Fishing since he was a child, Moorhead Mayor George Holland enjoys occasionally getting away from the daily grind and escaping to any of the Delta-area lakes to see how the crappie and bream are biting.
Raised “with a cane pole in my hand,” these days Mayor Holland takes his boat and his wife, Johnna, to enjoy time together. It was something they started when they first got married nearly six decades ago and were living and working in Missouri.
“We would get up early Saturday morning on the weekend or we'd get out of work and we'd head over to Missouri, over to Illinois, and we'd borrow a little fishing boat and we'd sing that song, ‘On the Road Again, On the Road Again, I just can't wait to get on the road again, the life I love is making music with my friends, I just can't wait to get on the road again,’” Holland and his wife harmonized.
Singing and fishing for bluegill and crappie or whatever is biting that particular day, the Hollands enjoy the serenity of the lake and just being together doing something they both love. Recently, Johnna had knee and hip surgery and that has kept them out of the boat.
“We did it over the years. It's something we shared together. I’ve just been kind of taking care of her,” he said.
When the Hollands retired from their automotive jobs and moved back to the Delta, Holland was happy to get back to his roots and back on Sunflower County lakes. He’s used plenty of live baits and enjoys putting a Slater’s jig on his line from time to time. Using his wits and not so much technology, the mayor manages to keep his cooler full with the day’s limit.
“I didn't do much trolling. I tried a little bit in the later days, but mostly just using one pole at a time,” he explained. “I wasn't one trying to find the fish. I didn't have the Live Scope. Yeah, we searched for them. We did real fishing. We didn't have to stop right on top of them. We just got out and just enjoyed it. We enjoy fishing.”
The husband-and-wife team doesn’t compete so much and the mayor confesses he usually catches more – but when he doesn’t, it’s because he’s tending to his servant-husband duties.
“Most of the time I caught more but I'll tell you this, sometimes she'd beat me because I was busy untangling her hook,” he said with a laugh. “I'd be going down the lake and she'd say, ‘stop, stop, stop,’ like I got brakes on that thing. She got caught on something.”
Holland doesn’t fish for trophies and admits his biggest fish is probably a three-pound crappie and a big bass here and there. He just sticks to crappie and bluegill and getting enough for a decent fish fry.
“Always liked that kind of fishing. We did some catfishing. When we were up North, we'd go to the Mississippi River in St. Louis with some guys sometimes and do some, what we call tightlining. We did some of that but I wasn’t that diehard of a fisherman. I just like to get away and get out on the weekend and just go fishing.”
He explained his definition of a diehard fisherman as “When fishing season comes, they go to a camp somewhere and stay all week fishing. I know a few like that but it's just something we do together. We always enjoyed getting away. And when the kids were small, I think we kind of burned them out on fishing. We'd be fishing on the weekend when they might want to go someplace else,” he said.
The Hollands’ favorite fishing hole is Little Eagle Lake in Holmes County.
“Little Eagle was our favorite but we went to Bee Lake. There's a place on the other side of Belzoni, we call it the Cut-Off, or River Chute. I didn't do much on Lake Washington, a little bit on Lake Ferguson, but not a lot. We kind of stayed local around this area,” he said.
He admitted he didn’t have a great fishing story, it’s just “something we enjoyed doing together. We've been married 56 years and we started fishing. We got married at 18.”
Over the years, he’s had several fishing boats to meet their fishing needs.
“We’d trade something for a fishing boat or buy a cheap fishing boat, but we had fishing boats,” he said.
And true to his servant’s heart, Holland would keep what he needed and find a home for the rest of his day’s
atch.
“I give away a lot of fish. There are people who like fish, so we give them away. I keep as many as I want to clean,” Holland said.
And once he cleans them, he gets to cooking as well.
“I think in the latter years, I do more cooking fish than she does. For bone fish, pan fish, we usually fry. Some of the other catfish fillets, sometimes we'll bake them, broil them, grill them,” he said.
And the one cooking secret he has is quite simple.
“I think the secret is the temperature of your oil. I'll take a thermometer and put it in the grease and I like to get it up to 350 (degrees), and then I'll cook it. It doesn't take long, and you get it nice and crisp on the outside but you're still juicy on the inside. It doesn't dry it out,” he said. “I bought a double-basket fish fryer down in Jackson not long after I moved here. The secret is 350. If you get that grease up to 350, you don't want it much hotter than that because it'll burn fast, burn your batter. But if you get it up to 350 and kind of keep it around there, you can cook fish all day, and it'll turn out really good, and it's crispy, just brown, just the right color.”
The Hollands can’t wait to get their boat back in the water and he admits, “I'm not really a competitive fisherman. I don't have to catch more than somebody else or bigger than somebody else. Just the enjoyment of being out in the outdoors and fishing. Just being out in God's air, in God's country.”
