Charles C. Ritz

Charles C. Ritz was a French hotelier and fly-fishing specialist.

Charles Ritz was born on August 1, 1891 and was the first of two sons born to Swiss hotelier César Ritz and Marie-Louise Beck, whose family also owned and ran a hotel in Menton. He did not know his itinerant father well, and César died when Charles was 27 years old.

Charles Ritz emigrated to the United States in 1916 where he became a soldier in the US Army. When World War I ended, Ritz returned to the US, and soon spent considerable time mastering the art of fly-fishing in the American West. He married Elisabeth Pierce.

Ritz returned to France in the 1930s. His experience with fly fishing made him one of the foremost specialists on the subject. Ernest Hemingway called him, "One of the finest fly fisherman I know." Ritz wrote a book, A Fly Fisher's Life, which has been read by anglers around the world. It has been regarded as one of the landmarks of fly fishing literature. He invented the parabolic fly-rod, a term coined by Everett Garrison, a famous bamboo fly rod maker. Fly rods of this type were commercially produced by Paul H. Young, Abu Garcia, Pezon et Michel, Jim Payne and Paul H. Young among others. He was a publicist for the High speed - high line style of fly casting (HSHL). He founded the "Fario Club,” which was the most select fishing club in the world during the latter part of the
twentieth century.

Charles Ritz spent several years assisting his mother to manage the Ritz Hotel, assumed presidency of the empire in 1953, when his mother Marie-Louise retires. Marie-Louise returns to her husband's village (Niederwald) during the summer's and sets up The Ritz Foundation specifically for Niederwald's youth. The Foundation pays for scholarships and apprenticeship programs, Marie-Louis later passes away in 1961. He attempted to introduce his progressive ideas when he opened le bar Vendôme and the l'Espadon restaurant but found himself hampered by the board of directors. His father died in 1918.

Ritz remarried in 1971 and retired from the hotel presidency in 1976, three months before his death.
He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery alongside his first wife.

Arnold Gingrich

Arnold W. Gingrich, co-founder, editor and publisher of Esquire Magazine.

Gingrich created Esquire in 1933 and remained its editor until 1945. He returned as publisher in 1952, serving in this role until his death in 1976. For several years he left the post of editor vacant while several young editors competed for it. The two most serious contenders were Harold Hayes and Clay Felker. Hayes won, and Felker went on to found New York magazine. During the Hayes-Gingrich era, Esquire played a leading role in launching the New Journalism, publishing writers like Tom Wolfe and fellow fraternity brother, Gay Talese.

Gingrich was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, of Mennonite parents in 1903. He attended the University of Michigan where he was a member of Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity, and was noted as a member of the class of 1925. Gingrich brought numerous skills and interests to bear in the formation of Esquire magazine, notably his skill in editing, identification of talent and in publishing. His partner, David Smart led the business side of the magazine with Henry Jackson responsible for the fashion section, making up a more substantial portion of the magazine in its first fifteen years. Over his four-decade career, Gingrich published such authors as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passes, Garry Wills, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer. He was also one of the few magazine editors to publish F. Scott Fitzgerald regularly in the late 1930s, including Fitzgerald's The Pat Hobby Stories. Gingrich also published stories by Jack Woodford, whom he befriended when they worked together at an advertising agency in the late 1920s. He wrote the introduction to Woodford's famous book on writing and publishing, Trial and Error.

The magazine’s name Esquire was inspired by a letter from Gingrich's friend Robert Klark Graham, facetiously addressing him as "Arnold Gingrich, Esquire." The magazine he created set the template for future men's magazines of the mid-century period; for example, Playboy, a variation, essentially Esquire with nude photographs (Esquire had famously published a series of "Varga Girl" paintings and other "cheesecake" imagery since its founding). Similar periodicals include GQ (originally Gentlemen's Quarterly), Field & Stream, Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. Further afield, even The Atlantic and other regional and national publications exhibit styling and content first evidenced in the pages of Esquire. Indeed, Esquire was one of the forerunners of this genre, blending aspects of traditional, if upper-crust masculine pastimes such as armchair discussions of Ivy League pedigree, East Coast fraternalism, and literary interest with "the sporting life," such as horses and angling, fashion, love of tobacco and whiskey, and admiration for the feminine. More recently Maxim has continued this tradition with a more edgy appeal to Gen-Xers and millennials.

