Jack O'Malley Interview w/ Dave Richey
The watering and weeding had taken its toll on my stamina. I nodded off, and for some reason was transported back to early November of 1967. There I was, brother George at my side, and we were catching coho salmon and steelhead on flies, one after the other.
Anglers who weren’t around in the late 1960s and early 1970s have no clue what good fishing is really like. There were fish than fishermen, and less fishing pressure meant the salmon and trout were more easily caught/
Tres Amigos (from left) George Richey, John McKenzie and Dave Richey. 
The thought came to me back then that I was pretty good at catching these fish on flies. The next thought was a question that only I could answer: Could I make a living at this?
I owned two barbershops in Flint, made decent money, but the idea of running my fingers through someone’s dirty hair all day left me cold. I wanted and needed a change of pace, and guiding fishermen six months a year seemed to be more fun than cutting hair.
I had a few clients in 1967, but by late winter-early spring of 1968, I was taking phone calls constantly to book steelhead trips for February, March and April. I suddenly had more business than one man could possibly handle, and I began booking trips for George.
It helped, but we couldn’t keep up with the demand. One day early that spring I had to be home for some reason, stopped into the old Water Wonderland Sporting Goods store at the junction of Dort Highway and the old Dixie Highway, about three miles north of Mt. Morris. I’d worked for Bernie McKenzie, the store owner for two years, and went in to buy some hooks. Then I had to drop off several fish to friends before going home.
“Catching any steelhead?” asked John McKenzie, the owner’s son. I took him out to the car, lifted the cooler lid, and watched him drool. I told him they came from the Platte River. He’d been on the Platte that weekend and hadn’t caught a fish.
“Fishing in the wrong spot,” I mused. He wanted to know where the right spot was, and being pushed for an answer, I made up a name. “The hole where it never rains.”
A week later I returned with a few more fish for friends hungry for fresh fish, and John wanted to know where they were caught, and I told him the same place as last week.
I gave in and took him to another hotspot several days later that didn’t open until the last Saturday in April, and we waded into the Little Manistee River, and no one else was on the river. No one was there except for the steelhead and us. I taught John how to fly-fish that day, and once I knew he could catch fish himself, I asked if he’d like a job guiding.
So John came aboard to help in my guiding business, and Tres Amigos (Three Buddies) became a reality. McKenzie turned out to be a great fisherman, a patient and wonderful instructor, and he usually took out the men and women who booked trips.
That was in late April of 1968, and we stuck together for nine years before John went off on his own. George and I stuck it out, but both of us were getting burned out. We both retired from guiding in late 1976, and I turned my guiding business over to our uncle. My writing business had really taken off, and by guiding and writing, I was burning the candle at both ends.
George returned to barbering, and I stuck with the writing, and as they say: the rest is history. But down through the years, John McKenzie and I would bump into each other on the river. Once, George and I were together when we met John at an old familiar hole.
“Hey, old-timer,” he hollered when he saw me, “jump in. There are a bunch of fish here and plenty of room for old friends. So we fished together for a couple of hours, and then the cold drove George and I back to the car for some heat. We hadn’t thought about fishing that day and weren’t dressed accordingly.
I’d bump into John almost every year on the river, and it was like old home week. We’d retell the stories about a big buck John shot that I drove out to him from a two-acre woodlot not far from Flint. We’d tell stories of fox shot at and missed, a few that were killed, and the center of attraction for all of us was the nine years we spent guiding spring and fall on a half-dozen different rivers.
We’d start talking and soon we’d be waist-deep in a river with a high-jumping steelhead on, or a heavyweight Chinook salmon sprinting downstream like a locomotive out of control. We’d be staring at one of our favorite rivers through a wall of falling snow, and the white stuff didn’t bother the fish and back in those days it didn’t bother us either.
We could remember people, places and events that happened while guiding, and most of them were tremendous memories of three men who shared a love of the river and of the fish, and still do, many years later.
John McKenzie unhooks a Betsie River steelhead.
My eyes can close, and my mind’s eye and memory helps me recall those halcyon days when Tres Amigos were something grand and wonderful. We got along well, solved each problem as we encountered it, and never said an angry word to each other.
We were a trio of fishing guides, the first ones to fly-fish for salmon, steelhead and brown trout and do it for a living, and we were a force to be reckoned with. We occasionally would have an afternoon free when our clients would get pooped and leave early for home, and we would go fishing together. There was never any competition between us, and we worked together as a team.
Those were great times, and the fishing was wonderful. We operated on an “all for one, one for all” principle. Our friendship is a long and treasured thing, and now with George gone back in September. 2003. , we are down to the Two Buddies. We don’t see as much of each other as we once did, but if I close my eyes, I can still see John McKenzie with his rod bent, charging downstream after a great fish.
It can’t replace seeing him in person, fishing with him as we once did, but my memories of John and our many years together come in a clear but distant second to spending time together as we once did. And for now, that has to be good enough.
