I didn’t exactly know what an eel was until the first one was caught. An eel is a slimy long fish; it looks like a cross between a worm and snake. It has fins, it’s a fish and the ones we caught were probably about a foot long, a foot and a half long; I don’t remember them being any bigger than that. .Anyway we ended up with I guess a 5 gallon bucket full of eels.We got done fishing and it got to be time to go home and Uncle Paul says Roddy, that’s my father, Roddy are you gonna take some of those eels home? I thought it was just a horrible idea but I was only a kid. Well magically a second bucket appeared and a bunch of eels got poured into the second bucket. Uncle Paul got in his car went home and I’m sure Aunt Flo was going to cook all those little rubber hoses into something, and my father put the bucket of eels in the trunk of the car and off we went to the house and I couldn’t believe he was going to bring those things home to my mother.
Eel Story
When I was little, I would say maybe 6- 7 -8 years old, my father used to take me fishing with him. My brother was still too little to go, so my father would take me with him, and we’d go to different lakes and ponds in New Jersey. We’d fish for sunnies and perch and whatnot, but one weekend, he and his older brother Paul, my uncle Paul, decided to take me with them down to the Passaic River to fish for eels. We got in the car and drove all the way down Lanza Avenue down to the Passaic River, which runs between Garfield, which is where I grew up, and Passaic and Clifton, which are on the other side of the river, to the Dundee Dam. We were standing on the bank of the river — now you’ve got understand back then the Passaic River was not the cleanest river in the world. I’m not sure that it is any cleaner now, but they have cleaned up a bit. There’s all kinds of manufacturing plants upriver as there was then. Anyway, most of us knew that if you caught a fish in the Passaic River you threw it back –you didn’t eat it, you didn’t take it home you didn’t eat it.