Articles

Urban Myths Column

By Nancy Clark
Denver Daily News - May 24, 2005

On his first day in business in his first business on Old South Gaylord Street, Tucker Ladd rings up his inaugural sale—a couple of hand-tied flies. The sound of the register (or in this case, the whir of the credit card machine) was the culmination of a dream of a lifetime and not so different than the starting bell at the Preakness on Saturday, the same day Ladd took over as owner of Trout’s Flyfishing Shop. Both the register and the bell set in motion a future, a race to the finish that will ultimately be measured by hours and years, and decimal points.

You can tell Ladd’s all-pervasive love of the sport of flyfishing even by the names of his yellow labs, Winston and Loomis. Flyfishermen live by these rods. The first time he actually recalls going fishing with his dad, he loved the water, the river, and the “get”—his first fish he tossed back into the water after admiring it with a mixture of pride and exhilaration like all first-time fisherman do. At 15 he tried flyfishing for the first time in Cheeseman Canyon on the South Platte and by 19 he was working as a summer guide for flyfishermen in Vail. After finishing college he spent time guiding in Alaska, steering a 14-foot tender into isolated bays catching and releasing salmon, halibut, Dolly Vardin, and, of course, trout.

Now he’s ready, set, go to catch a few customers.

Owning a flyshop was the next logical step for a young man with a plan to combine his passion for fishing and the outdoors with the realism that everybody’s got to do something for a living. He could have hitched his star to another flyfishing outfit like he had for those several summers. Or he could have resigned himself to spending his 8 to 5 hours in an unrelated enterprise and rush to the river every chance he got on weekends when he wasn’t working overtime.

Somehow that didn’t seem like an option to him.

So what does it take to launch a business when you’re not yet 25 years old? Gumption, obviously. Tenacity is a requisite. But perhaps most driving force is the conviction that somehow you’ll be able to carve a place of distinction out of a random world of options.

The saying “If you do what you love for work, you’ll never work a day in your life” is invoked regularly at commencement addresses. Throngs of young people, armed with pricy college degrees, go forward into the workplace and end up bartending to make ends meet (not that there’s anything wrong with bartending if you have a passion for it) or end up in a cubical performing data entry for minimal dollars because they just can’t seem to find what they love.

Think about it: Have you ever heard a parent of a newborn spout, “I want this kid to grow up to be a nightshift worker wearing a company shirt with his name logoed on it.” No way. Parents raise their offspring into the air like prized fish and declare, “This kid has potential. He’s gonna be a professional quarterback or president if the quarterback position is filled.”

Parents harbor dreams for their kids that exceed even what the kid believes he can do. And so they teach them to fish.