ran across this note on Pete ...evidently a teacher.
"Hi Butch, Haven't written in awhile, but the bit in today's T&T about noodling, brings to mind a couple related incidents I thought you may be interested in. In about 1937 we lived on a farm four miles north of Sulphur, and four or five of my folk's friends came to help harvest about 40 acres of oats, mowing and baling. After the day's work was done, all the men would go down to the creek and go swimmin'. One of the men was a big Choctaw Indian named Otis Lumpkin, and he decided to catch a catfish for supper, by noodling in the bank barehanded. He was groping, with just his nose out of the water, when suddenly he rose up out of the water and threw a big water moccasin up on the bank.Needless to say, we didn't have fish for supper that night. A couple years later, when I was in fourth grade at Washington School in Sulphur, a man named Pete Vanderslice came by the school to visit a teacher friend of his ( Pete had been the principle of the old Fairview school that burned down about 1936, about halfway between Davis and Sulphur). He had caught a huge catfish down on the Washita River south of Davis. The head had been cut off and was lying on the back floor of his 1936 Chevy.The seat had been removed, and the body of that ol' fish was laying with it's tail curled up on one side and the bloody end against the other side. Pete said that he was sure that the fish was Old Black Joe, a notorious killer fish that had spiked and killed a black man a couple years before, who was attempting to put a rope through it's gills, under water, while noodling. That was the biggest freshwater fish I have ever seen. It must have weighed 125 pounds or so. Keep those T&Ts coming. I really enjoy all of them." -Bob Elliston
may be Perry Pete Vanderslice found in 1910 in Okfuskee cty. a Perry Vanderslice b 10/9/1907 in Ok d 3/13/1999 in Ponca City Ok