Cliff Minton, of Montague, has been writing his book, “The White,” for 50 years; he just didn’t always realize that’s what he was doing.
Minton, 85, completed his book in April and had a book signing at the Book Nook in Montague in October; the store bought 10 of his 100 printed copies. (As of Monday, the store said, it was down to two of those copies remaining.)
It was his daughter, Cliff said, who convinced him to publish the book, a collection of short stories chronicling his time fishing the river.
“I just started writing stories, typing them up and getting them on paper,” Minton said. “My daughter read some of the stories along the way and asked me, ‘When are you going to publish the book?’ I had, over the years, given people copies of stories and they’d been enthused about it, and my daughter was enthused about it. I said, ‘I don’t know. It’s 50-60 percent done.’ She said, ‘Why don’t you finish it and we’ll get it published?’ She did the work, I did mine and three people proofread it over months, and we finally got it published in Grand Rapids.”
Minton has kept meticulous logs of his fishing trips over the years - his book contains a short story about his 1,000th fishing trip on the river, which took place in October 2013. However, his book is not a how-to manual; the fishing trips merely serve as the backdrop for his many stories.
“I’ve had a positive response, and I think it’s because it’s not about how to catch fish,” Minton said. “It’s about the river and the people on the river at that time and the interactions.”
One of the more dramatic stories in the book revolves around the sinking of a boat, the Play Pen, not too far off the shore of Lake Michigan, that Minton and one of his most common fishing companions, the late John Mussman, witnessed while out on a fishing trip in 1977.
“People on the lake even saw the smoke, called the Muskegon sheriff’s department, and they came down,” Minton said. “It was a grandfather, son and grandson. It was quite a story of how they got there. The grandson couldn’t get on the boat until he learned to swim. It was a good thing he did, because he jumped out of the boat to abandon the raft, and then came back to evacuate the boat.
“I talked to a guy in the Coast Guard once about the odds of swimming that far through rough water, and he said it almost never happens.”
Of course, Minton could’ve written a how-to fishing book if he’d wanted to. He is certainly well qualified, given his many years on the river. He and Mussman, who Minton said is known among anglers as one of the best steelhead fishermen to patrol the White River, took many trout out of the White during their frequent trips onto the river. Minton said he joked that his goal after retiring was “to eliminate trout in Oceana County.”
“We caught a lot of fish,” Minton said. “We caught trout by the tons, and that’s not an exaggeration. I went through and checked the records. The fishery was unbelievable here in the White, and the state as a whole never found that out.
“What I was looking for was how much natural reproduction was going on in the White system. What I found was that trout are in just about every feeder creek in the White River system...They hide under edges, under logs and stuff, and you don’t catch any. You go back on the rainy days and it’s amazing what’s in these creeks, the salmon and the steelhead.”
Minton has fished the White River since moving to Montague in 1973. He and wife Mary came to Montague from West Virginia by way of Detroit when Cliff got a job at Teledyne Continental Motors in Muskegon and bought a home on Fruitvale Road. Cliff and Mary left West Virginia, their home state, in 1959 when a rapid downturn in the coal industry turned what was a nationwide recession into, at least in the Mountaineer State, a full-blown depression.
“I had $54, and I got a train to Detroit and got a job for $81.10 a week,” Cliff said. “I couldn’t even get a resume accepted in West Virginia. I was going to college, but there were no jobs. They became ghost towns overnight, so I knew I had to leave.”
Minton, a lifelong outdoor enthusiast, “couldn’t stand Detroit” because of the lack of nearby outdoor opportunities, so he sought out an area where he could find some. That’s what led him to Teledyne Continental Motors and to Montague. Outside of a 16-month work stint in Alabama, he’s fished “The White” ever since.
Minton said when he first began fishing the river, it did not have a reputation as providing a bountiful collection of prospective catches. That was just fine with Minton, as it meant he would largely have the river to himself. Minton has enjoyed being a lone outdoorsman going back to his West Virginia childhood. His dad would not only permit Minton to hunt by himself, he encouraged it for safety reasons.
“My dad would let me hunt alone at 12,” Minton said. “He’d say that the most dangerous gun when you’re hunting is yours, and the next-most dangerous is your buddy’s. I learned early that if I wanted to hunt in West Virginia, I had to do it myself. It carried over to fishing and everything else.”
Minton has fished the White a ton, of course, but he’s also taken trips to indulge his love of the outdoors. His book includes a story about him and Mussman taking a hunting trip to Idaho that included a venture into the Salmon River, also known as “The River of No Return” because of how sparsely populated the area is.
“Three hundred square miles, no roads,” Minton said of the area. “That Indiana boy (Mussman) went up there and saw those mountains and threw up for two days, but he got by alright.”
The fish Minton has caught over the years have largely been used as meals, whether for him and his family or for others. He said in their younger days, he and Mary would donate some of their catches to the elderly, or to friends who liked to eat fish but just didn’t catch them. At one time, he used frozen catches and launched a free fish fry in the spring to encourage people to help get Stony Creek, a White River tributary in Benona, to clean up the river to get it ready for the fishing season.
“The attendance jumped from seven or eight to 40,” Minton said with a chuckle. “We had three deep fryers going simultaneously...We’d try to keep cooking so we could feed them and let them take fish home with them. We froze a lot of the fish we kept with ideas of giving them to people for the fish fry.”
The White kept calling Minton after he accepted a work transfer to Alabama, and he and his wife returned to the White Lake area after 16 months because they both decided that was where they wanted to be. Minton retired in 2000, opening up even more time for fishing.
Health has kept Minton off the river for much of this year; he said his last fishing trip was in January. He needs a hip replacement and hopes to return to the White after that’s done.
In the meantime, he hopes locals are interested in his stories of his many, many times up the river. If he gets enough interest, he said, he’ll order another round of books.
“I’m at the point where I have to make a decision about whether to get more printed or just be satisfied with what I’ve done,” Minton said. “I think it’d be a good seller at Christmas if people knew it was available.”
