My Q&A's started as an idea to interview some of the memorable
people I've met in fly fishing, both online as well as offline. Rather
than a true interview I decided to keep it simple by asking a few
Q&A's.
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Larry Kenney is a legend in the fiberglass community. Scott fly rod company started as a one man company by Harry Wilson in 1973 and a few years later Larry joined the company. Scott has become one of the foremost fly rod brand since then. The early years was the era of exciting innovations like new rod designs using fiberglass like five piece pack rods as well as the invention of a new wonder material named graphite.
Larry has been making limited numbers of exquisite glass rods under his own name since 2007. Last year he announced that he will be handing over the rod production to Tomonori 'Bill' Higashi and Katsumi Harada.
1) Q: When & how did you pick up fly fishing?
“Well, I suppose quite early in my life (early 1960s), my father was an angler, most of my friend's fathers were anglers. We vacationed camping and fishing.
I guess the first time I remember fishing a fly, or a fly rod, was when I was eight or nine years old, but we would have been fishing probably bait with a fly rod back then. I couldn't start fishing a fly until I was in college, when some of my other friends and I got into backpacking, and we found out that fly fishing was the most enjoyable way to fish for little stream trout in the Sierras in California.
So, I can't remember really when I haven't fished, and fly fishing has gone back now what, 65 years, 60 years?”
So, you got inspired or, let's say, taught by your parents and your grandparents, but obviously, there was no information back then, as we know now?
“Well, there was quite a lot of information, I mean, you know, the literature of fly fishing goes back a long way, and I've always been a reader, and I've always frequented libraries, as well, I'd get interested in something, and I'd find books about it, but like most of us, I think you learn by doing, and that's what we did.
There were quite a few books written in the United States on fly fishing, I mean, people like John Alden Knight and Joe Brooks, going back earlier, and I think probably the most influential for me came quite a bit later, which was Charlie Brooks's Larger Trout for the Western Fly Fisherman, which I think was published in the 70s.
“... everybody declared you for a crazy ...”
I discovered it when I was in the Army at Fort Fitzsimons General Hospital Library (Denver, Colorado), and it brought me a wealth of information and more questions, because I'd been up to that point pretty much following the far and fine theory of fly fishing, which still applied in many places, but our rivers in California and Oregon and Washington, Idaho were quite a bit bigger and brawlier, and fishing heavier, in some cases, weighted flies was an inspiration to me. It was really quite fun.
Well, you know, there was a tradition of fly fishing in the West Coast, but the literature was, dominantly from the East Coast (especially from the Catskills), and we read it and tried to apply it, and in many cases, it was effective. In many cases, it just missed the point of the kind of thing we needed to do.
I'm amused now and have been for years when friends of mine from the East Coast talk about going out West to fish, and by out West, they mean Montana, you know, the great theme park of trout fishing, and out West for me means the McLoud and the Sacramento rivers, and the Umpqua and the Rogue. They never quite got that far.”
“... the big notable streams of Northern California are the streams that flow into Lake Shasta now, which was dammed in the 30s, but there's the McLoud, the Sacramento, the Pit, Hat Creek and Fall River are part of that same drainage in a way. They're all wonderful fisheries, they still are.”
Did you also have friends back then when you were young who also fly fish where you could exchange thoughts and learn from each other, or was it solely a very isolated activity?
“I had a group of friends who fished, and as I say, our fathers took us fishing, so we learned from them. And then when I got to college and graduate school, I had a similar group of friends and we backpacked and fished, fished for trout.
But I think the other way I got into fly fishing heavily was because of equipment. My father was a commercial photographer and did a lot of sporting goods catalog photography. And he tended to keep the samples of the products that he was photographing if they interested him. So we had a lot of good fishing equipment roll across our table. And I always thought I was pretty well outfitted.
“... we backpacked and fished, fished for trout ...”
One of my friends, and I'm trying to think when this would have been, probably 1968, had a Winston fiberglass rod, a fly rod, and it was so much better than the rod that I was fishing that I just couldn't believe it. This would have been 1969. I think I was working as a teaching assistant in graduate school, making about $300 a month. And I spent $67 of that $300 on a Winston rod.
And everybody declared you for a crazy or whatever. A really foolish purchase. But it opened up my eyes to what a good fly rod could be. My first good rods were Winstons..”
“Yeah. That was a Browning product. They were fiberglass and some of them weren't bad fly rods, but they weren't built to the level of sophistication that the small rod builders like Winston and Powell and Powell's son-in-law Tony Maslan were building. Or Jim Green’s Fenwick glass rods. Those were significant improvements.
And quite frankly, the rods that were built by those companies are still among my favorites. They cast just as well today as they ever did.”
2) Q: What made you decide to join Harry Wilson to start with Scott rod company?
“I met Harry because there was a tackle store in the Mission District in San Francisco run by an amusing guy by the name of Bill Chappelle. And he carried among other things, fly tying hooks and some products that I wanted. So I would drive over there to shop. I also got interested in fishing for striped bass on a fly and asked Bill about it.”
“ I’d fished for stripers a lot,with bait and lures as a kid, and I wanted to catch them on a fly. Bill said, well, I don't know much about it, but there's a guy who comes in and uses the lathe that I have in my back room. He's trying to build a fly reel and he knows quite a bit about it.
