Tygarts Creek draws 96-year-old Carter County veteran back time and again Story by Kevin Kelly • Photos by Obie Williams
During an April visit to Tygarts Creek, Baker scans the hillside looking for jack-in-the-pulpit.
Baker carries a small assortment of tried and true muskie lures in a simple waist pack.
J
ACK BAKER IS just back from a half-mile stroll through the countryside on a sun-splashed morning in late October. The hillsides in this part of Carter County blaze in showy fall colors and there’s a slight chill to the air. Baker is wearing a blue plaid flannel shirt jacket over a blue and white-striped button down shirt. He settles into a porch swing, crosses his legs, and looks out over his backyard where he has neatly stacked the wood logs that will carry him through the coming winter. “There’s a lot of people 70 years old in a lot worse shape than I am,” Baker says. “I think huntin’ and fishin’ have kept me going.” His still sturdy frame, sharp mind and sound health defy expectations of a man of his age. Baker, a 96-year-old World War II Army veteran, is very much a fixture around these parts. He grew up and raised a family here, hunted small game and ginseng in the surrounding hills. He started fishing nearby Tygarts Creek before the Great Depression. Tygarts Creek meanders northeast through Carter and Greenup counties before emptying into the Ohio River at South Shore. One of the state’s native muskellunge streams, its population is now supplemented by periodic stockings by the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. Baker walks often along his beloved
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A muskellunge stalks a 7-inch floating crankbait as Baker slowly retrieves it.
creek for the exercise – and to occasionally pick a fight with a muskie. “My buddy used to say there’s no use in fishing Tygarts because Jack Baker’s got their mouths all sore,” he said. “But I turn ‘em loose.” Locals have grown so accustomed to seeing Baker’s white Chevy pickup parked near a bridge on the road to Carter Caves State Resort Park that they direct out-oftowners to stop there if he’s not at home. Across the road from Baker’s parking spot, a double track blocked by a steel gate follows the floodplain above the blue-green waters of the creek before dropping down to a ford. This is the area where Kentucky Fish and Wildlife fisheries biologist David Baker first encountered Jack Baker in the spring of 2015. “He had a heavy action fishing rod and this big white buzz bait tied on the line,” said David Baker, who is not related to the older man. “We got to talking. He said, ‘I love this place. I’ve been walking up and down here for years. You wouldn’t believe how many muskie I’ve caught.’ “He asked what we were doing and if we were still stocking the creek. He knew every nook and cranny. I was sitting there the whole time and couldn’t get over the fact that he’s 90-something years old and in such good shape.” Besides his fishing gear, Jack Baker car-
ries decades of memories about the creek. He recalls an uncle catching muskie from its waters using a cane pole, nylon string and live creek chubs. Jack Baker himself didn’t catch his first muskie in Tygarts until 1950. “Off of that rock up there,” he said as he glanced at the boulder jutting into a deep pool above the ford upstream of the bridge. “I was fishing for bass and catching sunfish, little bitty ones. That muskie hit and tore my little plastic reel with plastic gears all to pieces. I had 8-pound test line and held him to where he couldn’t roll. If you give those fish a little slack, they’ll roll and cut that line every time. You have to keep the line tight on them.” Local landowners know Baker well enough that they allow him access to areas otherwise off-limits to the public. On days he plans to fish, Baker gathers his favorite lures in a small waist pack and picks up his South Bend Black Beauty rod with its Abu Garcia baitcasting reel. He threads the curved metal shaft of a homemade wood-handled gaff through a belt loop on his blue jeans. The gaff isn’t used to impale his catches, he explains, but at his age helps him secure the fish so he can remove the lure with pliers before releasing it to swim away. “If I want a fish,” Baker says, “I’ll go to Long John Silver’s.” He boasts of catching as many as four Summer 2016 Kentucky Afield 13
muskie in one day while walking the banks. This past April, he caught a 34-incher near where he caught his first muskie nearly six and a half decades earlier. But his favorite spot is downstream. “I used to put a boat in down here at the bridge and go down the creek about four or five miles,” Baker said. “A friend of mine’s
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got a farm down there, where Sutton Creek runs into Tygarts. That’s a good day’s fishing and the best water that I know of around here.” Tygarts Creek certainly is no secret to muskie anglers. Long before Buckhorn, Green River and Cave Run lakes came into existence,
