Vernon S. “Pete” Hidy

Vernon S. “Pete” Hidy was a fly-fishing writer, editor, photographer, conservationist, and innovative fly tyer who campaigned tirelessly for James E. Leisenring’s place in the fly-fishing pantheon. It was Hidy who coined the word flymph (c. 1962–64) to help popularize aspects of the old British tradition of hackle flies (or soft hackles) fished just below the water’s surface. 

 Hidy was born on August 9, 1914, in Springfield, Ohio. After moving to Pennsylvania in 1934, he fished for ten years in the Pocono and Catskill mountains, where he became a fishing companion to both Reuben R. Cross and James E. Leisenring. The Art of Tying the Wet Fly (Dodd, Mead, 1941), co-produced by Leisenring and Hidy with mentoring from Cross, became a milestone of American angling literature. After serving in the Navy in WW II, Hidy moved his family to the west coast where he lived and fished in California, Oregon, and Idaho.

He founded the Flyfisher’s Club of Oregon and was influential in talks between his employer, the Boise Cascade Company, and the Nature Conservancy, resulting in the establishment of the Silver Creek Preserve in Idaho. He was also a member of the Anglers’ Club of New York and the Flyfishers’ Club, London. The journal of the Oregon club, The Creel, which Hidy founded and co-edited with Robert Wethern and others, appeared twenty-one times in as many years, 1961–1982, ceasing upon Hidy’s death in Boise, Idaho, January 1983, at age 68.

Arnold Gingrich, cofounder and editor of Esquire magazine and author of The Well-Tempered Angler, The Joys of Trout, and American Trout Fishing, wrote:

 “As editor of The Creel, the beautiful and distinctive organ of The Flyfisher’s Club of Oregon, Pete Hidy was a trailblazer in bringing a civilizing overlay of appreciation of the traditional and historic lore to the then generally rough and ready state of Western fly fishing in general. To my mind, V. S. Hidy can never be praised enough, for he showed the way, like a lantern in the dark, long before such journals as The Flyfisher, Trout, Fly Fisherman Magazine, and The American Fly Fisher were ever dreamed of. He is one of those rare spirits who could, almost single-handedly, give a sport a good name.” [Arnold Gingrich, The Fishing in Print (Clinton, N.J.: New Win Publishing, 1974), 323.]

Hidy’s most personal work was the book The Pleasures of Fly Fishing (Winchester Press, 1972) featuring eighty-seven photographs by Hidy, selected passages from angling literature, and a foreword by Sparse Grey Hackle. The spirit of that project is summarized in Hidy’s credo (otherwise known as “Hidy’s Law”): “Fishermen may find unexpected pleasures more enjoyable than those they seek.”