Classics: Too nice a day?…..Better slip ‘em a Mickey!

BY PAUL BRUUN

Prowling fly bins is an addiction I adopted from exposure to Abercrombie & Fitch’s inviting 1950s stores.

That’s where I instantly admired a real Mickey Finn, an eye-catching red and yellow bucktail streamer. Legends say this masterpiece was designed for brook trout around 1900 by Quebec tier, Charles Langevin.

In the 1930s, John Alden Knight, a Pennsylvania outdoor author, was handed a red and yellow streamer with which he landed a batch of New York state brook trout. In his ensuing Hunting and Fishing magazine article extolling this heroic pattern, he labeled it The Assassin.

Reports from a 1937 New York Sportsman’s Show were that astonishing numbers of this bucktail pattern were sold. Similarly, Weber Fly & Tackle Company advertised Knight’s streamer in that same magazine.

Thousands of orders inundated its Stephens Point, Wisconsin, offices.

The best part of this enduring fly pattern’s history comes from its name, chloral hydrate, aka “knockout drops,” a substance slipped into an unsuspecting person’s drink. The name Mickey Finn evolved from Michael Finn, a notorious Chicago 1900s pickpocketturned-bar owner, who famously drugged drinks and stole patrons’ cash and valuables.

Slip ‘em a Mickey was copied by disgruntled nightclub servers and bartenders for poor tipping customers. Such creativity wasn’t missed by journalist and angler, Greg Clark, whose Toronto Star story renamed Knight’s Assassin pattern to Mickey Finn.

A pulsating opening and closing action of properly tied bucktail streamers differs from the wiggle of marabou and other minnow imitating materials. Such lifelike action has been productive for me not only with trout but in larger patterns for bass and saltwater snook.

In the 1990s, fellow Tierra del Fuego explorers Tom Montgomery, John Simms and I experienced an absurd weather change on Argentina’s Rio Grande. Frigid, screaming gales vanished and an unexpected still allowed peaceful wading and casting! Swell conditions… except the sea-run browns were shut down.

Yet upstream, our caporal, Marcelo Morales, was hooked to a rambunctious silver streak roaring into his backing. “What fly, Marcelo?” I yelled.

“Mickey Finn!” grinned our Argentine mentor.

Scrounging streamer boxes, our Yank trio improvised enough colorful bucktails for adequate sea-run action

I’ve always wondered how Marcelo happened to tie on

Sublimely immersed in trout history, bamboo rod building, fly tying, Argentine casting lore, guiding and owning the Buenos Aires Angler, Marcelo’s fishing library soars above expansive. He was friendly with the late Bebe Anchorena, the renowned Argentine angler who famously hosted American writer Joe Brooks. Brooks wrote extensively on early red and yellow streamer patterns in both feathered Phillips Optic Beadhead saltwater versions and striper and trout bucktails.

Willard Greenwood II’s personalized Mickey Finn admissions in American Fly Fisher, prompted me to reexamine the “Sea Trout” chapter in my dusty copy of Brook’s Complete Book of Fly Fishing.

Voila’! There’s the pioneering American fly rod author hoisting a hefty Rio Grande brown landed on a “red and yellow streamer” during his earliest Tierra del Fuego adventures with Anchorena.