Joe Humphreys: Penn State's fly-fishing legend
Celebrity encounters are nothing new to him, all because of his fly-fishing expertise.
Gas pedal to the floor. Dick Cheney by his side. Joe Humphreys is nervous.
Cheney and a former secretary of the Navy are in the car while Humphreys is driving 90 mph like only a longtime resident of Centre County can — hugging every turn and hill between Spruce Creek and State College.
Cheney is supposed to be the commencement speaker at Penn State University, but he's still in Humphreys' car, zipping across the countryside, still wearing his fishing clothes.
And a big brown trout is the reason behind it all.
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Cheney wouldn’t even be visiting Pennsylvania, let alone State College, if not for Humphreys. The future vice president agreed to give PSU's graduation speech on one condition — that Humphreys take him fishing.
Celebrity encounters are nothing new to Humphreys, all because of his fly-fishing expertise. He has fished with President Jimmy Carter numerous times and guided actor Liam Neeson. Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight used to end morning practices and fish with him on game days, right before his Hoosiers took the court. Now Cheney wanted to go.
But the trouble started when a 20-inch brown trout teased Cheney, sucking down live insects but never the fly attached to Cheney's line. Now it's getting late in the day.
“This trout kept turning him down,” Humphreys said laughing.
Cheney utters the famous line, "Just one more cast, one more cast.”
But that was minutes ago, now the secretary of the Navy and Humphreys start sweating.
Finally, they get his waders off.
Humphreys pulled up to the Penn State Scanticon Conference Center Hotel, and it was like a scene on Spruce Creek. Instead of a swarm of black gnats over the water, a jittery crowd of event organizers and administrators in dark robes rush to Cheney’s side.
“Their people are frantic, going back and forth,” Humphreys said. “They get him out of the car, and I think they put his commencement gown right over his fishing gear.”
The teacher
Humphreys stands in a man-made puddle at The Fly Fishing Show at the Lancaster Convention Center. He demonstrates casting in a room of about 100 die-hard anglers and fly-fishing dealers.
He declares the key to casting is his thumb, at which point he makes a thumbs-up motion.
There are puzzled looks around the room.
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Enthusiasts, some of whom plunked down hundreds of dollars for instructors to teach them the "right way" to cast, surround him. These same people have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on bamboo, glass and fiberglass rods.
Many have flown to far-flung locales to land fish. And they are surrounded by tables hawking the best apparel, rods and guides in the sport. Yet here is Humphreys, a former high school teacher and wrestling coach, talking about the importance of your thumb.
Perhaps a dozen people lift their thumbs with him in the initial minutes of the demonstration.
And then Humpheys does what only he can do. He explains, he demonstrates and he demands interaction — even if it’s just a head nod or smile. His jokes keep coming. At one point, he shows the bow-and-arrow cast, a move anglers use when limbs surround the water. But he does it with a Humphreys' twist. He coils line in his hand, then unleashes his fly — 30-feet across the puddle.
"Never, never seen anyone do that before him," legendary fly fisherman Ed Shenk said about the 30-foot cast. "That's just one of his innovations."
The group — ranging from grandparents to pre-teens — now stands transfixed.
Almost all the people stand with their thumbs stuck up in the air mimicking Humphreys' movements.
A teacher's passion once again transferred to students.
“I think that’s what makes him so special, he truly, truly wants to help people,” said his daughter Hanna Humphreys, who used to live in Dillsburg and taught in the Dover school district. “He feels like he was put on Earth to give what he knows to other people. Whatever he’s figured out, he’s willing to share."
The fisherman
After the instruction, people approach him because he is Joe Humphreys. They've read his books. They've watched his DVDs. They've seen his show on ESPN. And now that they've experienced Humphreys up close, they want more.
Humphreys or "Hump," as he's been nicknamed, is, after all, still the man who landed a then-Pennsylvania-record 34-inch brown trout in August, 1977.
It was a trout he pursued, night after night, in the dark for more than three years without ever seeing it. Until the moment he hooked it, the only proof he had that such a trout existed in this spot on Fishing Creek is a loud splash he heard on a pitch-black night around midnight.
Three years later, around midnight, he finally landed that trout. It set off a wild morning, plopping down the trout on the bar in a Nittany beer hall to earn a free drink from a bartender at 2 a.m. Then waking up the fish warden at 3 a.m. to see if it set a record, which it did.
Although larger brown trout have since been caught in the state, no one in Pennsylvania has landed a larger trout while fly fishing.
Still, at age 87, he has bigger dreams, bigger fish. Humphreys estimates he has hooked a pair of trout that would top 20 pounds, only to lose them when his line snapped. He points out Jimmy Carter has done something he has never done — land that elusive 20-pound trout.
"Oh, he's pretty damn competitive," Shenk said. "He's a competitor."
Friends with Humphreys since the 1940s, Shenk remembers catching a 4-pound trout during free time at a fly-fishing class the two men taught on the Yellow Breeches at the Allenberry Resort. Students complimented Shenk on the fish throughout the night, prompting Humphreys to joke with Shenk.
"I guess I'll hear about that damn fish all summer long," Shenk, of Carlisle, recalled Humphreys saying.
This still causes Shenk to laugh.
"Well, that just tickled me because as far as I'm concerned, he can out-fish me," Shenk said.
