Catskills legend Joan Salvato Wulff helped open fly fishing to women

Wulff, 95, has been attending services in her chosen house of worship since she was a girl growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, learning fly fishing and the art of casting from her father, who was an owner of a rod and gun shop.

Starting in her teens in the 1940s through 1960, she went on to win multiple local, regional and national casting tournaments, often beating all-male fields. At the National Fisherman’s Distance Fly Championship in 1951, she became the first woman to win with a long cast of 136 feet.

She then spent nearly two decades as spokesperson for The Garcia Corporation, a major tackle company — becoming the first woman to be such a paid spokesperson — before launching a fly-fishing school in 1979 in the heart of the Catskills with her second husband, television cinematographer Lee Wulff, himself an iconic angler whose contributions to sport fishing include pioneering catch-and-release.

Today, Joan Wulff is a living legend in the fly-fishing world and a beloved figure around Livingston Manor in Sullivan County, where the Wulff School of Fly Fishing holds classes for several weeks during the spring and early summer along the Beaverkill River, one of the most popular and storied trout streams in the Catskills, considered the birthplace of American dry fly fishing. (Dry refers to casting an artificial insect onto the water’s surface, as opposed to using a weighted lure that will sink.)

“Once in a long while, a woman comes along who shifts perceptions and expectations, who inspires and influences generations to come, who establishes new standards and protocols,” said Jennifer Grossman, an avid fly fisher and longtime friend. “One such woman is Joan Wulff.”

‘Casting allowed me to be in a man’s sport’

Although Wulff’s trail-blazing contributions to fly fishing are akin to the accomplishments of such legendary female athletes as Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Billie Jean King and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Grossman prefers to take the comparison out of the sports realm.

“She’s like Amelia Earhart or Marie Curie: women who refused to be relegated to the sidelines, told they were not worthy of doing certain things,” said Grossman, an environmental attorney and co-owner of The Smoke Joint, a barbeque restaurant in Livingston Manor.

Theodore Gordon, a sporting magazine writer in the late 1800s and early 20th century, is considered “the father of American dry fly fishing.” Tuberculosis forced Gordon to relocate from New York City to the Catskills, where the imitation flies he created were designed to mimic the Catskills’ native insect species, not their cousins across the pond in the British Isles, fly fishing’s motherland. Gordon’s innovations and writings have spurred generations of anglers to seek out such trout-rich Catskills streams and rivers as the Neversink, Willowemoc and Beaverkill. 

While fly fishing started out as a male-dominated sport, it wasn’t long before women caught the bug, either while alongside their husbands or with other women whose love of the outdoors wouldn’t allow them to sit at home on a day when there were trout to be caught.

In addition to Wulff, those women trailblazers include:

• Julia Freeman Fairchild: Co-founder and the first president of the Woman Flyfishers Club, the world’s first organization for female fly fishers, established in 1932 in New York.
• Joan Stoliar: An accomplished angler and fly tyer, she was known for her conservation projects in the Catskills and for designing products for fly fishing.
• Winnie Dette: Alongside her husband Walt, she tied flies at their home along the Willowemoc from the 1930s to their deaths in the ‘90s, perfecting a technique known as the Catskill style of fly tying.
• Mary Dette: Daughter of Winnie and Walt Dette, she’s known as the last of the original Catskill fly tyers, a skill she learned from her parents. Now retired at 90, her family’s 94-year-old business, Dette Flies, still operates in Livingston Manner, owned by her grandson, Joe Fox.
• Elsie Darbee: Working with her husband Harry at their fly-fishing business in Livingston Manor, she became a pioneer of the Catskill style of fly tying, producing flies that gained world renown. And she was the first president of the Catskills Fly Fishing Center and Museum (CFFCM), located along the Willowemoc in Livingston Manor.

All these women are members of the museum’s Hall of Fame, established in 1985 to honor people “who have significantly enhanced the culture of fly fishing,” according to the CFFCM’s website. (Male HOF members include Baseball Hall of Famer Ted William; writer Norman Maclean, author of the fly-fishing novella “A River Runs Through It”; and actor Robert Redford, director of the 1992 film based on Maclean’s novella.)

Joan Wulff was inducted in 2000, a year after her husband Lee, who died in 1991 at age 86 during his pilot’s recertification flight. (Joan married a third time in 2002 to Ted Rogowski, one of Lee’s closest friends. Rogowski died in 2021.)

A person’s skills, not their gender, are what matter most when navigating a rock-strewn, swift-running stream while hip-deep in cold water, trying to entice an elusive rainbow trout to rise to the surface and swallow that expertly tied fly. Wulff’s casting skills put her on equal terms with any male angler.

“I was in a river with a bunch of men, and I could cast as well as they could, and they accepted me,” said Wulff, who’s been an author, magazine columnist and multiple fishing halls of fame inductee. “Casting really allowed me to be in a man’s sport.”

She gave up negotiating riverbanks and flowing water years ago. Instead, she can still be found sharing her eight decades of fly-casting expertise with students alongside one of the ponds on her school’s 100-acre property overseen by Doug Cummings, a son from her first marriage. She lives on the school’s property, in the town of Hardenburgh in Ulster County’s northwest corner, 12 miles north of Livingston Manor.

The more arduous instructional duties are handled by a devoted squad of instructors who drive hours from their homes in Pennsylvania and New England to teach weekend classes.

“These people are dedicated, like I am, to teaching people how to cast the way so as to understand it in every movement,” Wulff said. “I’m thrilled and so lucky they’ve stayed with me all these years.”