"As one of Life Magazine's top writers, Paul O'Neil was allowed a certain leeway when it came to the choice of story assignments. Still, it came as a surprise when in May 1964 Life featured his 10,000 word essay/memoir titled In Praise of Trout—and also me. It was about his trout fishing successes and travails in the Esopus and its tributaries. His article, albeit fleetingly, put the national spotlight on Shandaken and brought some of its citizens a sort of celebrityhood. Out of gratitude for the phenomenal increase in their business, for instance, Dick and Hermann Folkerts refused to accept his money for fishing equipment for the better part of that summer.
Twenty years before, he, his wife Jane and children Mike and Sally, arrived in Woodland Valley for the summer at the invitation of fellow TIME INCer Bob Boyd, in search of mountains and streams and the forested sanctuary they'd left behind in Washington state when he'd been drawn to Manhattan to write for Time/Life. It was a perfect fit. Of Woodland Brook, he eventually inherited the stewardship of the fly-fishing section that his friend Fred Muehleck had championed and developed. As Woodland Brook's "Troutmeister", and through various articles on fishing, he became recognized as a dedicated and savvy fly fisherman and a proponent of undamaged environment. He died in 1988."
- Mike O'Neil aka Boreegard
TIME - THE WEEKLY NEWS MAGAZINE
JULY 6, 1953
VOL. LXII NO. 1.
Extracts from the cover story on George Washington by Writer Paul O'Neil titled HEROES—A Man to Remember:
At 43, he was fair, broad-shouldered and huge for his day (6 ft. 2 in., 200 lbs), with a horseman's muscular thighs, penetrating blue eyes, and an impressive air of command. Mounted on a white charger and arrayed in uniform (he thoughtfully wore the blue and buff of the Fairfax County militia to the meeting of the second Continental Congress in Philadelphia) he was a sight few men ever forgot. Congress was impressed by his common good sense, his ability to bide his time, his capacity for decision.
He is remembered as a remote and austere figure, but George Washington had his little frailties and vanities. His temper was almost always held in check, but dishonesty or cowardice could send him into thunderous bursts of rage. He imported silk stockings and silver buckled shoes from England before the war, and seldom missed an opportunity to have his brown hair (worn clubbed and sometimes supported in a sort of snood) trimmed, combed and powdered by a barber.
He suffered all his life from that peculiarly leveling ailment: bad teeth. He scrubbed them with "spunge" brushes from England, and rinsed them in all manner of lotions, but they decayed, one by one. He was in agony from toothache at the siege of Yorktown, and in the hope of doing some dentistry upon himself, wrote to a friend for a small file which he could thrust between his molars. He was a theatergoer. He loved to dance. He fished, shot ducks, and rode to hounds with reckless competence. He suffered from sunburn, and in later years was not too dignified to inspect his acres with a large umbrella affixed to his saddle horn.
There was but one choice for the first President of the U.S.: George Washington. The office was of necessity less precisely defined than the judicial and legislative branches. It might have degenerated into a puppet presidency. Washington defined it by stepping into it. He held it in great esteem, and imparted to it the dignity of his own character. He refused to shake hands during his eight years in the office—he felt that such a gesture of familiarity was beneath the presidency—and always bowed instead. He dressed richly in velvet, wore hats plumed with ostrich feathers, rode in a six-horse coach with liveried lackeys and outriders, felt himself equal of any king on earth, but always thought of himself as the "Most Obed. Servt." of the U.S. people, who decade after decade, have borne the stamp of his character.
He lived but two years after his second term was ended. In his last moments of consciousness he said, "I die hard." And so he has.
