on the cabin roof throughout the night, and by next morning Soco Creek has raised about three feet, turning its soft murmur into more of a roar. Even so, the all rock bottom stream did not muddy, but the swift water all but ended fishing for a day.
The storm front that sent us rain and wind spawned many tornadoes across the south, killing 22 people in eastern North Carolina, around Raleigh.
Other writers and broadcasters on the trip included Bob Danner and Joan Maddox, Don and Leah Kirk and Carl and Carrie Stambuagh.

Carl & Carrie Stambaugh releasing a brown trout

The Kirks, from Alabama, where Don Kirk has a two-hour daily radio talk show on outdoor sports broadcast across the Mid-west, spent part of Friday evening and night talking on the cell phone with their daughter, Loryn, who had taken refuge in the bathroom of her home n Alabama, where several people also were killed by twisters.
The Stambaughs, of Ashland, had the advantage of youth to help them enjoy our tour on Saturday. At Mingo Falls, where Soc and I, whose legs don’t have quite the spring of yesteryear, could only sit in the parking lot and look at that long flight of wooden stairs leading up the side of the mountain, sprung up the 157 steps and brought us back a photo of this magnificent waterfall.
The Cherokee Campground, owned and operated by Joy and Lee Craig and managed by Barry Craig, for all its woodsy, stream-side setting, is still within walking distance of downtown Cherokee and a new thing now on the scene: Harrah’s Cherokee Casino.
Yes, the Cherokee now have their own gambling house, where the slots blink and click and ping 24 hours a day as busloads of tourists come from miles around to make their donations.
Say what you will of gambling, this casino has greatly improved the life of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, which numbers about 13,000 residents. Fifty percent of the profits go to improving life for them. It has helped build a new K-12 school, as well as a Alternative School, where children ages 1-5 are being taught to speak and write the Cherokee language – the language that was spoken during the winter of 1838-1839, when the U.S. Government set the Indians on “The Trail of Tears,” the long march West to what is now Oklahoma .
According to McCoy, at the rate of the casino’s current pay-out, when a young person of the current generation, who is a certain percentage Cherokee, reaches the age of 18 and has earned their high school diploma, they get a check for more than $90,000. It can be used for furthering their education, or for a new car, a new home, whatever they want. Then, once they reach 21, twice a year they will receive a check of perhaps $4,000 to $6,000.
Saturday night in the campground, Granny’s Kitchen, the downtown restaurant that offers a delicious buffet three meals a day, catered a dinner that included some traditional Cherokee dishes, and, yes! Deep-fried rainbow trout.
McCoy and three other Cherokee Braves performed Indian songs and dances. Also there we got to meet Internationally-known Cherokee artist Davy Arch, as well as Myrtle Driver, the Beloved Woman of the Eastern Band of Cherokees.
There is a lot to do in Cherokee besides fish and gamble, included among them touring a beautiful new museum filled with artifacts and recording the history of a proud people.
And, for sure, the old tourist sights and events – Indian dances, climbing black bears – along The Strip where you took your children in the 1960s and 1970s are still there. But nowadays, everything seems to have a cleaner, brighter appearance.
For information on Cherokee Campground & Craig’s Log Cabins, call (828) 497-9838 or 488-3373, or log on to the web site cherokeesmokies.com/camp.
To line up guide service with McCoy for fishing, or for hunting, including black bear, reach him on his cell phone at (828) 788-2748.
Information on the entire area is available on www.cherokeesmokies.com..
G. SAM PIATT can be reached at (606) 932-3619 or Gsamwriter@aol.com.