So I came by and met this guy who turned out to be Harry Wilson and we became friends. He was building a reel and he'd also been doing custom rod building of fly rods on at that point, Lamiglas glass blanks. I ordered a rod or two from Harry.”
“I think Harry was born 1912 and he died in 1995. But yeah, he'd retired from a career as a management consultant and had moved to San Francisco. I guess he'd come up first to Monterey to work for Aerojet and hated that and moved up to the city.
But so we became friends, we fished together a bit, we played with some of his rod ideas. And he finally decided he wanted to do it a little better professionally. The idea was that he would use rod building to finance producing this big game fly reel that he designed and patented.
It was an interesting reel that allowed you to preset the drag to a certain point and then back off to a lighter drag setting by turning the handle back about a quarter of a turn.”
“... we lucked out ...”
“... it was really complicated as I think about it now. But so he rented a little space on Cook Street in San Francisco and I signed on. I was in graduate school at the time, but growing disenchanted with academia, it was not as much fun as fishing. I was the first employee and I also, at that point, we incorporated and I put money into it and became a stockholder as well.
Yeah, we were lucky. 1974, 1975, graphite was just starting to come on the market. And at the same time, we were seeing the growth of the fly shop concept. I mean, there weren't that many fly fishing shops in the United States in 1965. Dan Bailey up in Montana, the shops in West Yellowstone, a few on the East Coast, a few on the West Coast. But nothing like there was today. ”
“So we lucked out in two ways. First, we had a new product, a new material to make a new product with. And secondly, we had a growing number of places through which we could sell it. I think if we'd started doing what we were doing in 1965, instead of 1975, we'd have gone nowhere. But graphite took off and we took off with it.”
How old were you when you started, when you joined Scott?
“Somewhere in my late 20s… 28, 29. I pretty much financed my ability to work in the rod business by teaching at night as an adjunct instructor at a community college down in the peninsula. I was in graduate school at Berkeley, and I dropped out of that program before I got my PhD, when it looked like we were actually going to make a go of it with Scott Rods. But yeah, interesting times.”
But that means that you're an engineer by education too?
“No, no. Absolutely not. I was a literature student. And my field was intellectual history. Harry was not an engineer either, though he had an engineering bent.”
So you guys started in 1974, 1975, which was basically the ending era of fiberglass and graphite came along. But you still thought fiberglass was the material to use?
“Precisely. Well, we started with fiberglass, and we built fiberglass up until 1982. We listed it in the catalog. We built, I think, excellent fiberglass rods, but graphite became such a dominant material in the market that that's what consumers wanted. So we gradually shifted from building glass, to glass and graphite, and then principally to graphite.”
So glass was always along the way with graphite models, or did it just end all of a sudden?
“Up through the early 80s, we still listed it in the catalog, and we built it to order after that, so long as we had an inventory of parts. But it really played second fiddle, at best.”
Who made the blanks for Scott?
“Harry started with Lamiglss blanks but became dissatisfied with what he could get them to do for him because he had specific ideas about what he wanted in terms of tapers and material. So he dropped Lamiglas, and I want to say about 1973 or 1974, just before I joined up, and went with a company called California Tackle, which was known for mostly building saltwater conventional rods. But they agreed that if he designed and bought some mandrels, they'd build fiberglass blanks for him.”
“... how many saltwater fly fishermen were there?”
“... and that's what I started with. And we were building on blanks built by Cal Tackle. Those originally were yellow, but we had some problems in that the yellow wasn't always the yellow we wanted. And we thought that a shade of brown would be a better color. So we had them use brown prepreg instead of yellow prepreg. And I think that started about 1981, 1980 or so, exactly the same blanks, same glass, just a different pigment.”
“That's what people had. I mean, the fiberglass cloth itself is translucent and it could be dyed in some ways and yellow was one of the ways they dyed it. It can also be colored by painting it. But yellow was what a lot of people were doing, I think was simply that's what was available.”
Because, for instance, Shakespeare, the earlier rods were just translucent white and no color, I think.
“You know, I can't speak to what lots of earlier rods were. I think a lot of companies painted their rods. Some companies, and Fisher was one of them, used a similar glass cloth to we did but with a different kind of resin. Phenolic rather than polyester resin, But Fisher and Hardy and Winston were all painted from a kind of low brownish tan to a darker brown color.”
What does PowR-Ply mean?
“That came out of Harry's fly reel. The company was named Scott, which was Harry's son’s name, Scott Wilson. And PowR-Ply referred to, in Harry's mind, the way the drag system on this reel he designed worked, which applied power through the drag, hence PowR-Ply. It sounded like a transmission from a 1950s Dodge. And that name gradually withered and died.”
“... andits reel ambitions never really took off. Think about it. In 1975 or 1976, how many saltwater fly fishermen were there? I mean, not that many. I mean, what you could buy, if you wanted a good saltwater reel, was either a Fin-Nor or a Seamaster for a lot of money, or you could buy a Shakespeare, Pflueger disc drag reel. And that was it. There might have been one or two others, but not many. And there weren’t many potential customers.”
“So the market was very small, and I don't think we'd have sold 100 a year. That wasn't going to go anywhere. So we gradually just dropped any interest in the reel. I thought the reel was overcomplicated to begin with.”
Were there any productions even started?
“No. Prototypes only. There's probably a dozen prototypes out there that collectors have amassed. But that was it. Harry gave prototypes to his friends, and as the friends aged and passed on, they sold them to people who collected them. I don't have any.”
