Bait:

A few days before my brother Hank and I were going to fish at Lake Michigan for perch, we would go to the DesPlaines River to fish for our bait. We found an old seine net and we repaired it. It was about eight or ten feet long, and only about two feet wide. We attached a six foot pole on each side. The nets holes were about a quarter of an inch wide. We took it to the river and we walked along in the river, Hank on one side and I was on the other side, draging the net on the bottom of the river. When we lifted it out of the water it was usually filled with crayfish and minnows, along with a few small bluegills, sunfish, or bullheads and others types of fish.

We always kept our shoes on, knowing quite well that the river had plenty broken glass and sharp cans sunk on the bottom. ordinarily, we netted many crayfish and minnows for our day at the lake. We did this for only a couple of years. I'm not sure why we stopped that practice, because it saved us a lot of money that we had to pay for bait. It could have been girls. We were getting to that age, you know