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  • Texas | Columns | "Letters from Central Texas"

    The Oilman and the Sea

    by Clay Coppedge

    Alfred Glassell, Jr. wasn’t your typical Texas oilman, if there is such a thing. He was part of the “Big Rich” that author Bryan Burrough chronicled in in his book of the same name about the Texas oil fortunes and the men who accumulated them. Burrough’s book is full of fascinating and often outlandish detail but Glassell is barely mentioned.

    Glassell’s name is more often associated with another book, Ernest Hemingway’s classic “The Old Man and the Sea.” Hemingway based the book on a true story he heard about a poor village fisherman who hooked a 1,500 pound black marlin and struggled to bring it to dock only to have it mutilated by sharks; this turns out to have been a minor literary trend in the early 20th century.

    When Hollywood filmed the movie, one of the people they went looking for was Alfred Glassell who, like the Santiago character in Hemingway’s book, hooked an enormous fish. Not only that but Glassell’s two-hour battle to land the huge fish was filmed. Some of the scenes of fighting the fish that you see in the movie version of the story starring Spencer Tracy was taken from Glassell’s footage.

    Alfred Glassell, Jr., son of an energy tycoon, was born at Cuba Plantation, Louisiana in 1913. He fell in love with fishing when he was three years old and caught a four-pound bass. He fished the lakes and bayous of his home state and all up and down the Gulf Coast but he kept dreaming of bigger fish. He had the means to pursue the dream, and he did.

    After finding the waters off the coast of southern Florida lacking, Glassell commissioned marine biologists from Yale and Miami to analyze the Pacific’s currents and how they affected wildlife. The scientists found that two powerful currents, the Humboldt Current from Chile and an Equatorial current from the Bay of Panama, merged at the western point of South America, creating a bonanza of plankton and other nutrients off the coast of Peru.

    Glassell went to a village called Cobo Blanco with his ship, Miss Texas, and built the Cobo Blanco Fishing Club. He usually took with him members of his family and fellow sportsmen like S. Kip Farrington and a rod and reel that he hoped would stand up to the rigors of landing a thousand-pound marlin, which the aficionados call “granders.” Glassell was the first one to catch, land and document an officially recognized 1,000 pound marlin. Writer and sportsman Zane Grey was for a while recognized as the first to land a “grander” but the record was rescinded because Grey’s marlin was “mutilated” by sharks.

    Glassell’s world record marlin weighed 1,560 pounds and was caught using a Fin-Nor reel, a 130-pound linen line and a bamboo rod about seven feet long. He used a five-pound mackerel for bait and fought the fish for the better part of two hours before landing it. Glassell took one look at the fish on the boat and said, “Let’s head for the docks, boys.” The picture taken of him with the fish appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated later that year. Farrington referred to Glassell’s feat as “the rod and reel Young Man and the Sea.”

    Hemingway was among the many angling notables who visited the Cobo Blanco Fishing Club. Late in his life Glassell remembered the writer as “a damn good fisherman” and “a big drinker.”

    “That’s one of the reasons were glad to get him to go down to the club,” Glasses told journalist C.J. Schexnayder a few years ago. “His bar bill kept us operating for a year. As the owner of the club I had to say I was happy about that.”

    Glassell moved to Houston in 1946 and is remembered and revered there for his philanthropy, especially in regards to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts which he helped fund and run and to which he donated more than 1,000 rare gold artifacts as part of West African, Indonesian and Pre-Columbian art. He funded a number of marine biology research projects, and not just as a way to find more and bigger fish. An avid supporter of Texas wildlife conservation efforts, he established a professorship in quail research at the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Kingsville.

    Glassell died in 2008 at the age of 95. It’s a tribute to the richness of his life that the 1,560 pound black marlin he caught on a rod and reel in 1953 is only a piece of his legacy.


    © Clay Coppedge
    September 3 , 2012 Column
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