Reeling in the years

Mastry’s Bait and Tackle Store is a shrine, a museum, a storehouse for those who go down to the sea with fishing gear. What it offers can’t be found at a sporting goods megastore.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 10, 2001

[Times photos: Fred Victorin] Jay Master, left, a native of St. Petersburg who has known the Mastrys for 30 years, is in the market for a cast net. Nancy Mastry, wife of Larry Mastry, co-owner of Mastry's Bait and Tackle Store, answers his questions -- and makes a sale.

ST. PETERSBURG -- When I tire of modern life, I drive over to Mastry's Bait and Tackle Store on Fourth Street S. I don't fish much anymore, but occasionally I like to be in the company of men who do.

I like to hear the fishing stories and smell the fish smells. I like to touch the tackle and pick up a fishing rod and flex it as if I know what I'm doing. I roll fish sinkers around my palms, open tackle boxes and paw through the plastic containers of flies, imagining the ones I'd buy if I were going after bass.

Like all classic tackle stores, Mastry's is big on pictures of men and the fish they've hauled in. Black-and-white photos, of anglers long dead, hang near the cash register. Others are taped to the wall next to yellowed newspaper clippings about the Mastry clan and fish they have landed, killed or released. I never tire of reading them.

Starting at dawn, old guys in overalls stroll in to buy bait. Shirtless young slackers wearing shorts and flip flops cruise by at noon to pick up reels they left for repair. The only woman regular at the store is the proprietor's wife, though other women arrive after work and buy fresh fish for supper.

Looking for a fishing line floater? Mastry's has them. The reasons the store continues to hold its own against sports megastores are its varied inventory and the expert advice always available. And maybe a few good fish stories.

Although I consider myself reasonably sophisticated, I enjoy hanging out with men who probably don't subscribe to the New Yorker and hated the part in The Old Man and the Sea when the old man was dreaming about lions. Psychological phoo phaw! Let's talk about the marlin and those hungry sharks.

When I'm at Mastry's I want to hear: "The kings are running at the Whistler Buoy" or "There are trout on the flats on a rising tide at the clam bar if you got white bait" or "Man, I got me a nice snook on a Rattlin' Chug Bug."

In Florida, especially coastal Florida, there used to be hundreds of places such as Mastry's. Many are gone. Like the family hardware stores squeezed out by Home Depot, they couldn't compete with the sporting goods megastores of today.

Celebrating its 25th year, Mastry's hangs on. Much of the success probably is due to well stocked shelves and Mastry expertise. Part of it, though, is the ambience: old, smelly, authentic.

Fish heads

Larry Mastry and Dale Mastry, middle-aged brothers, own the store. Their father, Mike, pushing 80, works there, too. Larry's wife, Nancy, usually lurks behind the counter. A bunch of family friends perform odd jobs.

Mastry's is small and cramped. On a busy Friday, when anglers are planning a fishing trip, I can't turn around without bumping something or someone.

Sometimes it's Larry Mastry I back into. Tall and tanned, he is seldom without an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth. He has almost mastered the ventriloquist's skill of talking without moving his teeth.

"Now whatcha you wansh is either a 358 Daiwa or a four-ought Penn Senator." The customer, who needs a reel for a grouper rod, listens as if he's getting word from the burning bush.

Like other Mastrys in Pinellas County, Larry grew up on the water. He caught his first tarpon -- a corpulent silver fish prone to gill-rattling leaps and bounds -- when he was 6. He has since won fishing tournaments galore.

Lead weights for fishing lines are on display at Mastry's. On a busy day, merchandise displays and customers take up most of the floor space in the store.

His daddy, Mike, was a fearsome tarpon angler in his prime. Anglers in the know bow their heads when whispering about Larry's Uncle Johnny, who died of a heart attack while fighting a tarpon.

Dale Mastry is no fishing slouch, but he prefers hunting. Photographs all over the store document his prowess.