“... it was an interesting idea. It was an anti-reverse reel, which, if you backed off on the handle, you could decreaset the drag without taking your hand off the crank. That was kind of nice because if you got a big fish right at the boat, and it made a last minute lunge against the drag you needed, you could just crank back a bit, and the fish would take out line without busting off.”
I think he was just a bit too early with his ideas.
“Precisely. Well, it happens sometimes. Not only too early, but too early in terms of the market. I mean, right now you can buy a trout reel for $89 that has a better drag than most of the saltwater reels of the 1960s.”
3) Q: Early SF Scott glass rods were sold in yellow and brown blanks. What were the decisions to choose for these colors we know as classic ‘glass colors’?
“... the F70/5 seven-footer (five piece pack rod) is what I call the holy grail of Scott rods. It gained us a lot of interest by virtue of the five-piece configuration. And if you remember back in the 1970s still, we were still at the end of the short rod phase where nobody wanted long rods. Everybody wanted a 7 ft or 7.6 ft rod.”
“... the holy grail of Scott rods ...”
“And that was associated in part with the idea that a short rod was more sporting. It wasn't necessarily for a lighter line. I mean, the Fenwick 7.6 ft rod that was standard cast a number six line just like the 8.6 ft did, but the shorter rod was somehow more sporting. We hadn't yet transitioned into thinking about light line fishing as well as light rod fishing, short rod fishing.”
“So, anyway, that five-piece rod got a lot of interest from people, both by virtue of the fact that it was short, it cast a very light line, number four was rare, and it was in five sections. My God, that was astonishing. And it was a hell of a good fly rod.”
Because, you know, when Tom Morgan bought Winston, his first fiberglass rod series, the Stalker series, they were all, I think it was for three and four weights. Maybe even there weren't even much any lines to go along with it.
“... I knew Tom back then, and also in his later years, but you'll remember that Winston was already making bamboo rods for number three and number four lines, the Leetle Feller series. I think Tom wanted something like that, and that's what he came up with, with the Stalker series. I don't know that they sold as well then as they would now, but it was a great innovation.”
“We were at the same time making quite a few four line rods in glass at seven feet, at six and a half feet, at seven and a half feet, and at eight feet. I remember the eight foot four weight model F79, which I think is the second most collectible Scott, is one that came out of a trip that I'd taken...”
“... many of Winston's rods in fiberglass were better rods than ours ...”
“I still remember Andre Puyans at his shop in Creative Sports Enterprises, you know, casting it and thinking it was marvelous. Nobody built a better eight foot four weight rod than Harry, which was a little different, a tighter, stronger action than Winston’s eight foot four weight.”
It looks like Harry's development of Scott rods and Winston, they were quite similar.
“... I think, by and large, many of Winston's rods in fiberglass were better rods than ours, mostly those over eight feet in length. Our rods got a little heavier. We're using polyester resins, which were a little heavier than the phenolic resin glass that Fisher used, which is a little lighter.”
“Fisher and Winston also used a little bit faster tapers in their longer rods, and I thought that made a better long rod. But from eight feet down, I thought our fiberglass rods at Scott were terrific.”
You probably got a whole stash of them somewhere in your locker room 😀
“You know, I actually don't. I have a couple, and that's it. There was no reason for me to own a lot of rods. If I went fishing and I wanted something, I'd just take a demo model off the wall, you know.”
4) Q: Are there any of the early Scott DNA still left in the current Scott company or has it become a different company with its own rod philosophy?
“Yeah, I think they share it very clearly. I mean, Jim Bartschi, who's the president of Scott, went to work for us at Scott in the early mid-80s when he was in college. Actually, I wrote on his employment application, don't hire this guy. He shouldn't be doing this. He needs to go to school and finish his degree. Do something else. He points that out to me on occasion.”
“... but because of Jim and his connection to Harry and to the Scott that we were in the early 80s, that carries along into what they're doing now. And I think they're doing marvelous work.”
“... Nobody built a better eight foot four weight rod than Harry ...”
Back in the 1980’s when I started fly flyfishing here in the Netherlands, fly fishing rods, especially the higher end were either Hardy or Orvis.
“We had limited distribution in Europe. We had a dealer in Paris, Pierre Seyler. We had a dealer in Italy. We sold a few rods in Switzerland, but that was it. (Limited) Production was part of it. And we were very small, but by the same token, you had to know somebody abroad to sell abroad. And we didn't want to go through a mass distributor who took a percentage of things.”
“We preferred dealing directly with shops. I think the one exception to that was Pierre in Paris, who sold to French fly shops. But he didn't do a lot of business. And we didn't make that many rods early on. I mean, if we made 3,000 rods a year, that was huge.”
Well, the first Scott rods I got to try out at fly fishing shows were the early G series, which were quite moderate action rods. And until, let's say, the past 15 years, they evolved to a more faster action rods.
“We did very well from 1976 on with long, light-lined graphite rods, 9 ft 4 , 5 and 6 weights. And in the later ‘70s those rods were considered too fast by a lot of anglers. Now they're considered moderate.”
I assume a lot of it has to do with people's taste, but those rods really put Scott on the map.
“Absolutely. First in the United States, and then in Japan. And to some extent in Europe. We built a 10 ft 5 weight rod that some competition anglers picked up in Europe as well. You know, we built a 10 ft for a 4 and a 10 ft for a 5, which would be considered too slow now, but they were the only game in round then at 10 feet.”
