February, 1945

\- # • PENNSYLVANIA ' em v "•••M^-'" \JfmK*'.' • « • •• m €'-(l^ ^ I >" DgGB^ „?• - < 'ANGLER' OFFICIAL STATE PUBLICATION PUBLISHED MONTHLY EDWARD MARTIN Governor by the PENNSYLVANIA BOARD OF FISH COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA COMMISSIONERS BOARD OF FISH COMMISSIONERS Publication Office: The Telegraph Press, Cameron and Keller Streets, Harrisburg, Pa. Executive and Editorial Offices: Commonwealth of Penn sylvania, Pennsylvania Board of Fish Commissioners, Har risburg, Pa. CHARLES A. FRENCH Commissioner of Fisheries 10 cents a copy—50 cents a year MEMBERS OF BOARD CHARLES A. FRENCH, Chairman EDITED BY— Ellwood City J. ALLEN BARRETT, Lecturer JOHN L. NEIGER Pennsylvania Fish Commission Scranton South Office Building, Harrisburg JOSEPH M. CRITCHFIELD Confluence * CLIFFORD J. WELSH NOTE Erie Subscriptions to the PENNSYLVANIA ANGLER should J. FRED McKEAN be addressed to the Editor. Submit fee either by check New Kensington or money order payable to the Commonwealth of Penn sylvania. Stamps not acceptable. Individuals sending cash MILTON L. PEEK do so at their own risk. Radnor CHARLES A. MENSCH Bellefonte PENNSYLVANIA ANGLER welcomes contributions and photos of catches from its readers. Proper credit will be EDGAR W. NICHOLSON qiven to contributors. Philadelphia H. R. STACKHOUSE Secretary to Board All contributions returned if accompanied by first class postage. Entered as Second Class matter at the Post Office of C. R. BULLER Harrisburg, Pa., under act of March 3, 1873. Chief Fish Culturist, Bellefonte IMPORTANT—The Editor should be notified immediately of change in subscriber's address. Please give old ar.d new addresses. Permission to reprint will be granted provided proper credit notice is given. 1 S VOL. 9, No. 2 ANGLER7 February, 1945 Cover Sucker Fisherman! Photo by Marty Myers, Williams Grove, Pa. In This Issue: EDITORIAL Stream Pollution Fishermen and citizens generally, in Pennsylvania are By James H. Duff, fastening their attention on the "clean-up" of stream pollution Attorney General of Pennsylvania as promised them and so ably placed before the joint session of the Legislature by His Excellency, the Honorable Edward Twenty-Five Years of Trout Fishing Martin, Governor of the Commonwealth. By Chas. M. Wetzel Governor Martin has minced no words and has certainly expressed the voice and the will of the entire electorate of Thumb Your Reel—Not Your Nose our great state over which he presides as its capable Chief By Ralph (Slim) Sides Executive. The Governor's message does not just imply his interest Standing Guard on the 'Ole Fishin' in fishing, in fact fishing becomes a natural important second Hole ary in the stupendous program. Paramount and first and By Seth L. Myers above all else is the health and safety of the people of the state. Water which must be fit for human consumption; fit Fanged Trout for industry; fit for every form of domestic and industrial By Leon H. Walter use—and then, fit too as a natural sequence for all forms of recreation. The Beautiful Blue Gill The promiscuous dumping of both human and industrial By W. R. Walton waste into the rivers and watersheds of Pennsylvania, MUST STOP! Streams, polluted and ruined over the years until Notes on Ponds and Fish today they have become veritable cess-pools, must be By Don Blair CLEANED UP! Clean, pure water must replace FILTH and STENTCH and POISON if we are to continue in our in Fishing Has Many Thrills Other dustrial and agricultural leadership and at the same time Sports Do Not Offer maintain our standards of health and sanitation and the By Johnny Mock invigorating tonic of outdoor recreation. Too Many Gadgets Clean streams will provide clean habitat for all forms of By The Old Timer fish-life and will in turn fire the KNOCK-OUT blow to Pennsylvania fishermen's greatest enemy—POLLUTION! What the Sports-Casters Are We are grateful to you—Governor Martin! Saying We join the multitude of Pennsylvanians in paying you The Perch Bug our sincere congratulations and tribute of confidence. By G. D. Gillespie THE PENNSYLVANIA ANGLER. Fish Commission Honor Roll Financial Statement—1944 Where Your License Money Goes! See Back Cover PENNSYLVANIA ANGLER FEBRUARY STREAM POLLUTION By HONORABLE JAMES H. DUFF Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania areas in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are so post-war plans must anticipate greater not vile in their contamination that swimming is less challenges to public health through prohibited under penalty of the law. In these stream contamination. congested areas where recreation is so neces The pollution of our streams by mines, sary for the welfare of the community almost mills and municipal sewage is highly men all types of aquatic recreation have been acing to industry itself. Right now pollution practically eliminated by reason of stream has a tendency to challenge the indus pollution. trial supremacy of the State so far as It is