Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Pond magazine history?

I got my first pond in the early 1990s and I think that at that time there was another pond owner magazine. It seems as if it was published somewhere in the midwest.

Published on: 5/28/1999 Last Visited: 2/17/2001
Several times during my association with Leo Pachner we discussed writing his story to a tape recorder and said I would transcribe the tapes and help him with the writing.

Well, Leo never got around to making his recordings, but I did take some notes on our conversations. during long winter days, when we were putting together the winter and spring issues of Farm Pond Harvest, then in his mid sixties, often would recount some incident from his past.

Most of these conversations took place in Leo's office, a converted garage, that stood on a piece of farmland near his experimental ponds.With the constant trickle of water recirculating through he's fish tanks as background, and in an atmosphere of pearly cigarette and cigar smoke - through which the pale winter sun angled from the windows in sharply defined shafts of mellow light - Leo would launch into a well honed tale from some part of his colorful life.

Born in Chicago's Back-o'-the Yards neighborhood to Austrian immigrants in 1908, Leo C. Pachner was the second oldest child in a family of 3 boys and 2 girls.His father was a ne'er-do-well brick layer and stone mason : his mother, a pious woman who struggled to hold the family together by working in a pickle factory.

until nine years of age, Leo knew only hard, impoverished life experienced by so many other first generation immigrants in the ghettos of large industrial cities.He attended St. Augustine school at 50th and Laflin, but he and his older brother were incorrigible truants.

The Back-o'-the-Yards was a patchwork of rival gang territories where the two boys found petty thievery and harassment of store keepers an accepted sport.The brothers stole coal from trains in nearby railroad yards (I would climb up on a slow moving train and kick coal off the top of the cars, said Leo, while my brother ran along, picked it up and put it in a gunny sack.) ; fished in park lagoons, where fishing was illegal, and battled with street gangs in neighborhoods where juvenile crime was a means of survival.

One day Leo's mother read an ad in a German language newspaper soliciting sharecroppers sugar beet farms near Unionville Michigan. her application was accepted and the following spring Leo and his family boarded a train with 20 other families.They all were bound for the fields and woods south of Saginaw Bay.

On arrival, the families were met at the railroad station by farmers who chose the workers they needed and hauled them home on horse-drawn hay wagons.Leo's family was taken to a run- down furnished shack that would be their home for the next two years.Later they lived for three years in a large farm house.

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Soon Leo found himself struggling to adjust to the cultural shock of a street-wise city kid swallowed up vy the open, unpopulated fields of rural Michigan.

The whole family worked sugar beets farms from planting to harvest time.We hoed the rows of beets, the younger kids thinned out the plants.The farmers were under contract to the sugar beet factories.We were paid eleven dollars for hoeing three acres.).

As winter came on - beet harvesting often was done while snow was flying - the Pachners were given the choice of returning to Chicago at the end of the harvest or of remaining where thy were.
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Leo and his brothers, sometimes accompanied by their father, hunted and trapped wild game for food and pelts.They fished the streams and drainage ditches and their winter diet was laced heavily with wild game an pickled carp.They found they could make more money trapping than working the sugar beet fields.

The following winter, Leo, besides attending a country school where he managed to get an eighth grade education, took on the added chore of hiring out to a farmer for fifty cents a week.The work was hard, the hours long, and tending the farmer's bad-tempered horse was a continuing threat to Leo's safety.

On a bleak morning in February, the horse trampled Leo.Badly injured, the eleven-year-old boy was taken to a hospital wrapped in a horse blanket.

The doctor told his mother that nearly every bone in Leo's body was broken.His right leg must be amputated, insisted the doctor.

Leo's mother pleaded with the doctor not to do the amputation ; believing the boy would not live, the doctor relented.

Although Leo feared he would remain a cripple for the rest of his life, three painful operations put him back on his feet.

During those months of recovery, Leo gained a unique insight into life.Even at this young age he realized the value of outdoor sport in restoring self-esteem and self-reliance.He vowed that when he recuperated he would help others, particularly city kids, discover the transcendent, redeeming virtues of the outdoors.

After five years in Michigan the Pachners returned to their old Chicago neighborhood.Leo, now 15, was no longer the city-tough street fighter.Many of his old friends had become thugs and bootleggers.He attempted to convince them that life beyond the streets, hunting and fishing in the outdoors could change their lives.He was met with ridicule.A year later, in despair at the poor quality of life they had returned to, Leo and his brother decided to leave the city and strike out on their own.Their wanderings by railway freight car and hobo jungle took them to the ranches and oil fields of Oklahoma ; the wheat fields of Kansas and Canada ; the 101 Ranch rodeo circuit and a short sojourn with Ringling Brothers Circus.

In 1929, back in Chicago, Leo settled down.He took up barbering.He practiced his trade in Detroit and New York City, then returned to Chicago in 1931.For the next year Leo divided his time between cutting hair and working in the back room on an invention called the Minnow Saver, a hook which did not kill the minnow bait.He also managed an industrial league baseball team called Leo's Clippers.The league's play-off games were held at old Comiskey Field.

We were going for the championship, said Leo lighting one of those evil-looking little cigarillos.I hired this pitcher for the series.He was damn good.But we lost.I found out afterwards the other team had paid the son-of-a-bitch more than I had -- to guarantee that we lost..

Married in 1933, Leo supplemented his meager income from barbering by making fishing lures and selling them to fishermen whom he and his wife found while traveling along lake sides and country streams.They then spent three years working various sporting shows.

In 1937 Leo's part-time lure-making business had culminated in a full-time business named P & K (Pachner and Koller) Bait Company.During World War II, P & K survived on government contracts, manufacturing among other things fishing kits for life rafts.

After the war, Leo became a co-founder of the Sports Fishing Institute and a member of the Fishing Hall of Fame.He was able to travel widely on fishing trips and became a recognized casting expert and sports fishing authority.

Leo often fished the Kankakee River.In 1945 he built a one acre pond, in which to test P & K lures not far from the river at Momence, Illinois.

We started with the regular bass bluegill combination, explained Leo with a laugh, and then, of course, we made some mistakes on our own.
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Leo went to work as a salesman for Salkelds, a sporting goods store in Kankakee, Illinois.

I see these kids running around and I want to take them fishing.You can't take kids in the river, so I found people that owned farm ponds.We'd take these kids out to a pond and they'd catch a few fish, mostly little stunted bluegill, stunted crappie and in some ponds, bullheads.Since I had had these problems with my own pond I figured that something had to be done, some way to help these pond owners.
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In the winter of 1966, with promises of technical help from fisheries biologist Al Lopinot, Leo and FPH's first editor, Wayne Ligler, put together a list of 10, 000 potential subscribers.
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Leo often billed himself as the world's greatest peddler. He put his salesmanship to work selling advertising to support Farm Pond Harvest.

Leo had a very persuasive pitch and an enviable reputation in the fishing tackle industry.I remember attending a trade show in Chicago with him.We could not walk more than ten feet without someone leaving their booth to shake his hand.Before the conversation was over, Leo often had another ad promised for Farm Pond Harvest.If the ad did not come voluntarily, Leo had a way of making the person feel obligated to place an ad.Perhaps it was a carryover from those days on the back streets of Chicago, when survival depended on quick wits and an unyielding determination to win every confrontation.The magazine grew from then on and has lasted 30 years.