I'm not an outdoor writer, but I have met and associated with all the great ones over the past 35 years. The one I know best and have spent the most time with is my friend Bob Cobb. This is about him.
In 1967 Ray Scott invited the outdoor press to a meeting at the Holiday Inn in Rogers, Ark., to announce the first professional bass fishing tournament that he would conduct on Beaver Lake. A few showed up, ate the roast beef and listened to Ray explain how the event would work. Then they returned to wherever they came from.
All of them, that is, except Bob Cobb.
Bob had driven up from Tulsa where he worked as sports editor for the Tulsa Tribune. He may have been interested in what Ray had to say because some anglers that he knew from Tulsa were contestants. He may simply have been looking for a story about something different, but I believe that Bob could see something good could happen here because he was a bass angler, too, and knew a little about this sport. So he hung around to ask Ray a few questions after the others had cut out.
Bob came back to cover the event and report how the Tulsa anglers did, then a few months later Ray announced his second tournament at Smith Lake, Ala. Bob was there with the same group of Tulsa anglers, again to cover the event as an outdoor writer, not as a contestant. This is where I met Bob for the first time.
I caught the largest largemouth bass in the tournament and won a trophy. Bob introduced himself as sports editor of the Tulsa Tribune and asked if he could take a photo of my bass. I remembered he was wearing a jacket with Tulsa Bass Club on the back. I also remembered that I was with two more contestants from Chattanooga, and we had outdoor writers in Chattanooga but none were covering the bass tournament. If fact, I don't remember any outdoor writers covering this event but Bob Cobb — all the way from Oklahoma.
We enjoyed the tournament, and on the way back to Chattanooga my fishing buddy Glynn West and I decided to organize a bass club in Chattanooga. We had met the group from Tulsa who had organized a club after the Beaver Lake event. We also met a group from Lexington, Ky., and thought we could form a club in Chattanooga and maybe some day fish against the Tulsa and Lexington clubs. I sent a letter to Bob Cobb asking for a photo of my bass and also a copy of any rules they had used to organize their club. He sent me the materials by return mail.
A few days later I received a phone call from Ray Scott. He said, "I hear you are organizing a bass club in Chattanooga."
I replied, "You've been talking to Bob Cobb." He was the only one outside Chattanooga that we had discussed it with.
Ray asked what we were planning, and I told him we enjoyed the competition and thought someday we could compete against other clubs.
"You're getting ahead of me," Ray said. "I'm planning to organize the bass anglers into the Bass Anglers Sportsman's Society. It will be known as BASS, and we'll have a tournament circuit."
Ray was very busy the next few months. New memberships were pouring in. He had announced a tournament under the BASS banner and somehow had managed to get out the first issue of Bassmaster Magazine, which was available only to BASS members with stories written by BASS members. I even wrote one that Ray used.
But it wasn't long until Ray knew he needed help, so he called Bob Cobb and soon Bob had his wife, children and bird dog loaded in a U-Haul and headed for Montgomery, Ala., to become the first editor of Bassmaster Magazine. When he arrived Ray gave him a shoe box full of notes about people wanting to advertise or write a story for Bassmaster and told him he could use a table and chair in the corner until they could find a place to rent an office. He also told Bob that the next issue of Bassmaster was due out soon.
I doubt that Bob ever had second thoughts about quitting a good solid job. I've always believed he could see where BASS could go and wanted to help make it happen.
Soon after that Ray decided it was time for BASS to start living up to some of the reasons we organized in the first place; one was to stop the industrial pollution that was destroying our fishing waters. He followed the lead of The Hudson River Fisherman's Association who had used the 1899 Federal Refuge Act to file suits in federal court against polluters. He and Bob contacted them and, with help from Bob Boyle, they organized a lawsuit in Alabama. The Chattanooga Bass Club organized one in Tennessee, and BASS had another one in Texas.
Bob Cobb was burning the midnight oil to keep the news media informed about a bunch of bass anglers taking on the industrial world, and it worked. We created enough press that finally the government formed the EPA to try to put a stop to this problem. This gave a big boost to BASS memberships. Bob had the outdoor writers all telling it like it is, showing the world that we had some power to change things and BASS was not afraid to take on polluters and politicians.
I believe the thing that got BASS started was the desire of bass anglers to compete. They had always competed against the bass but now had a chance to compete against other good bass anglers. Bassmaster Magazine was what bound them together. They read how other good anglers operated, and they soon recognized that Bob Cobb was picking their fishing brains and putting it on the pages of Bassmaster. He was not writing pretty stories about how beautiful the sun was at daybreak; he was telling it like it is, and he knew when a story was real or not because he was a good bass angler himself.
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