"Now that's an elk I got with bow and arrow," he says of one murky photo. "I bugled him in -- I pretended I was another elk with an elk call -- and got him close enough for a shot. That was Colorado."

Mastry's is not a politically correct place. Folks who patronize it for the most part have come to terms with the blood on their hands. They like providing their own vittles.

At the new sporting goods department stores of modern Florida, you can't even find a stick of beef jerky or a jar of pickled eggs. The person selling you tackle may be a kid with a summer job, dressed in a uniform, polite as all get out. He or she may or may not be an expert. That's okay if you are the expert, not okay if you want a trout rod and end up with a grouper pole.

At the shiny new store you probably won't hear the same kind of stories, stories with cobwebs on them.

A bark and a bite

"Did I ever show you these pictures?" Mike Mastry limps to the counter with a scrapbook. "Here's a picture of me and Babe Ruth. In 1934."

Mike was about 16. He used to go to the dime store and buy a dozen baseballs for a quarter. Then he'd hightail it to Waterfront Park, where the Yankees trained in spring, and hand his box of balls to the Babe.

"Here, Keed" the Babe would say, autographing every ball.

"Hey, Babe," some grouch would complain. "The kid is selling those balls and makin' lots of dough off you."

"I grew up poor," Babe would say. "I appreciate a keed that works."

Jason Orcutt, left, observes as Dale Mastry, co-owner of Mastry's, shows him how to hold a cast net before it is thrown. clamped in the corner of his mouth.

Into the fish market area in Mastry's stalks Jimmy Kelley. Jimmy is in his mid 60s. He and his dad, the late Papa Jack Kelley, ran a bait store on the downtown pier for more than a half century. When it closed, Jimmy caught shrimp for a living and tarpon for fun.

He fishes little now -- it got too high tech with tournaments and egos for him. But he enjoys the old-fashioned fish talk, too. He toils part-time at Mastry's but says he'd work for free if he had to.

"You want snapper?" he asks an old lady about closing time.

She's not sure. She wants to look more. Mastry's keeps all the fish inside 80-gallon coolers. Mullet lie in that one, shrimp in another, sheepshead, grouper, grunt and bream. You'll have to clean them yourself. Most Mastry customers are not repelled by the thought of cleaning a fish. Some even take advantage of the Mastry inventory and purchase ingredients for hush puppies and grits. Mastry's is a fried-fish kind of place in today's sushi world.

When Jimmy was a shrimper, he worked all night, which got in the way of tarpon fishing during the day. Or would have, except he figured out a solution. Jimmy cast out his tarpon baits and napped. Suddenly, a bite. And a bark. Jimmy's dog, Sugar, was trained to wake her master when he had a tarpon on. Sugar was a West Florida legend.

When the Mastry brothers were kids, Jimmy Kelley was their hero. They had others. Old Baldy, at Betts Tackle Shop, knew his onions. Pork Chop -- a heavy, short guy -- could catch kingfish in a cracker barrel.

Along with the tackle and provisions, Mastry's sells the main course too -- fish. Of course, the buyer must also clean them, but folks who frequent the store aren't squeamish about a little thing like that.

"There's a real generation gap now," Dale Mastry says. "A lot of the old timers are dying. Then there are people my age who still like to fish. There are younger guys, in their 20s, who fish hard, but not like in the old days. And the big thing is you don't seem to see as many kids coming in the store like when I was a kid. Now there are just too many distractions. Soccer. Computers. Stuff like that."

Dale's brother, Larry, agrees so wholeheartedly he rips the cigar from his mouth.

"When I was a kid," Larry says, "I couldn't sleep the night before a fishing trip. Your typical kid now, even if you're going fishing in the morning, you got to wake him up."

Outside, on a Friday afternoon, the rain batters a parking lot full of pickup trucks. Tomorrow the weather is supposed to clear. The wind should die. Maybe the kings will bite.

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