Joe Brooks
by Mike Brooks and Joe Brooks
Originally published in Tail issue 39
When we were growing up, dinner-table conversations at our house were quite the event. There were 10 of us sitting elbow-to-elbow around the the long timber table, with conversation flying and the banter continuously funny, if not biting. You had to be quick-witted to survive. Often we would ask my dad about his life. He would then launch into stories of what it was like in the military, or his childhood growing up in Baltimore, or maybe what we were like when we were younger. Inevitably, though, it would come back to Uncle Joe. The stories were always of how my grandfather, at the pressing of our grandmother, had to bail Uncle Joe out of jail often because of his run-ins with the police due to drinking. We did not know of Joe Brooks’ status in the fly fishing world; we were not kids who grew up fishing, let alone fly fishing. April Vokey called Joe Brooks a mythological icon she had heard so much about. We will endeavor in this article to shed some light on this hero, this mythological icon to millions.
So, who was Joe Brooks…? We don’t have enough time or space to cover the man in detail; we can offer the reader only a glimpse. Joe Brooks’ many books and articles, still available today, provide much more detail than we ever could.
Joe Brooks was a gifted athlete. At age 17, he was signed by Jack Dunn of the Baltimore Orioles—the same team that a young George Herman “Babe” Ruth was drafted to (and sold from) in 1914. In those days, the Baltimore Orioles were a very successful semi- professional baseball team. From a newspaper clipping: “On June 25, 1917, in the second game of a doubleheader in the Original Semi-Pro League between the Irvington Baseball Club and the Tindeco Tuxedos, representing Baltimore’s inner harbor, 15-year-old Brooks is given the ball for the Tuxedos. He’s facing batters of the experienced Irvington Club, which just two years earlier had won 35 of 43 games and proclaimed themselves Maryland State Champions. The kid is dazzling.”
Joe’s aspirations to be a professional hurler were squashed by his father, however. The idea of professional sports as a career was in its infancy in those days, and this lifestyle did not appeal to a man who had worked very hard to create an insurance business in order to give his children the very best in life. Professional baseball was not in the cards.
Joe Brooks was also a very fine golfer who took to the sticks late in life, at the age of 22. He would hold the course record of 65 at the prestigious Baltimore Golf and Country Club and would later travel around the country playing in tournaments.
Joe Brooks played semi-pro football and was a crack wing shot. It’s also said he bowled several perfect games of 300.
The sport did not matter—Joe Brooks seemed always to excel. He took up boxing and immediately shined. SIX KNOCKOUTS IN EIGHT BOUTS. “Joe Brooks stopped Harry Messick in two rounds” at the Polish-American Athletic Club at St. Stanislaus Hall, and “the kayoes pleased the spectators.” —The Sun, Baltimore, February 17, 1928. Some have said that while living in Minnesota, Joe even sparred with the legendary Jack Dempsey.
Needless to say, Joe Brooks was a very fine fly caster, bringing all that natural athleticism to the sport he so dearly loved. He took up fly fishing as a young boy, honing his skills on Maryland and Pennsylvania trout streams. In his 1950 book, Salt Water Fly Fishing, he wrote, “I was a dry-fly fisherman from away back, brought up on eastern brown trout streams and imbued with all the lore of the purest of the purists.”
It was, however, the magical meeting with friend and mentor Tom Loving that would change Joe Brooks’ life—and the sport of fly fishing—forever. Tom introduced Joe to fishing in the salt back in 1923, when Joe was just 22 years old. According to Joe, Tom Loving was the first fly angler to expressly tie flies for salt water. It wasn’t that fish were not being caught in the salt, but those who were doing it, both here and abroad, were using trout and salmon flies.
“When Tom Loving began catching brackish-water largemouth black bass in 1922,” Joe wrote, “he used streamers, bucktails and popping bugs that he made himself especially for that fishing. The next year he tied a two-hooked fly for shad, made with white bucktail wings and a black body with silver ribbing. As far as I know, that was the real beginning of salt-water fly tying.”
It’s interesting to think that Salt Water Fly Fishing, the first book dedicated entirely to the sport and still a go-to classic for anyone interested in chasing the mighty denizens found there, was written in 1950. With 27 years of trial and error under his belt, Joe Brooks was the authority on the subject at the time. He wrote the book to share his knowledge, but more important so that fly anglers could have as much fun as he was having.
Joe Brooks was not the only pioneer of saltwater fly fishing. By 1950 he was living in Islamorada and learning from the best of the best guides in the business. Joe would often quote and give credit to everyone who helped him gain his knowledge. In fact, when Joe landed the first permit ever caught on a fly, his guide was none other than Frankee Albright (wife of Key’s guide Jimmie Albright). Frankee Albright was the best of the best, and you can find her mentioned often in many of Joe’s books, such as when she guided him to an 85-pound tarpon (which would have been a world record, at the time, if they had boated it).
In his book Salt Water Game Fishing, also a classic, Joe devotes an entire page to those individuals who helped bring the contents together. Pioneering saltwater fly fishing was a team effort, and Joe never wished to take all the credit for himself; rather, he would downplay his role. If you read his works you’ll notice how frequently he mentions guides and outfitters; he did this to give them their due credit, but also to help them build their name in the business.
Joe Brooks was not about Joe Brooks—Joe Brooks was about others. As a young man he burned through two wives and was a very angry and abusive drunk, coupled with the abilities of a pugilist. Not a good combination. It was said that when he entered a bar in those days, everyone took notice. He was not a man you wanted to cross.
With help from a clinic in Ontario, Canada, Joe pulled himself out of his alcoholic addiction and developed the iron will to never drink again. Lefty Kreh, who received his first fly casting lesson from Joe Brooks, told us that Joe considered his victory over alcohol the greatest accomplishment of his life.
It was 1935 that Joe Brooks emerged a new man—and that man was on a mission. That was when he threw himself into the world of fly fishing and the outdoors. He became a man dedicated to helping others, and he would go on to spend the rest of his life doing just that. In the 1972 collection Fishing Moments of Truth, Ed Koch wrote a remembrance of Joe. In it, he recounted a story told to him by Mary Brooks, Joe’s third wife and soulmate. Mary recalled that a friend and fishing companion of Joe’s from the Brotherhood of the Junglecock, an organization that Joe help to found, had suffered a stroke some years earlier that had left him almost completely incapacitated. Once a month, regardless of where he he was or what he was doing, Joe would telephone the man and talk to him—even though his friend could not speak.
Everyone who knew Joe Brooks later in life referred to him as Gentleman Joe.
It’s likely that many readers of this magazine have never heard of Joe Brooks. The space of an article does not permit us to go into great detail about what he did for others, or of the influence he had in the sport we all love. By producing a documentary of our great uncle’s life, we hope to introduce this important historical figure to a new generation of fly anglers.
Bios: Mike Brooks and Joe Brooks are the great nephews of the late fly fishing icon Joe Brooks. They’ve produced an impressive documentary on Joe Brooks’ life, Finding Joe Brooks (joebrooksdocumentary.com). They’ve also created the Joe Brooks Foundation, which focuses on conservation, outdoor education, and stewardship. You can contact the foundation at the URL above.
