Gone Fishing (Of Moose And Men)
By Stinson Carter
BlackBook Magazine, March 2007

“John Wayne taught his kids how to fish here,” says Patrick Holleran, owner of the Sportsmen’s Lodge. It opened in 1946 as a clubhouse for the Trout Lakes Farm that supplied restaurants as far off as Vegas and offered locals a place to toss back beers while tossing out lines.

Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, and Bette Davis were also among those who dangled liverwurst-baited rods into the lakes to lure trout that the lodge staff would grill and serve on white tablecloths with a martini, or on the bar with a lager. Though suburbia has since turned the lakes into a pond, the Sportsmen’s Lodge has barricaded itself from the strip malls of bordering Ventura Boulevard with a parapet of towering eucalyptus and palm trees, and the stubborn ghosts of the past… click to continue reading