A Close- Up Look At People Who Matter : Salesman’s New Line: Hooking Kids on Fishing

During a morning’s worth of fishing, the girl hadn’t caught a thing.

But she cast her line again and again into Legg Lake in Whittier, even skipping breaks for food.

“Catching the fish is not important in this whole thing,” said Mickey Frankel, who had noticed the determination in the 16-year-old girl, a resident of a home for abused and neglected children in Sylmar. “But, she was the one who really tried hard.”

He awarded her with the prize of the day, a watch donated by a tackle shop.

“Thank you so much,” said the girl, who in Frankel’s opinion had improved the most since their first casting lesson in the yard of Hathaway Children’s Services only three days earlier.

“I haven’t been fishing in a long time.”

Frankel, 49, of Woodland Hills, had a 20-year career as a salesman until a misdiagnosed problem with his adrenal glands a year and a half ago left him disabled and unable to work.

Living with pain and little motivation, he was asked by his wife, Janis: “If you could do anything with the rest of your life, forget money, forget anything else, what would it be?”

His answer came quickly.

“Fishing.”

Frankel felt a career in fishing was out of the question, but he decided to turn his lifelong passion into a volunteer effort, founding the Cast-a-Line Children’s Foundation, which would introduce kids to the sport.

In the group’s first excursion Saturday, Frankel and a handful of his fishing buddies took a couple of dozen children from the Hathaway facility in Sylmar to the Los Tiburones (The Sharks) Youth Fishing Tournament at Whittier Narrows Recreation Area.

Only one fish, a rainbow trout, was caught by the group during the four-hour event. Still, it was enough to earn fifth place in the 10-club tournament.

The lake had been stocked with 1,000 pounds of fish for the event by the state Fish and Game Department.

“If they put 1,000 pounds of fish in here, I don’t know where they are,” Frankel said. “They probably went to the Motel 6 across the road.”

Joking around and spending time with friends in the outdoors are really what fishing is about, Frankel and his crew said.

“You don’t have to catch anything to have a good time,” said Steve Berry, a neighbor of Frankel’s in Woodland Hills.

“There’s nothing a fisherman likes more than taking kids fishing,” Frankel said. Frankel took Rich Nelson of Valencia, another fishing buddy, on his first fishing when Nelson was 5. He still calls Frankel “Uncle Mickey.” The kids from Hathaway don’t call him that--yet.

But the trip has helped them open up to each other and build new friendships, said Tairy Vogel, a child-care worker at Hathaway, which is on a 300-acre residential campus with several cottages.

“I’ve seen them talking more with kids from other cottages,” Vogel said. “That wasn’t there before.”

Frankel said Cast-a-Line needs more volunteers, corporate sponsors and donations of fishing equipment from businesses to continue the program and expand to include more disadvantaged and disabled children.

For more information, call Frankel at (818) 703-6193. His e-mail address is Micknator@aol.com.

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