estimated that the City of Philadel concerns Pennsylvania as the best location phia pours into the great rivers traversing for industrial enterprise. The United States her boundaries approximately three hun Army Engineers' Report to the Secretary of dred million gallons of raw sewage per day. War in 1943 estimated that in the area ad Pittsburgh pours less raw sewage into the jacent to Pittsburgh alone more than one rivers per day only in the proportion that million tons of acid waste per year is dumped her population is less. With the high bac into the streams. In this locality it has terial count, necessarily incident to such been established that acid wastes cause cal gross pollution, the full reliability of such culable damage to installations of two mil water for domestic use, even after the em lion dollars a year without endeavoring to ployment of the most scientific methods of compute the great amount of intangible dam treatment, is open to serious challenge. ages almost impossible of ascertainment. There is definite evidence that the great Like or similar damage is caused elsewhere wave of gastro-enteritis that descended from in the streams of the State, varying only in one city to another down the Ohio River degree dependent upon the amount and kind Valley during the extremely low water in the of pollution. It is sheer folly to contem drought of 1930 was water-borne. plate with equanimity the continued growth In the terrible and mysterious disease of of a menace that thus threatens every phase infantile paralysis, while it has not been of the activities of the people of the Com demonstrated that the virus is disseminated monwealth. Water is necessary not only to Attorney General James H. Duff through public water supplies, neither has it live but is almost as essential in order to been disproven. Tests have satisfactorily make a living. HP HE pollution of the streams of Penn- established the conclusion that the activated The principal sources of stream pollution -•• sylvania has proceeded unchecked for sludge treatment of sewage will destroy the may be succinctly listed as follows: more than a century. Insignificant at first, polio virus, indicating the further wisdom it has grown with the development of min of treating sewage instead of discharging it I. Industrial Wastes. ing and industry and the expansion of con untreated into our streams. II. Municipal Sewage. gested areas of population. In recent years In the aftermath of the current war, with III. Mining Operations. and particularly since the outbreak of World the inevitable introduction into the United 1. Sulphuric Acid Water from mine War II, pollution has mounted so greatly States of deadly viruses and germs and dis drainage. and has now become so vast in the aggregate eases from all the dark corners of the world 2. Coal wastes and silt from mining and that it threatens the health, welfare and se and the consequent and inevitable dissemi processing operations of anthracite curity of the people of the Commonwealth. nation of new kinds of fecal poisons into coal. Almost all the great centers of population our streams through untreated sewage, our 3. Deterioration and gradual erosion of Pennsylvania are now wholly dependent upon the streams of the State for domestic water supplies, as are the various enter prises of the State, large and small, for supplies of water for industrial uses. Yet, preposterous as it is, the more we have become dependent upon our streams for every kind of water supply, the more we continue to add to their corruption. In some areas of the State not a single stream remains unpolluted, even to the smallest tributaries. An impartial examination of all the facts concerning our water supplies makes it clear that the continuation of the present course of pollution, considered in conjunction with the alarming decline in the levels of under ground water tables, is bound to result in disaster. Apart from the vital health and economic aspects of pollution, we have been grossly neglectful of our streams in their social im plications. Today in Pennsylvania the water of the great rivers in the most thickly populated Everybody loses when streams are polluted. :^#*-' **«0£ Jhf, Photo Courtesy Pennsylvania Dept. Forests and Waters. and washing away of old mine A fisherman's paradise? No! Just one of Pennsylvania's picturesque streams ruined hy dumps. pollution—coal mine and industrial waste. 4. Washing away and deposit in streams of loose soil and rock debris from the other hand it should be made perfectly ceived from the heads of industry in Penn coal stripping operations. clear that in an industrial age like our sylvania indicates not only that industry IV. Soil Erosion. own it is not physically possible to restore generally realizes the existing dangers to 1. From unscientific farming. the streams to their pure and uncontaminated our water supplies but also that it is willing 2.

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