Memories of Tower Lakes fishing 1959-71

By Jim Boeger, 2009

THE BATTLE: TOWER LAKE vs. The CARP
An important lesson in ecology???

Hi. My name is Jim Boeger. I left Tower Lake in 1971 to go to college and am now, all these years later, still alive and living in San Francisco, California. I wanted to share my memories with the good people of Tower Lake. Maybe it will help in what I am thinking is still probably an ongoing fight.
Our family moved to Tower Lake from Elmhurst, a Chicago suburb next to Oak Park with typical city sized lots and sidewalks and no open space. I don‘t recall ever seeing a pond or lake or even a vacant lot anywhere near our house. There was an A&W Root Beer Stand down the street. My little brother Rick and I would collect worms in the gutters after it rained and go fishing in the storm drains with a string tied onto a stick, dreaming of the real thing.
When we first moved into our house on Raleigh Place in the late fall of 1959, I was 7 years old. My brother, Rick, was almost 6, and my sister, Linda, was 9. Our new neighbors were Mr. and Mrs. Olie Lindberg and their only son, Ray. Olie and his wife, Margaret, were from Scandinavia somewhere and both still spoke with a thick accent. It seemed like they had been living in Tower Lake for a long time. Ray was much older than us, maybe in high school. He had a red Chevrolet and a pet Crow that would fly around our back yard and come to him when he called. I don’t remember ever talking to Margaret. I got the impression that she didn’t speak English. But according to my Dad, she was just very shy and stayed in the house most of the time.
I remember one of our first meetings with Olie. It must have been during our first winter in Tower Lake. Olie had been ice fishing on the lake and brought home a bucketful of the most beautiful fish I had ever seen, their bright colors vividly contrasting to the white snow on the ground.
It wasn’t long before Rick and I discovered the lake and were fishing for real. The lake was teeming with fish, millions and millions and millions of them. Sunfish and Bluegill were everywhere. They spawned in huge colonies near every shoreline. The male Bluegills grew to 8 to 10 inches in length and were fun to catch with a fly rod. A large colony of beautiful shiny silver and black Crappies lived in the rocks under the main bridge that crossed the lake. Largemouth Bass patrolled the shoreline hunting the smaller panfish. Compared to the other fish, they seemed huge. Bullhead were usually out of sight, but when you found a hole full of them, you could catch them for hours without a break. Even the infamous Dogfish, an ancient and primitive Mississippi Valley native, inhabited the lake. These fish, known to be scavengers as well as hunters, were usually caught using a fish head as bait far off shore… as far as you could cast. Rick was a specialist at catching Dogfish. They were sort of eel-like with a mouthful of large teeth and grew quite large, up to three feet. Later, we discovered the fierce Northern Pike that you never saw, but were lurking in the depths of the lake. They grew to over three feet long and were caught mostly on a lure cast into certain channels and places they liked. One early morning I was down at the beach. An older athletic guy had been out on one of the rafts at the beach doing pull-ups over the side. Something had mistaken his foot for a meal. He came limping into shore with a large gash in his foot. We figured a large Pike had attacked him.
The water in the lake was clean and clear. You could easily see the bottom four or five feet down. In the spring, you could walk along the bank anywhere and see schools of baby Bass, guarded closely by their parents, cruising nearby in the deeper water. Baby Bullhead swarmed in tight black balls. Painted Turtles were everywhere. The occasional Snapping Turtle was seen. They got very large and, supposedly, one had even bitten off someone’s toe while they were boating around the lake. This was never verified and remained only a myth. But I did catch a large one while fishing one day… I remember being down at the lake in our current favorite fishing spot every day at sunrise all summer long. Thinking that there were actually too many panfish in the lake, resulting in stunted fish, we kept almost everything we caught. We either ate them or buried them in the garden for fertilizer. The panfish were very bony and difficult to eat. But we dutifully cleaned them packed them in the freezer and had them for dinner once in a while. One Fourth of July, our family won a prize at the annual fishing contest for the shear poundage of panfish we had caught. I remember there were three bushel baskets full!! . It never occurred to us that this tremendous abundance of fish in the lake was the natural condition of a most bountiful Mother Nature, and nothing abnormal at all. I guess, for whatever reason, our sense of the scarcity of nature had been programmed into our brains and we just couldn‘t conceive that this was how it was supposed to be. Of course, being so young and inexperienced, we weren’t yet aware of the population of the larger Pike, so we couldn‘t grasp the whole picture of what was going on in the lake.
We would go to the beach in the afternoon when it got too hot to fish. Swimming at the beach was wonderful. All summer long, every afternoon was spent at the beach. From 10 or 11am to 6pm we hung out there, swimming, playing cards, goofing around the islands. It was always a huge challenge to see if you could make it across one of the bridges without burning your feet on a hot summer day. Then we would go home for dinner and then sometimes go out fishing again until it got too dark to see. So we fished and fished and fished and swam and rode bikes and played and fished some more.
