The Editor’s Note

t was toward the end of high school

Iin the mid-1980s when I started to wonder what I wanted to do with my life. That’s typical at that age, and second only to my prized Atari game – I was a Defender and Space Invaders nerd – was my school’s career center computer.

I don’t remember much about the computer’s technology, but I know we could periodically come in, request information about careers and the printer would spit out a bunch of content about specific vocations. I was so obsessed with fishing and the outdoors I chose to get feedback about “fish and wildlife specialists.” I remember being excited about the description of what these professionals do, and less enthused when, at the time, jobs were scarce and hard to come by.

I settled for combining my love for writing and sports and studied journalism at college enroute to that field, but I always wonder what might have been if I had followed through on my first passion.

I was reminded of my choice while fishing with fellow Bay Area resident Don Franklin (page 67), who’s been a charter fishing boat captain out of San Francisco since the early 2000s. Though Franklin, an Oakland native, has also been working for the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department since attending San Francisco State, I asked him if he too always had a desire to make a living in the fishing industry.

“For me, it was a thing where I used to go out on charter boats with my dad. And eventually it came full circle in that not only were the guys I knew and went out on their boats, I became a peer and a coworker of them once I got my own boat. So it was like all the guys I grew up idolizing, now I’m working with them.”

But it was more preordained than that, something that really hit home during one of his recent birthdays.

“My mom gave me a picture that I had made in like the first grade. And it was me on a boat in San Francisco, and I had (drawn) the Golden Gate Bridge,” Franklin says.

“I asked, ‘Where did you get this?’ She saved it. She asked me, ‘How did you know what you wanted to do what you (now) do?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know how. I was just meant to do it.’”

In getting to know Don, both that day on the boat and in a phone chat we had a few days later, I learned we had baseball in common as youngsters in the Bay Area. We both rooted for the Oakland A’s and some of the elite baseball talent his city produced – though Franklin admitted he was also a huge fan of the great Willie McCovey of the rival San Francisco Giants – and we ultimately got involved in sports (I write about them; he coaches kids as part of his job with parks and rec).

But I commended Don’s commitment to living out his dream he drew on that piece of paper so many years ago. I guess in some ways these years I’ve spent at California Sportsman at least have given me a taste of what I could have become. I’m just grateful I can share Capt. Franklin’s story. -Chris Cocoles

A drawing Don Franklin made early on in grade school of himself on a boat off San Francisco provided an inkling of the career he would go on to pursue as an adult, a charter fishing boat

captain. (CHRIS COCOLES)