Homer O. Carter - 77 Years With Fish ( 77 as of 1999)

    This may be difficult for many of the present day people to believe. so I am counting on the following to clarify it for the reader.

    When my husband was born, his parents maintained a tremendous amount of bait fish.  these were basically kept in what they called a spring.  It was as deep as some dug wells.  The difference being that water ran out of it during most of the year.  Down the slope where the water ran from the spring was very small pond.  The spring was screened to keep the live bait in.  Every once in a while the screen would be removed so that some of the live bait could go down into the pond.

    When my husband was a small boy, his father built another pond for my husband's father.  Then there were two ponds.

    During the spring and summer months, there  were sunfish, chub, hornpout, etc. put in one of the ponds.  In the fall and some times in the summer, the fish would be caught by hawks and other wildlife.  This left only bait fish the year around.

    The spring always had plenty of bait fish.  As many of you fishermen realize,, they were also kept in bait buckets and other containers.

    One fall after the wildlife had cleaned out all the pond fish, my husband father brought home some goldfish and a goldfish bowl.  This was a wonderful surprise gift for little Homer (my husband).  It somewhat eased the hurt from the wildlife cleaning out his friendly pond fish.

    After Homer and I were married we lived in various places but our main home was at my husband's place of birth.  that is where most of what we had was kept.

    One winter we were in Middleborough, Massachusetts.  That winter we had guppies.  We kept them in most anything that would hold water.  We never raised as many guppies in the same length of time as we did that winter until we moved to our present home.  We raise many guppies now, but we have to make room to raise other fish also.

    Our outdoor fish at my husband's home declined considerably after we moved to this area (Canaan).  Our time with outdoor fish became less and our time with indoor fish became more.