Milford ‘Stanley’ Poltroon was well ahead of this curve | Sam Venable
An Alabama man has earned his five minutes of fame by running naked through his local Bass Pro Shop and diving into the store’s massive fish tank for an impromptu swim.
Actually, the guy’s moment in the spotlight lasted longer than five minutes. His daring dip occurred six weeks ago, yet his renown continues to spread thanks to multiple cellphone videos taken by Bass Pro customers. They’re all over the internet.
(Perhaps you just now set the newspaper aside and are busily scrolling through your smartphone for a peek. Fine, go ahead. But don’t expect the rest of us to wait for your return. We gotta get on with bidness.)
Police in Leeds, Alabama, identified the skinny-dipper as George Aaron Owens, 42. Eyewitnesses suggested that intoxicants — in liquid, pill or inhalable form, perhaps in combination — aided and abetted the au naturel performance.
We’ll leave it to medical and legal systems to help Gorgeous George address his demons. For now, I’m wondering when the billion-dollar fishing tackle industry will commemorate the event with a lure. The cash-happy angling world would scarf ’em up by the dozen.
I’m not the first tongue-in-cheek typist to suggest something this outrageous. The godfather of outdoor tomfoolery did it half a century ago.
David Bascom (1912-1985) was a big-league advertising exec from California who fled to Montana in the mid-1960s to escape the rat race and pursue his love of fishing.
Soon, the same creative juices that had netted his agency a fortune hawking everything from Skippy peanut butter to Purina dog chow to John Kennedy’s successful run for the White House in 1960 reappeared.
Under the nom de plume Milford “Stanley” Poltroon, he launched a Monty Python-esque fishing periodical called “The Wretched Mess News.” Imagine something wrought by a team of Mad magazine writers on drugs.
I discovered Bascom’s buffoonery in the 1970s and still have a few of his now-tattered, off-the-wall publications. “The Wretched Mess News” is long out of print, but vintage issues sometimes show up on eBay and other online stores.
In one particular flight of fancy, Bascom created a fishing lure in the shape of a human swimmer. He called it “Poltroon’s Magic Infallible” — an “incredible, flexo-action, five-position, undulating lure guaranteed to arouse the anger, deep-seated hatred and fighting instincts of game fish.”
The folks at Bass Pro Shop have every reason to discourage fish tank diving before someone gets killed. Nonetheless, they could sell a boatload of “Poltroon’s Magic Infallibles.”
I hope that somewhere, Milford “Stanley” Poltroon, with old client JFK by his side, are laughing their heads off.
Sam Venable’s column appears every Sunday. Contact him at sam.venable@outlook.com.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Milford ‘Stanley’ Poltroon was well ahead of this curve | Sam Venable
