Thanks to Ed Van Put, Jimmy Carter and George Washington had something else in common aside from being Southern planters who ascended to the presidency.
“At one point when he was wading across the river,” Mr. Van Put said after guiding Mr. Carter on a five-day fly-fishing visit to the Catskill Mountains in 1984, “I remarked — which tickled him — that we now have had a Carter as well as a Washington crossing of the Delaware.”
“Mr. Carter made my guiding easy,” Mr. Van Put, a pre-eminent angler and fly-caster as well as a conservationist, guide and author, told The New York Times shortly after the president’s expedition to the Upper Delaware and nearby Beaverkill rivers..
“He works hard at it, covers the water well and likes to catch fish,” Mr. Van Put added. “He is also fun to be with.”
Mr. Van Put, a principal fish and wildlife technician for New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation until he retired in 2008, died on Dec. 14 at his home in Livingston Manor, N.Y., his wife, Judy, said. He was 88. (Mr. Carter died 15 days later.)
Mr. Carter had fly-cast elsewhere for years but considered the Catskills a mecca for fly-fishing. It was where Mead Schaeffer, the American illustrator, once said that the rainbow trout may not have been invented, but it was where “they painted spots on him and taught him to swim.”
On his first full day, the former president caught a 15-inch rainbow, according to Nelson Bryant, the outdoors columnist for The New York Times, who had been introduced to the Delaware’s trout by Mr. Van Put a decade earlier.
Mr. Van Put described Mr. Carter as a “fearless wader,” adding that Mr. Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, “more than held her own” as a fly-fisher.
In the four decades since that fishing trip, in conjunction with a benefit in which Mr. Carter helped raise more than $40,000 to launch the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum, in Sullivan County, he and Mr. Van Put remained in touch by mail.
“Carter wished to one day return to the area and his newfound fishing buddies for ‘just a fishing trip,’” an editorial in The Sullivan County Democrat noted this week. “It might make one sad to know that the trip never came to pass.”
In addition to chaperoning the former president, Mr. Van Put volunteered as a guide and fly-fishing tutor for other high-profile visitors, including John F. Kennedy Jr., Dan Rather, Sandra Day O’Connor and Cory Wells, a lead vocalist with the rock band Three Dog Night.
“The Catskills are intimate,” he said in an interview with The Wading List, a fly-fishing blog. “I mean, in Montana, the views are amazing. In the Adirondacks, you’ve got bigger mountains, but here they are all around you, they’re everywhere, they’re more intimate.”
“The essence of fly-fishing? For me, I think of the word solace,” he said.
As a conservationist, Mr. Van Put was instrumental in securing more than 54 miles of public fishing rights, access and special regulation fishing areas in the state, including those with no-kill and catch-and-release stipulations.
He also oversaw changes in the water-release program by the New York City reservoir system, with the aim of maintaining a constant cold water temperature that trout favor during the summer heat.
As a result of his efforts, Mr. Van Put received the Ernest F. Trad Award, the state conservation department’s highest employee honor, for stream management and habitat.
“Ed was a legend in the Catskills — as the finest and wisest fly-fisher and most tenacious conservationist,” Nick Lyons, an author on fly-fishing, said in an email. “He was a quiet, thoughtful man and ignored the modern craze for ever-better graphite rods, space-age lines, and a never ending plethora of new fly patterns. His tackle was modest, his success immense.”
Mr. Van Put, he noted, “fished with an old fiberglass rod and a handful of trusted flies.”
On the basis of his meticulous record-keeping, his wife estimated that he had caught more than 12,000 fish.
Edward George Van Put was born on May 28, 1936, in Paterson, N.J. His father, Emil, an immigrant from Belgium, worked in the maritime industry. His mother, Agnes (Post) Van Put, worked in a lace factory and later for the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum.
As a child, Ed and his brother Russell frequently fished in northern New Jersey with their grandfather Edward Louis Van Put. After graduating from Hawthorne High School, Ed enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as a medic. After being discharged, he was a manager for a construction materials company. He began fishing in the Catskills on weekends in 1962.
“My philosophy was that although I had a well-paying job in New Jersey, I didn’t care what I did for a living as long as at the end of the day, after dinner, I could pick up a rod and go fishing,” he told Mike Valla in his book “The Founding Flies” (2013).
Mr. Van Put bought his house in Livingston Manor in 1965 and became known as “the admiral of the Delaware.” He met Judy O’Brien, his future wife, while working for the state.
In addition to her, he is survived by his mother, who is 108; his children Lorine Buchholz and Brett, Lee and Tyler Van Put; and five granddaughters.
Mr. Van Put taught at the Wulff School of Fly Fishing, also in Livingston Manor, and wrote five books, including two editions of “The Beaverkill: The History of a River and Its People” (1996 and 2016) and “Trout Fishing in the Catskills” (2007). “A Flyfisher’s Revelations” is to be published this spring.
“The fly is the first and single-most important item between you and the fish,” he advised in Mr. Valla’s book. “It’s not the tippet, it’s not the leader, or the line, or the rod — it’s the fly!” He said he once caught 37 fish with a single fly, using a white line, and the only thing left on the hook were the wings.