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Humphreys has fished in several fly-fishing world championships across the globe. At the World Masters Fly Fishing Championships in Ireland this year, every single competitor autographed a shirt for him.
"They did that, not because he won, which he didn't, but because he's there," fishing buddy Dennis Shannon said.
Bell talks about following and filming Humphreys. One day a boy fishing the same stream as Humphreys just stopped to watch the man fish.
Humphreys is in halls of fame for wrestling and fly fishing. A Penn State wrestler and boxer in the 1950s who then coached and taught at high schools, Humphreys eventually returned to Penn State in 1972 to teach fly-fishing courses for almost 20 years, what he still calls a "dream come true."
He took over for his mentor, George Harvey, and he continues to be an ambassador for his alma mater. It’s difficult to find a photograph of the man without a Penn State hat on his head.
“It’s interesting with fly fishing because I knew he was a big deal at first in the wrestling world,” Hanna Humphreys said. “I didn’t realize the magnitude of it.
“It was really not until later, when I was in high school, and he was teaching at Penn State and I heard, ‘He’s amazing.’ … Then my senior year in college he did a series of shows for ESPN, then I really realized, ‘Oh my gosh, he really knows something. This is a big deal.’ It’s so interesting to me now because in Centre County when I come back, he is just as well known for being the Bald Eagle (High School) wrestling coach as he is for fishing.”
In his first book, "Trout Tactics," he explained how he used scuba gear to study how the placement of a sinker will affect how a fly looks underwater. The crazy part? He makes it interesting.
“He looks at his craft as his gift from God," friend and fishing buddy Dennis Shannon said. "This is his calling. He’s not a pastor, but he has an ability to connect with people.”
The conservationist
Of course Humphreys lives in a house with a stream coursing through it — the same stream where he caught his first trout as a 6-year-old.
Drive up Route 322, long after the river fades from view and the mountains creep up around the road. Just before Penn State’s Beaver Stadium and all that noise comes into view, take a winding country road. And when the houses start becoming older and interesting, Humphreys' house comes into view.
Humphreys wanted to be close to his brother, so one door down from his brother's farm he bought an old Oak Hall gristmill. He fixed it up himself.
He used a crane to lift the collapsed roof, and when the project kept dragging, he hired a contractor to finish the renovation.
“He told me it would cost $23,000. I thought, ‘I’ll never pay that off!’” said Humphreys, and he lets out a laugh that fills the room, easy and often.
He and his wife, Gloria, moved in during the mid-1960s.
"We could have done a documentary just on the house," said Bell, who is a Penn State graduate.
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The house sits on Spring Creek. It's the same stream he campaigned to help save in the 1970s from pollution, securing the funds and helping provide the workforce needed to correct man-made problems from urban development. His work directly led to restoring Spring Creek to world-class, trout-fishing prominence.
The end result of his work is visible from Humphreys' front door, where the dorsal fins of trophy-sized trout break the surface of the stream. Humphreys bought them from a hatchery years ago.
“Some people have cats and dogs for pets, I have fish,” he said. “I just haven’t named them — yet.”
And he lets out another laugh.
The legacy
Shannon, 46, wandered on to Humphreys’ land by accident about 25 years ago. He was fishing Spring Creek while in college. The posted sign on the Humphreys’ property had fallen down, so he had no idea he was trespassing until Humphreys' wife, Gloria, informed Shannon he was on private property.
“Well thank goodness Joe wasn’t home, he probably would have shot me,” Shannon joked.
Gloria noticed the sign had fallen down and let Shannon stay. She struck up a conversation. She, too, was a talented angler. A picture of a trophy trout she landed at a local stream, Fisherman’s Paradise, is framed on the wall in Humphreys' basement.
“If Gloria was mean, I probably never would have gotten to know Joe,” Shannon said. “But she was a saint, just a wonderful, wonderful woman.
And now “Denny,” as Humphreys calls him, is his fishing buddy.
“I’m not 100 percent sure how it started, but we started fly fishing together,” Shannon said. “He’s old enough to be my grandpa or dad or uncle. His daughters call me their brother. I tell people he’s my fishing buddy, but it’s much more than that. We also spend Christmas and other holidays together.
“It’s become less and less about fishing and more about life.”
When Gloria died after a battle with cancer in May 2014, Shannon delivered her eulogy.
The two are close, but after all these years Shannon still struggles to shake off the awe of being in the presence of his friend. On three different occasions, he’s seen Humphreys catch a 30-inch or larger trout. Two Mondays ago, Shannon estimates Humphreys caught 20 trout between 9:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. while fishing next to him.
"I’m that kid that gets to go to batting practice every day and watch Babe Ruth hit home runs," Shannon said.
Joe Humphreys
Hall of Fames: inducted into National Wrestling Hall of Fame 2012; inducted into Fly Fishing Hall of Fame 2013
Teacher: taught Penn State University fly-fishing class for 19 years
Wrestling: competed at 1948 U.S. Olympic Trials, wrestled for Penn State, graduating in 1956
Author: "Trout Tactics," "Trout Tactics Revised" and "On the Stream"
Television: "Fly Fishing Journal" (ESPN)
Producer: has more than four videos, including "The Night Game" detailing how to fly fish at night