Well, we had one Scott dealer here in the Netherlands somewhere in the early 2000s, but he didn't stay around long. Well, basically Scott never really caught up in this part of Europe, because simply the Sage was too dominant.
“... Sage definitely was dominant, but we couldn't keep up with orders in the United States at Scott. Sage came on the market, what, I'm trying to remember when it would have been. I think early 80s. And they did a marvelous job of marketing and sold a lot.”
“... Orvis is, I think, still in a kind of a mess ...”
“Their first rods were quite slow. when they started business as the Winslow Rod Company, but their later rods, starting with the RP, were, to my mind, quite a bit faster than I enjoyed fishing. But a fast rod makes it easier for a beginner to get the line out in front of him. All he has to do is master a basic stroke and learn not to start before his back cast straightens out, and he can make it work.”
“... a fast, strong butted rod, to my mind, doesn't allow for subtleties of presentation the way a more moderate progressive action rod does. But if you want to sell a lot of rods to people who are just starting fly fishing, make it easy on them and make it fast.”
“I don't know if you remember the spinning rod revolution of the 1950s (ed: I wasn't born yet! 😀). One of the buzzwords then was fast tip, which was, again, a rod which was very tippy and bent only in the top, but that somehow sold to people. Fast is a good word.”
“It has to have evolved, of course it evolved. Everybody evolves, and I think what you'd ask was, was there any of the original DNA there? And it certainly is with the president of the company. I think Scott's doing very, very well in terms of sales.”
“Scott just hired Shawn Combs from Orvis, and he'll bring different ideas as well, but nothing stays the same.I don't hear as much about Sage as I used to. Loomis has always built excellent fly rods, but I still don't hear a lot about them.”
“... Orvis is, I think, still in a kind of a mess. Winston is trying hard to regain some of what it used to have and lost, but I think Scott is standing at the top of the heap right now in terms of the production rod companies. ”
Orvis were typically the slower rods, and all of a sudden all these fast rods came around (mid 1980's) and they had to adapt their rods, which was quite a difficult path.
“... they didn't have what we had on the West Coast, which was a tradition of caring about fly casting. I mean, the Portland Angling Club, the Long Beach Club, the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club, all of whom promoted good casting. Rod design benefited from it.
“... hope that Shawn (Combs) doesn't bring the white sticker ...”
I remember going to fly fishing shows on the East Coast in the late 1970s and 1980s and not seeing anybody who I thought could really cast a fly rod very well. I mean, there were the Joan Wulffs, of course, but that's an exception anywhere. And then there were a few Atlantic Salmon Anglers who could put out a long line. But for the most part, nothing admirable.”
“The West Coast has a tradition of developing fly rods for rigorous casting conditions. Obviously, you know, all the casting tournaments were all originated in the West Coast. With the exception of St. Louis, which still has a fine casting (club). The East Coast has taken years, but I think Orvis is finally catching up with the rest of us.”
Well, let's hope that Shawn doesn't bring the white sticker on the blank 😆
“Think about that, and I'll tell this story from a little further back. When Harry started building rods, he put that little varnished cork on the end of the grip. The composite cork was turned as part of the grip, and it was varnished. And ahead of that was a hook keeper, wrapped in deep red with a white trim wrap above it.
So in almost any picture that showed a fly rod, you could tel ifl it was a Scott rod. There was that little white wrap, and that varnished cork. And of course we benefited from photographers like Val Atkinson, Brian O’Keefe and Dave Lambroughton fishing and using our rods in their photos. It was free advertising. Now what Orvis has done with that white paint is to instantly identify a rod as an Orvis rod. I think it's uglier than sin, but as a marketing device, it's brilliant. ”
5) Q: You started making rods under your own name. How does your ideas about rod design differ from when you made rods at Scott?
“You know, I left Scott in 1993, after they moved to Colorado, and my wife and I moved up to the Umpqua. I stayed on as a director of the company for a couple of years, and then left. They were going in a direction that I wasn't wild about. And they didn't want somebody offsite anymore. So it was a mutually advantageous decision. I took about a year off and fished a lot and goofed off and got bored, and then took a job working for some magazines as an advertising director for them, heading up advertising sales.”
“... I could be an artisan fly rod builder in fiberglass ...”
Why couldn't there be fine fiberglass fly rods like there used to be? I mean, fiberglass had a very short lifespan, maybe 25 years. Bamboo had a longer lifespan, graphite had a longer lifespan.”
“So in probably, what year was it, probably 1998 or 1999, I started fooling around with fiberglass, working with a guy on the East Coast who had a little rolling plant, and I had two or three mandrels made. And when I say two or three, I mean, two butt sections and three tip sections. And I started fiddling with them and seeing what I could do, and that led me to build some rods, which I liked. I didn't build many, I couldn't build many.”
So basically, it was for your own personal use?
“Yeah, but I always had the idea that I could be an artisan fly rod builder in fiberglass, just as some people were doing it in bamboo. When I left that magazine company, I took the project far more seriously. And I knew by then what I wanted in terms of tapers, in terms of mandrel design, in terms of the glass I wanted to use, in terms of how I wanted to present it. It just took me a couple of years to get that done.”
