WADING THE CORRIDORS OF POWER BY CHRIS SANTELLA
Bill Horn
may be the most effective fishing and conservation advocate you’ve never heard of… and he’s not a bad writer, either. Bud Hodson, long-time owner of Tikchik Narrows Lodge in the 1.5 million-acre Wood-Tikchik State Park in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska, recalled the first time he encountered Bill Horn. “Back in 1989, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared that they would now only issue one-year permits. Without the guarantee of a longer permit, it wasn’t feasible to invest in a Beaver float plane. Someone put me in touch with Bill. With his help, we petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to allow five-year permits. They were permitted. Even then, Bill knew how to work the system. “Some years later, I happened to be in Washington, D.C. Bill said, ‘Do you want to have lunch with the Director of Fish and Wildlife Service?’ So we did. I had the sense that Bill knew everybody.” From his high school days in New Jersey, Bill Horn was fascinated by politics. After serving as president of his high school debate team, he pursued a degree in political theory at American University. “I knew early on I wanted to go work on The Hill and play politics,” he recalled. An attraction to fishing came even earlier. “My family made its first visit Halls Fish Camp on Florida’s Marathon Key for a vacation in 1954,” Horn continued. “But my mother was petrified of the bridges leading to the keys, so we started going to Islamorada instead. My dad was a sailor, and I used to hang around on the docks. I saw the snappers, cowfish and little ‘cudas. They fascinated me. I had to figure out how to catch them. No one showed me. I did it on my own.” The first fusion of politics and fishing conservation came while a high school senior. “There were plans for the Army Corps of Engineers to build a dam in the Delaware Water Gap, Tocks Island,” he continued. “The dam 47
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