I wasn’t much of an angler growing up, but when a few of my friends from school and I became early teenagers, we decided to try our hands at fishing some of the local reservoirs. Collectively, we didn’t know much about what we were doing, using worms and corn under bobbers launched by spincast rods we bought from Kmart. Fishing during the heat of the summer, we pretty much only caught sunfish, but we were in the outdoors, having fun without parental supervision, and just being kids.
Beyond our bankside hijinks, one of the things I always looked forward to the most was getting a new fishing license each year. Our gang would cram into one of our parents’ cars, likely some sort of Oldsmobile, to get dropped off at the parking lot of Leonard’s Sporting Goods on Lansdowne Avenue.
Leonard’s was a fairly non-descript building from the outside. It was very small and could just as likely been a strip club or bar as a sporting goods store. Beyond the front door, you found a dim, fluorescent-lit interior of wood paneled walls lined with taxidermy, compound bows, fishing rods, and a menagerie of other assorted outdoors items. Most of which I had no concept to their purpose.
The old guy behind the long glass display counter full of pocket knives and firearms would eye you up, then break out a big 3 ring binder, slowly flipping open the cover. With a slightly disturbed look, he’d pull out paper Pennsylvania fishing licenses, and make us scribble our names on the back as well as in his log book. Once the chore was complete, the final question before exchanging money was to ask us if we wanted the trout & salmon stamp… even though it was almost July and there was no chance of catching a trout (and definitely not a salmon) anywhere within the Philadelphia suburbs during the summer swelter. But of course, we wanted the trout & salmon stamp!
The trout stamp was the absolute coolest thing to me. Having one’s formative years being the mid ’80s and early ’90s, baseball cards were enjoying a resurgence and new peak popularity. Affixing that trout & salmon stamp to your license was just like completing one of those awesome Fleer baseball sticker books. Except these stickers featured colorful brook or feeding brown trout on them instead of Dwight Gooden or some other cokehead New York Met.
Outside of gym, art was my favorite class in school, so I marveled at each year’s new trout stamp. The trip to Leonard’s was an unveiling of sorts. I was actually kind of sad the old guy would ask us to sign our names across its front. Defacing these mini Van Goghs in the name of theft-prevention was in itself a felony.
These physical stamps continued to be placed on Pennsylvania fishing licenses all the way up until around 2010 when most of the Commonwealth’s old school analog fish & game processes were converted to digital. The 3 ring binder was replaced by retail computer terminals, or even worse, online registration. Convenient, yes, but where’s the personality in a boring, pixelated outline of a salmon or walleye?
And I know Pennsylvania is not alone. Most other states have uninspiring fishing licenses too. In an age where there are so many great outdoor artists, this new standard makes me especially sad. Can’t we go the route of the duck stamp? Everything retro is cool again. Why do today’s fishing licenses need to be so boringly generic?
In the name of everything that’s still good in the world (or at least Pennsylvania), can’t we find a way to bring back physical trout stamps?
Pa. Won’t ever bring back the stamp , it’s a shame but they can’t even pay the WCOs a living wage.
It’s a shame on both fronts.