“... but by 2008 or so, 2007, I was in a position to look for a company that could do small time fabrication of my blanks. I obviously wasn't going to be able to roll them myself, though, oddly enough, the Steffen brothers were doing that. I mean, they had the most rudimentary setup you could believe, but they were making some good rods.
But at any rate, I didn't want to do that, I didn't have the space. I wanted to find someone who could do for me in a very small way, what California Tackle Company and Fisher had done for us at Scott, which was contract manufacture to our specifications.”
“... anglers had never given up their fiberglass rods ...”
I started finalizing prototypes. By 2009 or 2010, I'd finished work on three or four models. And I had enough contacts that people were interested. So I was building, you know, a rod a month. It wasn’t any big thing. I never really built much more than four rods a month.”
“... but I did that from 2009 through 2023. And I developed more models, and that was the fun part of it. I mean, I started out thinking, what's the ideal length and line weight for a fiberglass rod? Well, it wouldhave to be just under eight feet for a number four line. So I built what's now my model 794, seven foot nine, three piece, number four. It's a sweet rod.”
I have been hearing a lot of good stories about that model, for sure.
“... I had a bunch of friends who were fishing the Sierras and wanted a small stream rod. So I designed one at seven foot three for a three line: the 733 And I thought, well, how about a longer trout rod, I mean, the basic trout line is a number five. I could stretch things to eight foot three on my first mandrels and came up with the 835, which turned out to be more popular than the 794. I like three piece for the ease of transportation and for the way the two ferrules balance out the action.”
“But designing blanks, designing models was fun. I don't know, what do we have now, seven or eight blanks. And Bill (Tomonori) Higashi and Katsumi Harada are working on more models. We're passing prototypes back and forth. Which I might add would have been a hell of a lot easier had not Trump done away with the de minimis exception to tariffs, which is increasing the price of things coming into the United States. ”
Are your rods similar or different than the Scott rods back then?
“Well, they certainly share some similarities in that I'm using the same kind of ferrule that Harry designed, which was an internal, spigot ferrule with a variable wall thickness rather than a solid one like Fisher and Winston use. And I suppose what I learned in 22 years at Scott can't be unlearned and has to apply to what I'm doing.”
“... I believe in progressive action fly rods. I believe in a mandrel that isn't a single taper from butt to tip, that is a compound taper, which allows for a little lighter tip. I still believe that sanding rods isn't ideal. When I design the amount of glass that goes into a rod, I'd like to know that it stays there, or that sanding isn't going to remove something that I don't want to remove.”
“... t doesn't quite make sense to me ...”
We may do some things in S-glass in the future, but we don't see any reason to at the moment. And I don't see us expanding beyond trout rods. There are better materials for fly rods than fiberglass once you get to eight and a half feet and over.”
Let me go back to your remark about progressive rods. Have you ever thought about making parabolic action rods?
“We make two right now. Bill and Katsumi were working on those and I helped. They call them semi-parabolic.”
“... I learned my casting on the West Coast and I'm heavily influenced by the Golden Gate Angling Casting Club. And I like a progressive action rod.
What we call a parabolic action, which define as a relatively light tip, a relatively light butt and a relatively stiff middle, doesn't please me that much for casting. I've never really spent enough time with rods by Paul Young to know what good ones are like.”
“I don't really quite understand the idea of the cast where a second kick of the rod comes in after you've finished the stroke. It doesn't quite make sense to me, but I know there are good casters and good anglers who do like it, so I'll leave it at that. I like a rod which, the harder you push it, the further it works down into the butt, without sacrificing the stability of the tip end.”
“But graphite has ruled for years, I mean, that's what everybody fished with, and fiberglass anglers were just, you know, mostly old timers who thought that they shouldn't have to change... But a lot of smart anglers had never given up their fiberglass rods, their fiberglass Fenwick's, or their fiberglass Cummings, or their fiberglass Peaks.”
And in your same area, there was also this guy called Mario Wojnicki.
“... oh, Mario, sure. Yeah, he also made and still makes fiberglass rods besides his bamboo rods. He also occupies a unique and admirable place in Scott history.”
“... I first met Mario in about 1975, when he placed an ad in a little local paper to try to sell a couple of Scott rods that he had, early Scott rods. And at that point, he was thinking about going back to live in Poland, and he was trying to cash out.”
“He got to be friends and he got to be a visitor at the Scott shop. And one of the significant things that happened was that he said, well, I'm going to go back to Poland. I'm not going to sell this rod, but I don't want to have a broken tip. Build me an extra tip for my nine foot four weight, very early Scott G from 1976, maybe 1977.”
“... and we did. Mario was a decent caster and he said, these two tips cast differently. We said they can't cast differently. We ordered our 9 ft 4 wgt tip just as we’ve been doing, from Fisher. And he said, well, cast them. We took them out to the ponds or out on the street, and it was true. They were different and we were horrified.
“... Mario kept coming to the shop”
What that led us to do was take an order of about 20 tips for four weights, Scott nine footers and carefully weigh and deflection test them. And they were all over the map. I mean,, it wasn't like there were some 12 line tips and some two line tips, but there were some tips that were heavier than they should be. And some tips that were lighter than they should be. This despite Fisher being pretty careful cutting patterns.”
“And that led us to the program we called Flex Rating. And it was all because of Mario. We would have noticed it sooner or later, but he was the one that brought it to our attention.”
