About Buz Buszek
Content written by Mickey Powell, son-in-law and business partner with Virginia Buszek after Buz's death in 1965.
Chapter One: The Beginning
Wayne “Buz” Buszek discovered fishing as a teenager spending his summers at Laguna Beach with his parents. His early experiences were with surf fishing in the Pacific. Spending the other 10 months of the year at his home in the Sierra foothill town of Lindsay, it was inevitable that he would discover high country trout fishing. And fly fishing for large, wild trout became an obsession. He trod and explored the Sierra, lakes and streams, headwaters and heavy waters, every nook and cranny from South to North many times over.
Once he was introduced to fly tying, the stage was set for the birth of Buz’s Fly & Tackle Shop. He tackled fly tying with the same fervor which drove his pursuit of wild trout. By the time he graduated from college, married Virginia Compton and began raising a family, his fly tying skills had become not only well honed but well known. He had many fishing partners as a young man, and his flies became highly prized throughout the Central Valley fly fishing community. With a family of four to feed on a postman’s salary, it became quite difficult to provide his flies to all his fishing buddies and their friends, without charging something to recover the cost of materials. Long before it became his full-time vocation, Buz was selling flies from his home.
Birth of a Business
I don’t know when he sold his first fly. I don’t know when he printed his first catalog. What I do know is that one 
day in 1947 he and Virginia decided that even if “neither sleet nor snow” could delay the postman’s rounds, fly tying certainly could. He left the Postal Service, hung out his shingle, and the rear bedroom of a rented home in Visalia became Buz’s Fly & Tackle Shop. The first few winters a bank loan was necessary to acquire tackle and accessories to bring sales to a level that would barely provide an adequate income to support his family. And it was a family effort. Virginia tied leaders, daughter Rosalie tied woolly worms and daughter Judy (only 6 years old) helped package the flies. The “store” quickly expanded into the breakfast nook of the kitchen and then the screened back porch. Even though living space in the home was diminishing rapidly, it became necessary to expand the customer base by publishing a small mail-order catalog. The catalog alerted other retailers around the state, and demand for his flies then soared exponentially. Buz began to train others to tie for him in his style. The employees’ flies were sold exclusively at the wholesale level to sporting goods stores, resorts and marinas throughout California. Outside the state were customers such as Rangely Region Sports in Maine and Norm Thompson in Portland, Oregon. Abercrombie & Fitch of San Francisco carried Buz’s flies for many years. At the retail level, Buz always felt honor-bound to tie 100% of the flies sold to individual customers. Amazingly, he held to this principle for at least 16 years.
Achieving national recognition as the fly volume increased, so did the need for consistently good quality fly tying materials. Thus, in the early 1950’s began the era for which Virginia is so well known. It became necessary to buy feathers, fur and hair in bulk quantities in order to have sufficient volume for the tying operation. The materials became Virginia’s domain. She was the sole processor (washing, grading, dying, packaging) of the materials. She and Buz soon realized that there were some exceptional quality materials to be found in the bulk acquisitions — quality they had rarely seen before when buying packaged goods from other processors. These exceptional items were stockpiled rather than used in fly tying production. Many of them became exceptional simply through Virginia’s diligent and skillful cleaning. When fly tying materials were added to the biennial catalog, and their quality became known to a few tiers around the country, the word spread like wildfire. Within a decade, fly tying materials were accounting for well over half of Buz’s gross sales. Buz’s Fly & Tackle Shop was listed in virtually every book on fly tying as one of the best sources in the nation for high quality materials.
Growth and Tragedy
In 1955, Buz & Virginia had built a new home with an oversize, attached garage which became the warehouse for the mail order business. It also housed Buz’s office and his fly tying room. All of the wholesale fly tiers worked in their own homes. The next 10 years provided gratifying yet relentless growth. Catherine Landers was
hired to help Virginia gather, pack and ship the mail orders. Buz was compelled to buy his primary source of fly tying materials, an import business named The Feather River Trading Company. Its founder was selling out to pursue other interests, and Buz couldn’t risk losing his best source of good materials. The import business in Rough & Ready, California, became the subject of a feature article by Ted Trueblood in a 1962 edition of Field & Stream Magazine. Thus began another onslaught of growth. Now he was managing two growing businesses, 300 miles apart. Joy should have been rampant, but dealing with the ever increasing demands on his time began to take its toll on Buz. Tragically, he took his own life in May of 1965. The flood of condolences, offers of support and offers to buy some or all of the inventory from all points of the compass allowed Virginia very little time for mourning. Though the grief lasted forever, within weeks she and Catherine were shoulder-deep in returning the business to normalcy. She enlisted the aid of friends and customers who were admirers of Buz and whose fly tying was influenced by his style. These were the men to supplant Buz’s personal fly tying production. Among them were Don Lieb, Darwin Atkin and Clarence Butzbach. By Fall, 1965, Virginia realized the effort was far too much for just she and Catherine, so she invited myself, Mickey Powell, to join the business as her partner. I knew little about fly fishing and far less about fly tying, but ever since the Field & Stream article of 1962, I had been thoroughly intrigued by the business itself, especially the import operation in Rough & Ready. I jumped at the opportunity. I made it my mission to keep the business operating, and to institutionalize the name Buz Buszek. I hoped that in the process I would be able to raise and educate my four children. Were it not for the help of Buz’s eldest daughter, my wife Rosalie, I would have failed miserably at the latter. For 28 years, she was one of Visalia’s finest and most dedicated kindergarten teachers.
Building Tradition
Virginia and I operated as partners until 1978, when she retired. It was during those years she expended a great deal of effort in founding and supporting the Federation of Fly Fishers, now an international organization of fly fishing clubs and individuals. She provided Buz’s nationwide mailing list to Federation organizers for the very first mailing of invitation to membership of the FFF. She introduced the concept of demonstration fly tying at conclaves. Her acquaintance with fly tying customers throughout the nation made it easy to identify and invite outstanding fly tiers to annual, national conclaves. The Federation now sponsors a highly prized, keenly contested award: The Buz Buszek Memorial Award for Fly Tying. It is given each year to the individual deemed to have contributed the most to the advancement of the art of fly tying. Proudly I can say, two of our former tiers, Darwin Atkin and Wayne Luallen, are among the recipients of this prestigious award.