Half Makes A Full Turn

The committee has come to the right person on this one. Although I have never been on intimate terms with the subject of your inquiry, I have been around him off and on for a long time now, my hobby having upon numerous occasions taken me into the powerful riptide of his obsession, and as a result of these random encounters I am able to offer the following observations in the hope that the committee will find them of some use.

I believe it was in 1958, possibly '57, that I first met Half Nelson and his brother Full, twin sons of a wrestling father. They were bait dealers on Santee Cooper Lake in South Carolina. I am under the impression that it was their father who put them on to the trade. He ran a garage on the highway between Moncks Corner and Charleston, and evidently the sight of all those fishermen pouring up to the lake on Saturday morning started the wheels turning in his mind. Half and Full pieced together a van out of the acres of wrecked vehicles behind the garage and went into the business of supplying crickets and minnows, night crawlers and bloodworms to the fishing camps and boat ramps that were rapidly being built around the lake. It has occurred to me since then that the soaring volume of Half's voice, an impressive instrument once it is revved up, may well have been developed during those early years in Berkeley County when he was trying to make his brother hear him above the choiring crickets in the back of the van.

Full never talked much himself. He was the plodder of the two and always looked as though he had been rolled through a mixture offish slime and mud and his clothes were rotting off him. Half, on the other hand, kept creases in his starched khakis from morning until night and even wore a rubber apron while ladling minnows from the big watering trough they pulled along behind the van on a pair of wheels. The chore of getting inside the trough and driving the minnows into a corner where they could be netted always fell into Full's capable hands, while the dry twin sipped coffee with the camp owner or distributed cards with NELSON BROS. BAIT SERVICE printed in the right-hand margin.

One shimmering morning in May, 17 years ago, a fishing rod under one arm, a tackle box under the other, I crossed the parking lot of Homer Price's boat ramp on the north side of the lake. Half stepped from behind a locust tree and cheerfully slipped one of these cards into my shirt pocket. I have kept it ever since. A school of minnows is nibbling at his and his brother's name—whose idea could that have been, Half's or the printer's?—and into the vacant white space at the center of the card several teams of night crawlers are drawing a crowded cricket cage, unaware of the largemouth bass swerving in from the upper right-hand corner after the parading baits.

Although I did not know it at the time, an important event had just occurred in Homer Price's parking lot: the Nelson Bros. had unveiled their first Bloodwormmobile. How I missed seeing this famous vehicle on its maiden voyage, I have never understood. The photograph which appeared the following morning in the Sunday edition of the Charleston News and Courier clearly shows my car parked in the shady background, yet no matter how often I review the events of that long-ago Saturday, drawing as it were a seine through the murky depths of memory, a figure Half would appreciate, either the net comes up empty or with trivia caught in the mesh: what kind of sandwich I had for lunch (bologna) or the stabbing scent of a carp rotting in the weeds. So I dump my unproductive haul in disgust and plunge back into the stream, convinced that somewhere in there is the van I am looking for painted a gory red with bloodworms two feet long dripping from the hood and both doors.

One of my father's most cherished memories of growing up in Atlanta was of being asked by the corner druggist to taste a drink he had just concocted. "Who knows," my father would say, pleased by his brush with destiny, "if I had not found that drink delicious, Coca-Cola might have gone down the drain." Who knows, if I had not had fishing so grossly on my mind that it blotted out all else, or if I had been more observant, I might be able to say to my children that I was on hand the day the first Bloodwormmobile rolled out of Half's inventive mind.

He had a fleet of these vans running around South Carolina before the year was out. The publicity helped him. There wasn't a newspaper in the state that didn't carry one or two pictures of a "bait buggy" in action, usually with Half at the wheel. But as important as the Bloodwormmobiles were in getting the organization off the ground, some credit must be given to the unusual variety of minnow which Half distributed. He imported them from one of the Central American countries and they had the advantage over our local minnows of staying alive longer on a hook. Being a plug fisherman myself, I never used any of the "Nelson Minnows," as they were described in fat black letters on the back of each van with the addendum THE BAIT WITH NINE LIVES. Quite frankly, the ones I saw looked to me no different from ordinary mud minnows, although fishermen more expert than I in these matters verified everything Half said about them. I have always regretted not seeing a television show on which Half appeared with a minnow that had spent close to an hour in the belly of an 11-pound largemouth bass before being used a second time to catch an eight-pound rockfish. Still very much alive, the minnow was circling inside a small Plexiglas tank on Half's lap.

The committee may have gotten the impression that Full has disappeared from this narrative. Not really. While Half was telling the world about the miraculous minnow, Full was installing a new differential in one of the vans or laying in a fresh supply of minnows or rotating the tires. He belonged in the background of the operation, a hidden beam holding it up, and so far as I know he never gave any indication of resenting this role. Presumably it had been his to play ever since he looked around as an infant and saw Half lying in the crib beside him. They were identical in all ways except one: Full's powerful body hunched under a bulging pack of muscles was just the vehicle he needed to carry out his abilities, whereas the exact same body on Half provided a disguise for the promotional wizard pulling the strings inside. The fighter who looks like a bookkeeper is a lucky fighter because he has an element of surprise working in his favor. Who ever expected such a blizzard of jabs from such a dreamy blue sky? So it was in Half's case; he was one of nature's favored few.

I ran into Homer Price one day in Charleston coming out of the A&P and asked him how business was on the lake. The Nelson Bros. had recently launched a new venture from his ramp, a bait boat "for the fishermen afloat," and I thought he might have picked up a few new customers as a result.

"Slow," he said. "Too slow. I plan on selling out."