“What happened is, you have a 12 inch wide preg of graphite with fibers distributed across the width of itl. And if you cut a bunch of identical pattern shapes from it, some of those slices are going to have more fibers than others. That made a difference in terms of their weight and their strength.
So what we did was develop a program of matching, for example, light flexing four weight tips to light flexing four weight butts, and those that were stronger and closer to a five weight with butts that were closer to a five weight. So it worked out really well.
“... Mario kept coming to the shop and he, at that point, he was doing a bunch of refinishing work on bamboo, which led him to doing his own bamboo rods and tapers. So we'd cast his rods, he'd come over and cast our rods, and we got to be good friends. His shop was in the East Bay and I was living in the East Bay at the same time, so we saw a lot of each other. ”
“I miss him. He's in France. I don't think he's been back to the States for six months or a year. I think he still owns a house in Richmond, California, but I think he's got it rented out.”
“So he and Mary, I don't know that I'll ever see them again, unless I go to France.”
I still need to visit Mario in this little village in France.
“... and yeah, eventually, of course, Mario went to the bamboo route and his rods have a lot of followers and fans around the world.”
“He did. He agreed to do them and let us sell them. And I don't think we ever sold very many, but we got to the point where it helped him in terms of his name. And I think he was able to go out on his own much better than had he not been associated with us for a while. Oh, but eventually, if you make something really special, eventually you'll be out in the open, of course.”
“... bamboo and glass make better light line short fly rods than graphite does ...”
“It sure helped being under the Scott label, getting his name out. Scott has done that with a number of builders, with Bernard Ramanauskas and with Naoki Hashimoto over in Japan. And they must be getting something out of it, so I imagine it'll continue.”
“Well, bamboo is a great material. It makes for good fly rods. I mean, I think bamboo and glass make better light line short fly rods than graphite does. The two problems with bamboo are that it's a little bit heavier and it's a lot more expensive. And that leads to the third problem, which is you don't want to ruin it, so you tend to keep it in the closet.”
6) Q: Let’s talk more about materials, your rods are made of E-glass.
Please explain what E-glass is and why you think E-glass is still the best material for your rods? Would bamboo be a good material for your ideas about rods and did you consider making bamboo rods as well?
“... ‘E’ stands for electrical and it was used in electrical insulation first, with an early fiberglass iteration. Its successor, ‘S’ is a slightly lighter, greater tensile strength, greater stiffness version, and it was used for structural applications. It makes good fly rods.
S-glass fly rods are made from an S-glass material where the fibers are mostly unidirectional going along the length of the rod, rather than a weave like E-glass. I fooled around with it quite a bit and didn't see the need for it in what I wanted to accomplish. There's nothing wrong with it. I’ve built a number of good S-glass rods, but I just kind of liked the softer feel of E-glass in my rods, which are for the most part, eight feet and under.”
Have you ever considered making a bamboo rod yourself?
“... I don't have the patience. I have any number of friends who make bamboo rods, Mario among them, Tim Anderson, and a bunch of people, and they spend countless hours. I'm just not that patient.
“... who knew how good a writer he (Per) was?”
And the idea of making a mistake after spending 20 hours building a rod and discovering it's only good to grow tomatoes next to, is not something that pleases me. I have great admiration for fine bamboo rod makers. I own bamboo rods myself, and I love to fish them and cast them, but there's no chance I'm going to do it.”
Talking about material costs, I mean, bamboo is quite cheap, but it's all the labor that you got to put in.
“Yeah. Of course. Hours and hours of labor.”
I think maybe you have seen the DVD called Chasing the Taper, where Per Brandin tries out one of his rods, and he didn't like it, and he just broke it after casting it.
“Of course. And you have to be willing to do that.”
“... I joke about tomato stakes, and the mistakes that I've made are holding up tomatoes in my garden. But there were only a couple of hours into those. No, I admire good bamboo, I mean, Per (Brandin) and Mario, Tim Anderson, Chris Vance, a few other guys are making terrific rods. They are top-notch artisans, for sure. Absolutely.”
I've been trying to get a hold of a Powell, but since Per wrote the book (about E.C. Powell), it's unobtainable these days.
“... it used to be that Powells were wildly undervalued, which allowed a lot of us to acquire them. And who knew how good a writer he (Per) was? He's as good a writer as he is a rod maker. A very special guy, that's for sure.”
“E.C. (Powell) did not like short rods. When my father went, drove up to Yuba City from our home in San Francisco to order two rods from him in 1940, he wanted a steelhead rod at nine feet and a trout rod at eight and a half feet. And Powell told him that an eight and a half foot rod was a woman's rod, and that a good steelhead rod should be nine and a half feet, and that's what he ended up getting.
So I think, I'm betting, though I don't know for sure, that Tony Maslan built more short rods than E.C. ever did. I like long rods, too. But it's not necessarily the most appropriate place for fiberglass.”
Let's talk about ferrules.
7) Q: Does type of ferrules (spigot vs female over male) matter or is it just an aesthetic preference? Same with type of grip, your rods are all full wells.
“As I understand it, the idea of that ferrule was John Tarantino’s, who developed it for Fisher, Winston and Hardy. And the idea was to allow a continuous taper between sections. Harry modified it as a semi-hollow, stacked ferrule, where there's a tube within a tube within a tube. So the wall thickness gets progressively thicker toward where the ferrule exits the blank.”