These experiences went on for what seemed like many years. Then, one day, we started noticing schools of small Carp gulping for air on the surface of the lake. (I now know this is something they do on hot summer days when the oxygen level in the water gets low.) At the same time, it seemed, the water in the lake turned muddy. Not just in some places, but everywhere. You could not see the bottom anymore. The schools of Carp at the surface got bigger and bigger. There would be schools of thousands of them. They were all small fish from 6 to 8 inches long. The water was so muddy, you couldn’t actually see the fish, only the thousands of mouths breaking the surface. Soon we began catching the young carp in our regular fishing spots. Then, I think it might have been one day when we were fishing off the northwest side of Boat Island, we caught one of the parents of these little Carp. Turns out, Momma and Papa Carp had been happily growing to an enormous size in Tower Lake. By this time, 24-30 inch, 5-8 pound Carp were abundant and easy to catch if you knew how and where. They were giants compared to everything else in the lake except the largest Northern Pike. Carp are omnivorous, but mostly vegetarian. They dine by sucking up the muck from the bottom of the lake and filtering out the algae. This is what caused the lake water to become perpetually muddy. Because of all the nutrients in the lake, there is, as you know, no shortage of algae, especially in the summer.
We were soon fishing almost exclusively for these massive fish. We caught them using balls of wheat flour dough cooked in bullion broth… I remember the stinky smell of the dough balls cooking… When they were done, they floated to the top of the boiling water….
We could sit in our favorite spot at the far north end of the lake by the viaduct under Roberts Road and catch these monsters for hours on end even during the heat of the day. These were healthy fish. Depending on their size, it could take up to an hour to land one. We considered them ‘trash’ fish and never tried to eat one. We buried them all beneath the rose bushes or wherever we could dig a hole big enough to bury them. I suppose, our disgust for them may have been mostly psychological, as they had ruined our beautiful lake, but the thought to eat them never arose. I found out quite recently that they’re considered a delicacy by some people and even a staple food for others….
Our beautiful lake had become a large muddy hole filled with monster carp and their millions of offspring. It was almost a horror movie come to life. The large Carp were fun to catch, but gone were the days of watching the schools of Sunfish and Bluegill spawning near shore in the clear water, the huge Bass patrolling the shoreline, fly fishing in the cool evening. Even the Northern Pike had become scarce. As the water was a constant muddy brown, swimming at the beach was no longer pleasant. Everywhere, the huge schools of young carp covered the surface, sucking for air. It was very depressing. We couldn’t figure out what had happened. Where did all these Carp come from? What was going on here?
I don’t remember what year it was, (I think it might have been about 1965 or 1966), someone called in the Illinois State Department of Fish and Game to heal our devastated lake. I imagine this was a not a unique situation for them, as I think most of lakes and rivers in Northern Illinois had been infested with Carp for quite a while. They decided the best way to get rid of the Carp was to poison everything in the lake and start over with newly stocked fish. From the start, I didn‘t feel good about this plan. I wasn’t sure why, but it just didn’t seem like a good idea to me. I might have been thinking there were probably still too many good fish left in the lake to kill everything. It just seemed like such a drastic solution. There were meetings and discussions about what was going to happen, but I was a little too confused about the situation to offer any solid advice (I was only 12 or 13…). The plan went ahead as proposed. This was a problem the ADULTS were going to solve….
Finally the day came for the poisoning. Early in the morning, Rotenone was sprayed into the water from boats. Rotenone is an organic poison that comes from certain plants (http://www.clemson.edu/extension/hgic/plants/other/landscaping/hgic1713.html ). When put into the water, it causes the fish to suffocate. We were told they could still be eaten, as the poison only affected their gills. Soon the shores were covered with fish. That afternoon, we walked the shoreline looking for large fish to take home. There didn’t seem to be many, except for the occasional large Carp, which seemed to not have been affected so lethally as the other fish, probably due to their ability to breathe air out of water. Approaching them, they would spring to life and head back into the deeper water. For weeks, dump trucks came to fill up with the stinking carcasses.
Soon the water cleared and the lake was restocked with Bass, Bluegill, and Sunfish. It stayed clear for a few years. We were able to fish again. The Bass were all too small to take home, but they were still fun to catch. But very soon, it seemed like within a few years, the lake began to get muddy again. The Carp had returned. I think the State Fish and Game people poisoned the lake again. By this time, I had gone away to college and lost track of what happened.
It wasn’t until just a few years ago that I believe I figured out what had happened to Tower Lake. Back in 1965, it seemed like such a difficult puzzle to me. Now it seems rather obvious. These are just my thoughts about what happened, but it seems very likely to be close to what really happened. This could be another important lesson for budding ecologists everywhere:
By catching out all the carnivorous ‘Game’ fish from the lake, we had taken away all the Carp’s natural enemies and their populations exploded. Once the water became muddy, the other fish could not feed or reproduce naturally and the Carp were able to reproduce in unlimited numbers and virtually take over the lake. We (not just my brother and I, but everyone who loved to go fishing in Tower Lake, probably numbering at least one hundred others) had, most likely, innocently created this problem ourselves through our own ignorance by over-fishing the lake. All those millions of Sunfish and Bluegills, Bass, Pike, and Crappie, had probably been eating up the baby Carp and keeping their numbers in check. It may just be the case that in order to keep the Carp population in the lake in check, all other fish caught must be returned to the lake.
A ‘Catch and release’ policy for all the native fish IN ADDITION to a thorough EDUCATION of Tower Lakers about this issue may be the best practical way to keep the lake free from Carp. And maybe the only way.

So if any of this sounds familiar, think about what I’ve said and maybe you can apply it to the lake today. We Humans can upset the delicate balance that Nature has created over millions of years in a very short time.