anglers counted Tygarts Creek, the Little Sandy River and Kinniconick Creek among Kentucky’s best places for muskie. “There are some holes of water on Tygarts that are absolutely beautiful – cliffbound with rhododendron and mountain laurel everywhere,” said Tom Timmermann, Northeast Fisheries District biologist with Kentucky Fish and Wildlife. “It’s one of the really cool fisheries in that part of the state.” As a member of the “Greatest Generation,” Baker is as much a treasure as the creek and its muskellunge. He was born in 1919. That year, Sir Barton won the Kentucky Derby and became the first horse to win the Triple Crown; the New York Yankees acquired Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox; and the Treaty of Versailles formally brought an end to World War I. Baker was working as a coal miner in West Virginia when he was drafted and sent overseas to fight in World War II. He learned too late that coal mining was considered essential to the war effort and he could have received an exemption. His military service carried him into some of the biggest battles of the European Theater. Today, Baker keeps his military portrait in a frame with three medals – the World War II Victory Medal, European-AfricanMiddle Eastern Campaign Medal, and the Army Good Conduct Medal – as well as his Army marksmanship badge. A small bronze arrowhead on the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign medal signifies his participation in the DDay invasion of Nazi-occupied France in June 1944. “It does something to you,” Baker said of the terrifying experience. “They strafed the boat we were on going over. I don’t remember crossing that beach. When I come to, I was on top of that cliff. “Don’t let nobody tell you you won’t be scared. I went in behind a tank, pushed the dead bodies out of the way that were floating in the water.” The small five-pointed silver service star pinned beside the arrowhead signifies participation in five campaigns. After the Normandy invasion, Baker said he was sent to Paris then east from there. “We were in this town, between Germany and Belgium, in a real small country,” he said. “They told us to move out, so we
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went back to Belgium that night. The next day we went right back where we left. That was when the Battle of the Bulge started. Right then.” He came home after the war – “I couldn’t get back quick enough,” he said – and returned to the coal mines before helping build bridges in his home state. Life hasn’t been without personal loss and tragedy. His only son died in a car crash in 1966. In 2001, a daughter, Greta, and wife, Dora, succumbed to cancer only three months apart. Such events could pound a man into submission, but Baker persevered through everything thrown at him. “He’s a good guy. He really is,” said his niece, Sally Everman, who lives in Frankfort. “He’s not real emotional. I think that’s just their upbringing and their age, just the way they were raised.” She also remembers a mischievous side to her uncle. “He’s mellowed,” Everman said. “He didn’t used to be. Oh, lord. And he drove
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Baker looks out over the boulder-strewn pool on Tygarts Creek where he caught his first muskellunge six decades earlier and still fishes to this day. like a maniac. That would tickle him to death…. If we went to visit, he’d take us somewhere. Have you been to Carter County? You know how those curves are? We’d be screaming in the backseat, crying. He just thought that was the funniest thing. So he was a little daredevil.” In the deep pool just upstream of the ford where he swam as a boy, there once was a diving board mounted on a rock overlooking the creek. The diving board is long gone and the days of Baker scaling the steep bank to fish from atop the rock are over. Time is catching up. He is now content casting from safer spots. “There’s a hole of water two or three miles below the bridge, it’s the deepest hole of water that I know of in Tygarts,” Baker said. “There’s a muskie in there, I had it hooked once from the bank, and it must bet-
ter than 50 inches long.” He knows there’s a good one in this hole above the ford, too, and invites his guests to try for it. “You’ve got some nice looking baits there,” Baker said. “You should get them dirty, though.” Eventually, he joined in. Baker attached his favorite 7-inch silver and black floating crankbait and started casting toward woody debris on the opposite bank. “I’ve caught more muskie on that bait than any other I fish,” he said. Sure enough, within minutes, a small muskellunge stalked the lure across the pool as Baker slowly retrieved it. It was almost as if the fish knew it was his lure and just wanted to show itself to entice Baker to come back another day. He will. Sometimes, a place just gets into your blood, becomes part of your identity. Tygarts Creek is that kind of place for Jack Baker. For proof, just look for the white pickup truck parked near the bridge. n Summer 2016 Kentucky Afield 15