“... they wanted a different-shaped grip, and I'd tell them no”
“Arguably a little lighter, perhaps a little more flexible, but either kind of spigot ferrule, to my mind, is a better system for most rods than the tip-over-butt system that Jim Green developed. Resistance to bend in a tube is most dependent on diameter and not on wall thickness. So that the diameter of a tip-over-butt ferrule, a tip-over-butt ferrule rod, is inevitably smaller underneath the ferrule than it is above the ferrule.”
“They can't bend the same way. I've found, at least in terms of my particular feel, that the tip-over-butt ferrule isn't as smooth in casting as the spigot ferrule. It is more production efficient, particularly since now multi-piece rods can be built on multiple mandrels and indexed in a cutter so that the ferrules fit together easily.”
“... but I like the internal ferrule. I prefer it. Are there good rods with the other kind? Sure.”
So you both like the way it makes the rod bend and also the looks of it, the aesthetic part?
“I like the looks of it. I don't know that it's any lighter or any heavier, but I do like the looks of it. But more than looks, particularly in light line rods where flexibility matters, I think it's just more efficient.”
“I think all of them. I like a very shallow wells grip. I don't like pronounced Wells grips that, for example, Powell put on his rods. They are way too radical for me.
“... everybody's using preformed grips now”
I just refinished a Powell steelhead rod and I saved everything, did everything as close as I could to the original, but I made the grip a little less radical and it's much more comfortable than it ever was.”
“I think the other thing about grips is that everybody's using preformed grips now, and they're buying them from somebody who thinks that the fat part ought to be in the middle of the handle when it really needs to be forward in the first 30 or 40% of the handle.”
“... anyway, I made those grips and those rods to please me. I was in a fortunate position of not having to make a lot of money when I was building rods, and if people didn't like what pleased me, they could go elsewhere. I couldn't care less. I think Bill Higashi and Katsumi Harada and I share similar tastes, which is one of the reasons we get along so well.”
The typical Eastern cigar grip, that's not your taste?
“... I can fish it, but I prefer a little bit of something for my thumb to press against. You remember, Scott rods had a very long, flat taper, and I moved away from that personally, but I think personal preference has everything to do with grip choice. What's comfortable for me may not be comfortable for you.”
“I used to get orders from people for glass rods where they wanted a different-shaped grip, and I'd tell them no. It's how I make it, that's what they're going to get. They can order a blank and build it themselves any way they want.”
Well, I personally like shorter grips, so especially the smaller rods. I like them 11 cork rings rather than 12 or 13.
“My idea on that, maybe very similar to yours, on the little 7'3” model, 5 1⁄2 inches. On the 7'9” model, maybe 5 3⁄4. On the 8' #3 model, 6 inches. On the 8'8” model, which is another model that I like, a longer rod, I go maybe 6 1⁄2 (inches), but I don't want a long, long handle.
On the other hand, I don't want a real short handle, like you see on some Leonards. Some of those little Leonards, Leonard 37s and things, 4 inches long.”
Okay, we're almost to the end.
8) Q: What made you decide to keep Larry Kenney Rods to stay, now with the new owners Tomonori Higashi and Katsumi Harada, rather than just close the shop?
“... I'd done a bunch of design work, and we had a bunch of mandrels. If the rods were any good, which they are, and somebody else can execute the production. why not continue? It's certainly not an issue of money. Tomonori Higashi, he also goes by Bill, and I are reasonably old friends.”
“... there are craftsmen in the United States who are as good, but these Japanese guys are something else”
“He was, in fact, instrumental when I switched away from CTS fabricating blanks for me to having my blanks fabricated in Japan. Bill was the guy who set me up with the company that was doing it.”
“We'd reconnected, we'd sort of known of each other, but we met down in Chile, we were fishing with the same group. We stayed connected, and he expressed an interest in continuing what I was doing, and because we shared values and opinions, that was more than fine with me.”
“It’s been fun, and I've had the greatest of respect for years for Japanese craftsmanship. The execution that they accomplish is just really good. I mean, there are craftsmen in the United States who are as good, but these Japanese guys are something else. So I knew that Bill and Harada would do a good job. And if it lets me keep my name out there a little longer, that's fine too.”
“They're doing quite well. Katsumi is doing three or four rods a month, and I think they're backordered a year, a little more already, with the majority of their orders coming now from Japan and Europe rather than from the United States, because of these stupid tariffs.”
“... at any rate, I'm kind of tickled to watch it, and we're doing some new models. They've come up with a five-piece rod (7.3ft #4) that people are going to like. You should order one. Call Higashi, get a rod.”
Well, you know what's the problem with most rod geeks? We already got way too many rods, so... 😁
“I know. I'm approaching the end of my life as a fly fisher, and I'm not in acquisition mode anymore. Time to get rid of a lot of the stuff that I've accumulated.”
You know how this glass and bamboo disease starts? Let me have one bamboo rod, let me have one nice glass rod, and you know how that ends.
“You can't do it. It'll never happen. I thought what I'd do is I'd see if I could trim my own collection of rods down to a small stream trout rod, a large stream trout rod, a steelhead rod for inland rivers, a steelhead rod for the coast, and a nine-weight and an 11-weight for the salt. Six or eight rods. I've never been able to get that to happen. There's always a weird rod that I need or want to keep.”
Let's talk about fishing.
9) Q: What is your favorite fly fishing destination and what makes it so special?
