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THE OUTDOORS : It’s Like Having a Picasso on Your Desk : Lord of the Flies

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Times Staff Writer

Poul Jorgensen was playing at being a fraud.

“People think the Beaverkill is where the fly tyers sit all winter and tie flies,” he told a Los Angeles audience of fly fishermen recently. “I don’t. When the leaves are off the trees and all the fishermen are gone, I go out and take all the flies they left behind out of the trees and sell them.”

Fly anglers know Jorgensen as the creator of some of the most beautiful and delicately intricate artificial fly patterns in the world, the maestro of the craft. Having a Jorgensen fly, one said, “is like having a Picasso on your desk.”

Those who have met him know that he also has a wonderful sense of humor, flavored with a Danish accent.

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“Some writers don’t understand me,” he said.

But when admirers, including some distinguished fly tyers in their own right, approach him, humbly requesting that he autograph his fifth and latest book, he puts them at ease by saying, “I didn’t invent fly tying. I didn’t even have an accent when I came to this country.”

After a life of upheaval, Jorgensen, 63, is comfortably settled in the Catskills in Roscoe, N.Y.--”Trout Town, USA”--a legend in his time in a legendary locale for fly fishing, a place dedicated fly anglers regard with reverence. The Winnewemoc, which meets the Beaverkill at Junction Pool, flows 30 feet from his back door.

“I’ve been very lucky,” he said.

Truthfully, Jorgensen has been a survivor. He survived the Nazis in Denmark, the fast lane of corporate life in New York, a failed marriage and, finally, alcohol.

None of that is in his new work, “Poul Jorgensen’s Book of Fly Tying,” (Johnson Books, $19.95), save for a single line of dedication: “ . . . with gratitude to Bill W., to Dr. Bob, and to my sweetheart, Carol. They saved my life.”

Asked about that, Jorgensen paused, realizing that the giveaway was that only first names were used, in the tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous.

He sighed, then told the story: “Twenty years ago I had a drinking problem, and in 1970 I came into Alcoholics Anonymous. When I introduce myself I just say, ‘My name’s Poul and I’m a recovering alcoholic. I haven’t had a drink today.’ ”

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He goes to meetings three or four times a week.

“I’m not ashamed of it. I’m proud of it. I’m programmed to drink, but I don’t, and I don’t because of Alcoholics Anonymous.”

The drinking coincided with a crisis in Jorgensen’s life. He had a good job with a Swedish office equipment company as a mechanical engineer. Too good. The pressures drove him to drinking, and his wife left, taking their three children.

“They promoted me to director of technical services with headquarters in New York City, and they gave me 50 people (to supervise),” he said. “All the electronics started coming out. I had to re-train myself completely, since I was mechanical. I could only work with things that moved. After two years there, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I felt boxed in.

“They wanted to send me back to Europe, but I said, ‘No. I quit.’ ”

He drifted in misery to Baltimore, where his fly tying skills led to a job as a consultant for a tackle company.

“One day, I was tying flies at a banquet in New York City, and three weeks later I was at another place in Pennsylvania and this guy came running after me . . . said he’d been looking for me all up and down the East Coast. Said he wanted me to write a book for them.”

That was 1972, the book was published in ’73 and, Jorgensen said, “As soon as that was out, another publisher asked me to do one for him, and people started asking me to come and do their banquets. I was very lucky.”

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He said he couldn’t have done it without Bill W., Dr. Bob and Carol.

“I would have been dead,” he said.

A lot of the people he grew up with are. Jorgensen was 14 when German troops rolled into his town, Odense, on the Danish island of Funen.

“It was five years of hell,” Jorgensen said. “They kept us hostage for five years. For the last two years of the war I was part of the Danish Resistance movement.

“On the fourth of May, 1945, we all helped throw the Germans out. The soldiers they had in Denmark at the end of the war were kids 15, 16 years old and old men, most of them injured. We came out with machine guns and pointed south. They just laid down their weapons and kept walking. The British and Americans were coming up from the south.

“The worst of all were the Danish collaborators. They barricaded themselves and we had to flush ‘em out.”

Jorgensen said there were trials. For some.

“Yeah. The ones that survived had trials.”

From those grim times, Jorgensen emerged to distinction in his gentle art, and when he did he was somewhat caught by surprise.

“One day I was doing a demonstration and I finished a salmon fly. The person said to me, ‘Do you want to sell that?’

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“I said, ‘Yeah.’

“ ‘How much is it?’

“ ‘Oh, $25.’

“So I figured if people were willing to pay $25 for a salmon fly, why should I sit down and tie a dozen fishing flies for $6.50?

“Now I only tie for collectors. It’s an investment. They figure that someday I’m going to die.

“It’s not that I tie a better fly than some of the fine amateur tyers we have today, but they can’t sign Poul Jorgensen’s name to it. They’re not paying for the fly. They’re paying for my name. This may sound egotistical, but that’s the fact.

“No slimy fish are ever gonna get their teeth in these flies because these are, unframed, $50 apiece--unless some person who is a millionaire wished to fish with these exclusively.”

Jorgensen’s eyes crinkled behind his cutoff spectacles.

“But sometimes I play a little. I have the urge to go down behind the house and see if it works. When somebody asks me, ‘Did you go fishing yesterday?’, I say, ‘No, I just went down and tested a couple of flies.’ ”

Jorgensen’s flies start at $50, framed $125. He sold a framed group of 11 flies to an Oxnard collector for $2,500. Still, he has trouble keeping up with the demand.

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“I’m about a year behind on delivery right now,” he said.

His new book, he said, “is for somebody who has never heard or seen anything about fly tying.”

It has already sold 3,000 copies, sending the publisher back to the printer.

“I am an all-round fly tyer but there are certain things I am best known for,” Jorgensen said. “Salmon flies and some of my realistic patterns.”

The dry fly, Jorgensen said, “is considered the purest form, (but) if the object was to take as many fish as you could within a certain period of time, (using) a nymph I would out-fish a dry-fly fisherman, 10 to one. The fish takes about 90% of his food underwater.”

But, Jorgensen said with a chuckle, he would never use a nymph, which is meant for fishing beneath the surface, because “that’s too close to worm-fishing.”

The idea, he said, is not necessarily to imitate nature’s insects.

“It’s mostly making it attractive to the fish.”

Jorgensen is a strong advocate of the growing catch-and-release philosophy. He gives pins to people who fish that way on the Beaverkill.

“Limit your kill,” he says, “don’t kill your limit.”

Jorgensen noted a recent trend, that fly fishing is becoming attractive to young, upscale people.

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“They want the very best equipment,” he said. “They don’t know how to use it, but it has to be the best.”

He has created a fly just for them, the yuppie. “And, believe it or not, it works,” he said.

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