WELCOME.

Welcome to my website. I hope to connect with you in the future! Add me on my social networks below.
Follow Me
mobile-logo
Back to top

True Guide Stories

Jan 17, 2015
in Ojibway Chief Stories, True Guide Stories
by carlnordgren
1
0 Comments

Behind Anung’s Journey: Steve Talks About Famous Guests

This is part 3 of a six part video series where Carl and Steve Fobister, creators of 'Anung's Journey', talk about their time together and Anung's origins. Watch part 1 & part 2 here! The second fishing camp that Steve and I worked at, Ball Lake Lodge, attracted many famous and near famous guests. Here's a quick video where Steve remembers some of of the most famous. For those of you who were fans of the Cubs, White Sox, and Blackhawks and watched on WGN television, and listened on WGN radio, the announcers Jack Brickhouse, Lyod Petit, and Vince Lyod, were frequent guests as well. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzcFsJ58vGc&w=420&h=315]...

Read More
Jan 06, 2015
in Ojibway Chief Stories, True Guide Stories
by carlnordgren
0
1 Comment

Behind Anung’s Journey: Carl, Steve, and American Football

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sod4P2RNNUo&w=420&h=315] This is part 2 of a six part video series where Carl and Steve Fobister, creators of 'Anung's Journey', talk about their time together and Anung's origins. Watch part 1 here! I have recently mentioned in a blog about how delighted I was to learn that Steve had such found memories of me teaching him and his friends how to play football that first summer we worked and lived together. We captured Steve talking about it with me. ...

Read More
Jan 02, 2015
in Ojibway Chief Stories, True Guide Stories
by carlnordgren
0
2 Comments

Behind Anung’s Journey: The Day I Met Steve Fobister

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ueh4GWvp9s&w=420&h=315] This is part 1 of a six part video series where Carl and Steve Fobister, creators of 'Anung's Journey', talk about their time together and Anung's origins. When I traveled to Winnipeg in November to meet with Steve and present him with a box of 'Anung's Journey', I arranged to have a local videographer, Tyrone Otte, shoot us in our hotel talking about the pioneer days, the good old days, the four summers in the mid to late 60's when Steve and I worked together, at Delaney Lake Lodge for one summer, and Barney's Ball Lake Lodge for three. This is the first of six short videos we edited from that evening. This first video is our memories...

Read More
Dec 19, 2014
in True Guide Stories
by carlnordgren
0
0 Comments

To Guide, I Lied

I wanted so badly to be a fishing guide. I spent my first summer, the summer of 1967, the summer I turned 16, working at Delaney Lake for room and board, as a camp laborer, and was allowed to take a boat out with Little Stevie every chance I got, to learn the water, to prepare to guide. The second summer Barney Lamm, the owner of Ball Lake Lodge, began to include me in the guide pool as "the number three guide in a three boat party." When six businessmen came in a group for their three or four day fishing adventure, they would need three boats--two guests per boat. So two guests would go out...

Read More
Dec 01, 2014
in True Guide Stories
by carlnordgren
0
0 Comments

My Thanksgiving surprise. I’m sorry.

I got to spend sometime with my dad, Loran Nordgren, over Thanksgiving when we gathered at my brother's house, in Athens, Georgia. My father is a remarkable man, in so many ways. He is a classic self-made man--he dropped out of high school to join the Navy during World War II and went on to be a innovative business leader in the HVAC space. He's incredibly vital at the age 86, flying his airplane, an Air Cam, every day the weather permits, for instance. And he is a great storyteller. I wish I could do an Irish accent the way he can, or Swedish, or just about any one of the many he heard growing up in...

Read More
Oct 31, 2014
in Ojibway Chief Stories, True Guide Stories
by carlnordgren
0
1 Comment

Steve and I in Winnipeg

When Steve Fobister and I began to plan our reunion in Winnipeg next week the good folks at the University of Manitoba learned we would be in town and first invited us to speak at a previously scheduled event for the evening of the 6th, then set up this event for earlier in the day. Isn't the old camp lovely to behold? It's the inspiration for Innish Cove. And I have arranged for Steve and I to be video taped as we talk about meeting for the first time, about working and living together in the frontier days on the English River, about when he entrusted me with the legend of Anung, and where my Indian nickname came...

Read More
Oct 30, 2014
in True Guide Stories
by carlnordgren
0
0 Comments

Ball Lake Lodge

How about it? This photo is from the early 60's, just a couple of years before I started working for Barney Lamm at Ball Lake Lodge. You want a sense of the scope of the business he built? Well, all the buildings in the left third of the photo were for camp operations, and there are others not captured in this picture. There are storehouses, the ice house, a fish house, Barney's office and radio room, his wife Marion's office; there is the camp store where guests could purchase fishing tackle or soft drinks or a Hudson Bay coat; the lunch box room where we collected supplies for our shore lunches; a motor repair shop and building...

Read More
Oct 26, 2014
in True Guide Stories
by carlnordgren
0
1 Comment

In Praise of Barney Lamm

I’m surprised there hasn’t been a song written about Barney Lamm. He lived such an extraordinary life of adventure, surrounded by legendary figures as he was creating his own. He began building Ball Lake Lodge on the English River in Northwest Ontario in 1947, starting with a single two room log cabin on a beautiful sandy beach 50 miles north of the frontier town of Kenora. Over the next couple of decades he and his wife Marion built it into one of the most successful and famous fly-in fishing camps in all of Canada, the destination of rich and famous Americans as well as adventure seekers from around the world who enjoyed a bit of rustic comfort at...

Read More
Oct 10, 2014
in Ojibway Chief Stories, True Guide Stories
by carlnordgren
0
0 Comments

Tales from an Ojibway Chief: n’Gosh

Having just submitted 'Worlds Between', the second novel in The River of Lakes trilogy, for publication in the Spring, I am focusing now on the third novel. My working title for this book has been n'Gosh', which is the name Steve Fobister gave me when we worked together as teenage boys, for it isn't until this third novel, set in 1969, that a character loosely based on me shows up. This character's name, by the way, is Guy Greene. And Guy immediately falls in love with the daughter of Brian and Maureen Burke, who they named Grace O'Malley Burke. First he saw her hair. It was long and black, wild and wavy. And then he saw her eyes, her...

Read More
Feb 13, 2014
in True Guide Stories
by carlnordgren
0
0 Comments

Names matter

The 53rd Parallel was written with respect for the large historical events that advance its stories. I have fictionalized those events, I have not distorted them. That respect extends to my use of labels and names for the First Nations Ojibway and in my presentation of their customs. My guide in this matter has been my good friend, Steve Fobister.  We worked together at Delaney Lake and Ball Lake Lodge in Northwestern Ontario in the mid to late 60's and he went on to be elected Chief of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, serving his people at a crucial time. Steve is Ojibway. Others spell the tribal name Ojibwa (which is how I pronounce it because it is how Steve always pronounces it)...

Read More
Older Posts
logo

I want to thank all the folks who have been so important to my writing. My wife, Marie, and my three daughters, Sarah Rose, Brita, and Krista Anne. Steve Fobister. Elizabeth Turnbull. Robin Metz. Kevin Qian. And my father, Loran Nordgren.

Let’s Talk

    Your Name (required)

    Your Email (required)

    Subject

    Your Message

    Copyright © Carl Nordgren 2015