What is your favorite way to fish?
“... there's no way I can answer that question.”
“I lived for 10 years on the North Umpqua River, a fabulous steelhead stream, and that would have to be one of them. But by the same token, I've fished in Alaska, Canada, Slovenia, Mexico, New Zealand, Bolivia Argentina, Chile, and there are all sorts of wonderful places to fish. It's too hard to decide.”
“... there's no way I can answer that question”
“I know you'd asked another question, where would the last place I'd fish? And I think it’s uncharacteristic for the kind of rods I'd build. if I had one stream left to fish, and I won't even give you the name of the stream because we don't talk about it. But at any rate, a little coastal stream in Northern California that's overgrown by redwoods and hosts beautiful steelhead coming back in this time of year. That would be the place I'd like to fish last.”
“I'll be 80 years old in six months. So difficult trips are sort of going to be off the table. I'll probably go down to Baja again for a week this year. I doubt I'll go back to New Zealand. So most of my fishing will be in California and the Western United States. That doesn't mean that if an interesting trip pops up, I won't jump on it if I’m able.”
“... I'd love to go back and fish Slovenia again. I'd love to fish the Soca River. My good angling friends are going down to New Zealand late this month for three weeks. I can't afford the time away and I can't walk that much anymore. I mean, they're doing seven or eight miles a day on riverbeds. That's more than I'm happy with.”
“So I think a good deal of my fishing will be from a boat rather than wading. But again, I don't know.”
Well, you could try the chalk streams in England where you can just sit on the bench when you're tired and wait for the rise 😀
“That would bore me beyond belief! For the same reason that I'm too impatient to build a bamboo rod. I can't stand still when I'm fishing. But I do like to cast (to) a fish.”
You might consider the Spanish Pyrenees.
“I've heard that that's good. I've heard there's a lot of hiking involved.
Well, some parts, but there are parts where, you know, obviously you have to walk some part of it. But it's not like eight miles in New Zealand, you know, it's not that kind of distance. That was one of the destinations on my bucket list.”
“I fished in Bolivia in the jungle, but I'd like to fish for peacock bass in Brazil, though I'm not sure I could tolerate the heat. But Spain would be interesting.”
Yeah, fly to Barcelona, and I will take you.
“And there were a bunch of little streams in the Midi in France my cousin Robert wanted to take me to. . I'd love to go. Hell, I want to go back to all of it. It's all great, you know.”
Let's make some plans then.
“... there's no food that can wake me up in the middle of the night.”
“... hire a donkey to carry me”
“When I wake up in the morning, I used to wake up in order to have breakfast, but no. Like my fishing, I eat around. All good food. That was one of the things that Mario and I shared. Eating and good wine are important.”
That's a good part of Spain. The food is excellent.
“True”
That's why you should come, because you know, I've been fishing in Austria for 20 plus years, and I've been eating those damn schnitzels every night, and it really gets bored.
“My French cousins tell me that they go to Italy for the food in Italy.”
Oh, that's also good, yeah.
“And I go to France for the food in France.”
But Italy can be a bit crowded, some streams, there are a lot more fishermen in Italy than in Spain.
“Well, it's worth thinking about. Let me think about this.”
11) Q: How would you like to be remembered?
“... I've never given that a minute's thought, to tell you the truth.”
You're the last of the people who had started the (pioneering) fiberglass rods back in the 70s, you know, the Tom Morgans, Harry Wilson, Russ Peak and that kind of people, but you're certainly one of the last still around.
“I hope people will enjoy the rods that I've made, and think kindly of me for that reason. I hope people will be amused by some of the writing that I've done.”
“... but you know, it's not something I pay attention to. You know, we're all gone in an instant. And whether that instant is a year or 10,000 years, whatever.”
“I think that's about it in the forum. You don't know how many people read it and don't participate, but you're right, it is small. But given the number of fiberglass rod builders there are today.”
“... It's so insignificant that it's very significant”
“Well I think, you know, you can divide the fiberglass world into the people who make their own blanks and their own rods, the people like me and Higashi and Harada who design and build the rods but don't fabricate the blanks, and then the people who just build on what other people like us have done. And there's value in all of it.
This is fishing for God's sake! It's supposed to be fun, that's all.”
Yeah, well, we really love to talk about something insignificant like fishing, you know, it doesn't save lives or make the world a better world, but it sure helps us to keep away the nasty stuff.
“It's so insignificant that it's very significant. That's a great ending.”
Thank you, Larry.
Let's say, let's consider Barcelona, Spain as an option in the future.
“Perhaps you might hire a donkey to carry me up the road.”
Well, that can be arranged 😀
12) Q: Final question. Where would you fish if it was the last day you would be able to fish?
Read Larry’s answer in question 9.
Thank you to Nate Stansfield of Freestone Vintage Tackle for letting me use some pictures from his library!
Update Feb 6, 2026:
Erik Peterson sent me a picture of the lathe that Harry Wilson used to make the reels.
3) Q&A with Edoardo Scapin
4) Q&A with Hoagy Carmichael
5) Q&A with Jorge Trucco
6) Q&A with Per Brandin
7) Q&A with Jack Dennis
8) Q&A with Charles Jardine
9) Q&A with Christopher Rownes
10) Q&A with Leon Hanson
11) Q&A with Joe Messinger Jr.
12) Q&A with Mike Valla
13) Q&A with Larry Kenney
