Wednesday, April 28

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28 April, Wednesday - Went with Marv to pick up ingredients. Spent the rest of the day at home. Mary goes into the hospital Monday - operated on Tuesday

29 April, Thursday - Went to store and then to see Gladys. She felt pretty bad. Came home and relaxed. Felt pretty good.

30 April, Friday - Didn't sleep well. Got up and had a fight with Marv over Bud. Got hair fixed. Went to see May Fair Lady with Mom, Patty, Walt and Bud. Real good.

Dad's supply trips were epic adventures into the world of fish bait ingredients. Dad regularly picked up 100 pound bags of wheat shorts and flour from Robin Hood in North Kansas City, huge whey blocks originally designed for poultry farms, 55 gallon drums of cheese trimmings for catfish bait, 55 gallon drums of blackstrap molasses, (Yep, the trunk of the Cadillac could easily hold a full 55-gallon barrel, and my old man was strong enough to wrestle it out by himself.) and my favorite trip, every loaf of two-day old Taystee bread that dad could squeeze into a '55 Cadillac sedan. The back seat was jammed to the roof, and usually the trunk and as much of the passenger side of the front seat as dad could muster and still have room for me to ride along.* Dad had cultivated a friendship with someone at Taystee, and they just gave dad all the bread he could cart away, sometimes twice a week. They couldn't sell it, and the bread was destined for the dumpster, so what the heck. Dad found he could use bread as a replacement for wheat shorts and flour for some of his bait. The bonus factor was that the bread that was "Baked While You Sleep" was already infused with industrial strength preservatives, which meant dad didn't have to buy big bags of mold-killing sodium propionate to add to bait. Dad, like me, could be frugal to a fault. 

Tastee has Wheaty Flavor

If you're inclined as this point to compare your Uncle Ferd's homemade corn-flake dough bait to dad's stuff, you can pretty much stop now. Dad spent years in R&D finding the combination of flavorings and ingredients that made his bait unique. The running family joke was that the minute you walked in the back door, dad would thrust something under your nose, and say, "Here! Smell this." This madness was his method, and over the years he isolated flavors from other foods - cumin, curry, fenugreek, hops, whey, celery, and many others that he eventually incorporated into bait or other flavorings. He built a small distilling device for extracting essences of flavors that didn't exist on the market. Yes, we had a still.

Dad's baits didn't spoil, didn't get hard in the container, and never failed to catch fish. Four years after dad died, I went shopping for a gift for an angler friend of mine. I found a couple of cans of his Big Thunder Carp Bait at a bait and tackle shop in Independence, Missouri. It was still good. It was soft and pliable, and still had that distinctively sweet molasses aroma. Dad definitely knew his business. Your Uncle Ferd doesn't know shit about fish bait.

What could make mom and dad fight over me? Hard saying, but I never saw any of it. I only saw mom and dad fight one time, and that was about fish bait. Truth is, I think mom was concerned that dad was spoiling me into the ground, a theory that I can confirm without hesitation.

"My Fair Lady". If my mom and her mom were going to a movie or a theatre production, you can bet your valve oil and harmon mute it's going to be a musical. 

*Why dad didn't buy a pickup truck is still a mystery to me.