The Gasque backstory

As Townsend, Tennessee, gears up for Troutfest 2009, Knox.com features a story about the book that will be helping generate funds for the fly-fishing exposition, Hunting and Fishing in the Great Smokies, by Jim Gasque.

Writer Chad Gay caught up with Dan Pitts, president of the Great Smoky Mountains Chapter of Trout Unlimited, who helped bring the out-of-print 1948 classic back into print last fall. Read the full story of Pitts’s efforts to track down Gasque’s heirs and find a good home for the book with UNC Press. (It helped that editor-in-chief David Perry is an avid fly-fisherman, himself!) Pitts made sure that the book would continue to serve the Smokies in more ways than one — a portion of the book’s net revenue goes toward Trout Unlimited’s Embrace-A-Stream program to “protect, reconnect, restore, and sustain coldwater fisheries in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.”