His autobiography, Toys of A Lifetime, with illustrations by Leslie Saalburg, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1966. It has long been out of print. In it, Gingrich recounts his experience with cars (he owned several notable Bentleys), including a classic R-series and S-series "Countryman" (obtained through the late J.S. Inskip in Manhattan), as well as an early Volkswagen. Other interests include transatlantic liners (notably the Normandie), French hotels, Dunhill pipes and Balkan Sobranie tobacco, clothes and all manner of other possessions and accommodations.

Gingrich was an accomplished fly fisherman, writing several books on the subject and lifestyle of the gentleman angler.

Gingrich was also an accomplished violinist. He would arrive at his office hours early to practice before the staff arrived, participated in amateur chamber music ensembles, and owned several highly prized instruments. He published a musical memoir titled "A Thousand Mornings of Music: The Journal of an Obsession with the Violin."

He died in 1976 at his home in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

Frank Woolner

Frank Woolner was a well-known authority on fishing, hunting, natural history and conservation.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Frank left high school in his junior year, worked as a cook and automobile spray painter, and was New England amateur bicycle racing champion (#13) for four years, retiring undefeated to join the World War II effort. From 1942 to 1944 Woolner was chief writer for the 3rd Armored “Spearhead” Division. He also was a tank commander on the front lines and a veteran of the Normandy Invasion on June 6, 1944. After the war Sgt. Woolner remained in Germany to co-write (with Major Murray H. Fowler) the Division’s narrative history, the military classic Spearhead in the West.

Frank hadn’t done any surf fishing prior to 1942, but while overseas he received letters describing the budding activity on Cape Cod beaches. When he had his chance in 1946, both the sport and the tackle were still in their early stages of development: rods were blank Calcutta sticks with wound-on guides which didn’t work for long, and the Cuttyhunk linen line soaked up water and showered anglers with every cast. But there were beach buggies, and Frank was immediately recognizable in his first of many Model A Fords, purchased for $25 and painted dazzle (grey, green, yellow, and purple) camouflage.

When Frank became the Worcester Telegram & Gazette’s Rod and Gun Editor, he used his daily column to introduce his home town to the sport – and to the striped bass. His readers became striper-savvy and striper-obsessed in a big way, driving their 40-mph buggies 80 miles to the Cape Cod Canal, then another 60 to Provincetown, where they navigated the beaches from midnight to dawn and tide to tide. By the 1950s the sport was booming. The Worcester Striper Club was formed, and Frank helped organize the Massachusetts Beach Buggy Association in 1949. Their code of ethics covered everything from keeping beaches clean to maintaining good relations with town authorities, and in their numbered buggies (Frank in his lucky #13), members had almost unlimited beach access until the mid-1960s.

In 1950 Hal Lyman, owner and publisher of Salt Water Sportsman, was called back into the Navy, and Frank took over the magazine’s reins. Under his tutelage, what had begun in 1939 as the four-page weekly “Voice of the Coastal Sport Fisherman” became the instrument that defined marine angling and marine conservation, as Frank explored new frontiers and kept ahead of the rapidly evolving world of techniques, tackle, conservation and management. By the late 1960s the magazine’s editorials and slogans (“Limit your catch, don’t catch your limit”) began to reflect the thinking of the day, and fewer photos of excessive catches were featured. Frank, who had appeared in similar shots years before, now had a favorite phrase to describe them: “Dead fish, dumb fisherman.”

As one of the biggest names in saltwater angling, Woolner’s influence not only shaped Salt Water Sportsman but also fostered the careers of the sport’s most promising writers. He held others to the same high standard to which he held himself, and went out of his way to reassure those in whom he saw potential, often sending a letter of encouragement instead of a stark rejection slip.

Woolner was a masterful writer. He co-authored books on striped bass, weakfish, bottom fishing, saltwater tackle and techniques; authored six other titles; received numerous awards for excellence in craft; and remained on the Salt Water Sportsman masthead until his death in 1994. 

