That was way back in the 1930s, when Lake Wallenpaupack was just achieving that peak status that comes to all impoundments in the years immediately following their construction. R.E. Angst, was a teacher-scout master who chaperoned a troop of Middleporters who camped on the banks of the Big Lake. During the week, whenever he could turn supervision over to his Eagle Scout, Dad and I went fishing for walleyes. To me was assigned the task of rowing the rented boat while Dad trolled for walleyes with a casting rod and line attached to a June bug spinner with treble hook and a hank of red wood cloth attached. Wallenpaupack was created by damming the Paupack Creek and flooding an entire valley to create a dam that supported an electric power generating plant near Hawley.
Flooding is the right word.
Houses, barns and other structures were covered by the lake as well as the tens of thousands of trees. For years, the banks of the lake were littered by the washed-up limbs and trunks of trees that eventually broke off under water and came floating to the top. Those sunken trees, still standing upright, made great fish cover but played Bloody Hell on fishing tackle. Fishermen, thus, who tried to get their lures down to the deep-running walleyes for which the lake was becoming famous, were required to stock a supply of lures that would have bankrupted a millionaire if they had been bought at retail. As a result, fishermen in the Tamaqua-upper Schuylkill Valley area, hammered out their own spinners, hung on cheap treble hooks, and decorated the lure with ordinary red flannel strips.