EUSTIS'S INNOVATIVE use of heat had the effect of turning bamboo a deep, dark brown, right to the core, and his neighbor and onetime partner soon began advertising rods of the same color. But Fred Thomas's "Mahogany" model only looked the same. "The Mahogany rod was just stained brown on the outside," Streamer [Bill Abrams] said. "It took Thomas another year to figure out what Eustis had done, and then he copied the technique with his own Browntone model."

By 1916, Eustis Edwards was ready to go public with his breakthrough. And his elder son Bill joined him in his new rod shop, in a family succession that was replicated by all the graduates of the Leonard school at about this time. Eustis begat Bill, Fred Thomas anointed Leon, Hiram Hawes taught Merritt, and Ed Payne passed on his skills to Jim, whom he famously ordered never to play baseball so that his fingers could avoid harm and so work their magic. As indeed they did — Jim Payne made rods for fifty-three years without a break, from 1915 until his death in 1968, and they are widely regarded as the benchmark of consistent excellence. This laying on of hands, father to son, was astonishing, really, considering the unforgiving nature of the work and the marginal economic returns. But then you have to bear in mind that in the early part of the twentieth century the family business was still a cornerstone of the American economy.

Over the next two years, according to Martin Keane, Eustis and Bill turned out between a thousand and twelve hundred rods. Computing these figures, I found them a stretch. Depending on whom you ask, building a single bamboo fly rod is a matter of forty to sixty, even eighty, hours of skilled labor. Two men, two years: maybe two hundred rods, if they were driving themselves hard. A thousand rods: ten men at least. It would have been a business to equal Leonard's, in other words, and a direct rival to Fred Thomas.

 

Eustis begat Bill, Fred Thomas anointed Leon, Hiram Hawes taught Merritt, and Ed Payne passed on his skills to Jim, whom he famously ordered never to play baseball so that his fingers could avoid harm and so work their magic.I've only ever found one photograph of Eustis Edwards after he turned sixty. It shows a slightly built man, apparently younger than his years, with delicate features and round, thin-rimmed glasses that lend him a scholarly, even ascetic, demeanor. In 1918, Edwards found himself at something of a crossroads. Despite the fifteen-year hiatus, he was at the top of his profession. His reputation as an innovator was secure, and he had the satisfaction of seeing his influence take hold both in Thomas's work and in the rods coming out of the Leonard shop in Central Valley, which was now in the hands of old Hiram's nephew Reuben.

On a personal level, Eustis's life seemed to have reached the kind of tranquility that men search for in middle age. His daughter Minnie had given him his first grandchild, and now Bill was about to produce a second. Eustis's younger son Gene, now a teenager, showed signs of having a craftsman's hands.

Yet everything about Eustis Edwards's career, from the pressures of the commercial marketplace to his own restless and perfectionist personality, would have made it clear to him that craftsmanship of this kind was hard to sustain. The making of high-quality bamboo fly rods is a brutal discipline, demanding the precision of a surgeon and the patience of a saint. The profit margins are slender. By 1918, with the exception of a few sentimental diehards who were still attached to their greenheart and lancewood, split bamboo was all there was. The big, bottom-feeding companies had developed mass-production techniques capable of churning out hundreds of thousands of rods that were cheap and crude but enough to satisfy the needs of the mass market. The boutique craftsman occupied a narrow and precarious niche.

The craft, in other words, did not — and does not — exist in a vacuum, but as part of a web of circumstances that can extend from the personal quirks of the craftsman through the larger forces of economic and societal change, even disease and war.

Eustis's father, William Scott Edwards, had spent the last year of his life at 8 Washington Street before his death in September 1918. It seemed an unremarkable event, a normal old man's death. But then, as I studied the family genealogy that I had found in Pilot, Virginia, I noticed that one of Eustis's aunts had died on the very same day, and a second aunt only weeks earlier. And then in October 1918, even as Bill's son Scott was born, Eustis lost his daughter Minnie at the age of thirty-seven. This series of losses at first seemed a wicked set of coincidences. But then the penny dropped: Spanish flu.

Winchester already had the gun that had won the West; now it wanted the bamboo fly rod that would win the East.Some said the virus was spread by German agents. But when the Spanish press published details of the epidemic (it was uncensored during wartime, unlike most of its European counterparts), the virus became known as "the Spanish Lady." In the United States, October 1918 was the deadliest month, with 195,000 of the total of 675,000 fatalities that occurred in the course of the epidemic. By the time World War I ended, the Spanish flu had taken an estimated 25 million lives worldwide — three times the number who had perished on the battlefields. Americans celebrated the armistice wearing face masks.

On top of the personal tragedies of the Edwards family came the turmoil of the postwar economy. War always stimulates the growth of technology and the production of certain strategic goods; but for the companies that benefit from wartime expansion, it also has a downside. When the conflict ends, these enterprises have to find something to do with their surplus capacity. This applies particularly to those that have specialized in armaments production.

The American arms industry had two iconic leaders. One was Samuel Colt's Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company; the other was the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Both were located in the state of Connecticut, Colt in Hartford, Winchester in New Haven. Each had its signature weapon: Colt's 45-caliber handgun, the Peacemaker, and the Winchester 73, "the rifle that won the West." Connecticut, guns, and mechanical ingenuity had long been synonymous. Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, remember, was a foreman at Samuel Colt's "great arms factory" in Hartford before a blow on the head carried him off to King Arthur's court. The very idea of Connecticut as a seat of invention is summed up in the way Hank the Yankee introduces himself:

I am an American. I was born and reared in Hartford, in the state of Connecticut — anyway, just over the river, in the country. So I am a Yankee of the Yankees — and practical.... Why, could make anything a body wanted — anything in the world, it didn't make any difference what; and if there wasn't any quick, new jangled way to make a thing, I could invent one.

You can hear a strong echo of Hank in Winchester's annual report for 1918, which said:

We have delivered to the Government substantial quantities Of small arms and ammunition and have performed important engineering service in connection with the development of Government products and services.... The termination of Government contracts will find us with a considerable portion of our plant idle. The management is active at the present time investigating and developing new products and new lines of business.

The following year, the company's directors unveiled the Winchester Plan. This was Winchester's retooling for peace, and it was a signal moment in the growth of American marketing — based on a strategy that nowadays we would call "vertical integration." Winchester announced that it would be buying up a wide range of companies — tool and die makers; companies that produced ice skates and pocketknives; clay pigeon and fishing reel manufacturers. These were all common, everyday products, hardware store standbys. But Winchester decided that something else was also needed, something that would brand the company's name for social elites as well as for the mass market. It settled on something that would represent the pinnacle of craftsmanship. Winchester already had the gun that had won the West; now it wanted the bamboo fly rod that would win the East.

On October 14, 1918, Eustis Edwards sold his small Maine rod-making business to Winchester for $10,000 — perhaps $125,000 in current dollars.On October 14, 1918, Eustis Edwards sold his small Maine rod-making business to Winchester for $10,000 — perhaps $125,000 in current dollars. He agreed to "use his best endeavors in manufacturing fishing rods and instructing and training a working force for the manufacture of fishing rods and in the development of the machinery, equipment and tools therefore and such other duties as may be assigned to him." For this Winchester would pay him an annual salary of $3,000 for five years — not a fortune, by any means, but the kind of financial security no boutique craftsman could dream of. But the worrisome phrase in his contract was "instructing and training a working force." What that meant was that Winchester intended to marry Edwards's individual craftsmanship with a mass-production scheme aimed at competing with the bottom-feeders. I could only wonder what misgivings Eustis, who had always been one to dance to his own drummer, may have had about this arrangement.

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