Fay Fronk
By Vance Polton
As it's getting close to the start of the walleye spawning operations I thought we should spend some time this morning with Fay Fronk who worked at the Spirit Lake Fish Hatchery from 1942 to 1973. And actually he was running gillnets for broodstock walleye on Spirit Lake as part of a father and son gillnetting crew starting clear back in 1929. Attached is a "re-typed" newspaper article from the April 19, 1972 edition of The Spirit Lake Beacon newspaper. The article was an interview with Fay shortly before his retirement on April 30, 1973.
One of the things I found interesting in the article was that in the early years they spawned the walleyes right on shore not far from the gillnets. With just rowboats and doing three runs a night I guess you wouldn't have time to do much else. Then questions starting to pop into my head: "where do you put all those claying pans, tables, sets of egg pans, towels to keep everything including the fish dry?(yeah, right). There were two guys, in a rowboat loaded down with a lantern, the gillnets, and a couple of wooden boxes to hold the collected eggs, and a tub big enough to hold a net worth of fish for the run to shore, oh, and a bucket to put water in the tub and take it out of the boat.. Oh yeah, and a tent and some matches for the fire. It had to be a quick and dirty operation out there, no claying the eggs, no patting dry the fish, or putting semen up in plastic vials. And that was if it was a nice calm dry night, If the weather turned out to be not so nice, I bet it got real interesting.