Roderick Haig-Brown

Roderick Langmere Haig-Brown was a Canadian writer and conservationist.

Haig-Brown was born in Lancing, Sussex, England. His father, Alan Haig-Brown, was a teacher and a prolific writer, the author of hundreds of articles and poems on sports, the military, and educational issues in various periodicals. Alan was also an officer in the British Army during World War I. In 1918 he was killed in action in France.

Roderick's mother, Violet Mary Pope, was one of fifteen children of Alfred Pope, a wealthy Dorset brewer. After the war ended Roderick, his mother and his two sisters went to live with her family. His grandfather Pope was an industrious man with very strong Victorian values of “service, fair play, decency and acceptance of the obligations that follow with the privilege of class and education.”

His grandfather was a friend of Thomas Hardy and took young Roderick to tea there on at least one occasion. Roderick later noted in his essay “Hardy’s Dorset” that he regretted not having elicited more information from Hardy about being a writer, but he was sixteen then and was passionate about fishing and shooting. Life on his grandfather's country estate on the Frome River was fascinating to him. His many uncles loved sport and taught him to fish and shoot, but it was a family friend, Major Greenhill, who served as Roderick’s sporting mentor and taught him both the skills and the ethics of sportsmanship. The estate's gamekeepers introduced him to the importance of conservation and the complexity of the environment. In 1921 Roderick entered Charterhouse where his grandfather Haig-Brown had been headmaster.

His physical and social childhood environment contributed, according to biographer Anthony Robertson, to Roderick’s code of conduct. Throughout his life he adhered to an ideal balanced between reason and passion, an ideal infused with knowledge and tempered by responsibility, decency and fair play. This code “invoked a mental and physical discipline that went beyond making a successful catch or kill; its central virtue was knowledge, intimate and thorough, transcending pursuit.”

Haig-Brown found his way to British Columbia, Canada through a series of unexpected events. After he was expelled from Charterhouse School, he joined his father’s regiment for a short while, but found that army life was too restrictive. The family decided that the British Colonial Civil Service might be a more agreeable alternative, but he was too young to write the exams. He went, in the meantime to Seattle, Washington at the invitation of an uncle who had married a Seattle woman, promising his mother he would come back when he was eligible for the civil service. He worked at a logging camp in Washington, then crossed the border to Canada because his U.S. visa had expired. He remained in British Columbia for three years to work at Nimpkish Lake on Vancouver Island as a logger, a commercial fisherman and an occasional guide to visiting anglers. He returned to England in 1931 and enjoyed the fast-paced life of London. But images of British Columbia haunted him while he wrote his first book, Silver: The Life of an Atlantic Salmon (1931) as well as part of Pool and Rapid (1932). He returned to BC at the end of the year and planned his third book, Panther (1934).

He married Ann Elmore of Seattle after publishing Panther, and the couple settled on the banks of the Campbell River where they lived for the rest of their lives, raising three daughters and a son.

From the year of his return to British Columbia to 1976, the year of his death, Roderick Haig-Brown published twenty-three books (five more were published posthumously), wrote numerous articles and essays, and created several series of talks and historical dramas for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He is most famous internationally for his writing on fly fishing and the natural world.

He joined the Canadian Army as a personnel officer in 1943 and was later seconded for several months to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police which allowed him to travel across Canada and to the Arctic. He was magistrate for the town of Campbell River from 1941 until 1974. He became a trustee of the Nature Conservancy of Canada, an advisor to the BC Wildlife Federation, a senior advisor to Trout Unlimited and the Federation of Flyfishers, and a member of the Federal Fisheries Development Council and the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission. He was also Chancellor of University of Victoria from 1970 to 1973. He served three times on the Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for British Columbia. These many responsibilities prevented him from devoting much time to writing. He retired from the bench a year before his death and was planning to get back to writing as the pressure of his other commitments gradually eased off. His life in his mature years were featured in many of his books, especially "A River Never Sleeps" and "Measure of the Year."

R.L. Haig-Brown died on October 9, 1976 at the age of 68.