Fish Stories
South Side fishermen talk about life on the line BY MORLEY MUSICK
PHOTO OF DENNIS CASTILLO BY JASON SCHUMER
F
ishermen old and young gather summer mornings and afternoons in the Jackson Park harbor near La Rabida Children’s Hospital. Further south, others fish Lake Michigan around Calumet Beach. They fish for smelt, steelheads, crappies, and salmon, all stocked by the Illinois Department of Resources (DNR) with varying frequency. A DNR fishing permit is required to fish anywhere in Illinois. I spoke to fishermen in both locations in August, once approaching them as they fished and once after Wayne Hankins generously invited me to a barbecue. In my conversations, I learned that three of the Jackson Park fisherman learned the craft from their fathers, southern anglers who moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. They have in turn come to understand the migration of fish, describing the seasonal procession of salmon in great detail. Their stories show fishing as an escape from the city, but also an activity shaped by the city’s ecological and political changes. Willie Duncan, who had been fishing for more than sixty years—in Vietnam, 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
Okinawa, Thailand, and Jackson Park— said, “If there’s one thing a person should know, it’s that fish were here before man, and they’ll be here when man is gone.” In Chicago, Hankins—his friend—described fishing as “trying to hold on to what’s left.” The following are four interviews with South Side fisherman, edited and arranged for clarity. Wayne Hankins Wayne Hankins has been fishing all of his life on the South Side, having learned the craft from his father, Chicago boxer Wayne Hankins Sr. He now directs a YouTube series called Salmon Nightmares, which recounts fishing stories from fisherman friends. His incredible remix of Old Town Road, Kooler in the Back, is about salmon season in Chicago. He invites people interested in fishing to email him at tutfishing67@gmail.com.
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grew up in a pretty tough neighborhood, Woodlawn. I remember one guy, one of my friends, got killed in the neighborhood. I was out spending the night
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with the [fishermen], and they were just telling me, “Stay out man, you ain’t gotta go back over there.” And I didn’t want to ‘cause everybody was crying. It was sad. So that's when my deep passion for fishing really hit me, like, you know, I could be somewhere peaceful. There’s guys over there crying and loading guns and selling drugs and I'm up here catching salmon and having the time of my life. So it separated me from that and from then on out I just always been an angler. And then I’m an Aquarius, which is a water sign, so I think I have a natural love for water. You learn to fish, you almost become a fish outside the water. I feel like a fish out of water. I talk to them, and fish for them, and watch them turn. I know when the water’s hot, when it’s cold, what lures they like when the clouds are out, what lures they like when the sun is shining. I’ve been downtown fishing and didn’t even take a fishing pole, found line and string and a hook, and fished with my hands and caught fish. [Chicago] is one of the best fishing spots, I believe, in the world. The lake is pretty much like a fish market
when the salmon come around, because it’s not too many places in an urban city where you can just catch salmon left and right. A lot of Polish guys, Mexican guys [come out to buy] salmon, for ceviche, caviar. I know one lady that, anything salmon, she get it because she got glaucoma. I started filming [a web show called] Salmon Nightmares in 2019. Me and my best friend, we would come out fishing later at night. A lot of guys couldn't fish at night because they work. They'd be sleeping while we be out catching monster salmon and they wake up and they be all mad and looking crazy and be like, “Where you guys get these fish?” Fishing will sometimes give you nightmares, because guys be out fishing and you have a fish hooked on for hours straight, and all of a sudden your lines snap and you lose it. It becomes a nightmare because you go home and think about it, hour after hour, night after night. I just try to film all the guys because they're getting older, you know, most of my friends are in their late fifties, sixties, seventies, even eighties. I grew up learning to fish with these guys and that’s my way of
