I am holding a newspaper clip from the sports section of the Miami Herald dated August 26, 1957, stapled to a faded photograph of me at age 6, rod in hand, a fish dangling limply at the end of the line. The snippet of newsprint, rescued from its gentle decay in a folder, is the consequence of a trolling expedition into the past provoked by my father’s death a few years ago.
My father was a public-relations consultant with the flamboyance typically associated with that profession, and the piece was his doing. He’d pitched me as an all-too-cute column item to Alan Corson, the ’s fishing editor, who rose to the bait. “My favorite fish is a grunch),” I told my interviewer. “And,” I added with precocious certainty, “when I grow up I want to be a ickologist ().”
