It has been years since Jack Vadas and Eddie Landmichl last cast a line, but when the two men get together at the Southeast Side bait shop Vadas has owned for almost 60 years, the fishing stories come pouring out.
There was the time Landmichl, frustrated with state officials’ slow recognition of the invasive round goby population, organized a fishing derby for the inedible, foreign fish. About 50 kids dropped lines in Calumet Park and caught around 1,800 gobies, Vadas said, essentially confronting state natural resources officials with the extent of the problem.
Vadas, 80, and Landmichl, 77, are among the last of a tight-knit group of South Siders who have spent more than 50 years years fishing Lake Michigan and other area waterways and doggedly protecting their turf against invasive species, industrial fishing, and unconcerned politicians.
Both men were raised in the shadows of the steel mills on the industrial Southeast Side, where fishing on the Calumet River, Wolf Lake, and Lake Michigan offers a tie to nature in one of the city’s most polluted stretches.
Vadas was born in East Chicago, just across the Indiana border, and lived in a southern Illinois coal mining town as a child before returning to Chicago. In 1949 he bought the bait shop at 101st Street and S. Indianapolis Avenue from a man he said drank too much to keep running it. Vets Live Bait and Tackle has been in business ever since.
Landmichl grew up on the Southeast Side and worked as an iron worker in the nearby steel mills and as a local charter boat captain. A lifelong angler, he was known for fishing salmon in Lake Michigan throughout the winter, spending hours chopping ice off boat ramps.
Now, with both men in poor health and unable to fish, Vadas and Landmichl have turned their full attention to fighting for the region’s waterways — in their direct, homespun style. At public meetings and rallies, the two beat the drum for their current major causes: Keeping invasive Asian carp from establishing a population in Lake Michigan and regulating ballast water of the ships that come into the Great Lakes from the Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence Seaway. Many invasive species including the zebra mussels that have decimated the food base for Lake Michigan fish entered the Great Lakes through ballast water. The federal government is now developing the first-ever mandatory limits on the amount of live organisms in ballast.
“There are disease pathogens in there, ‘no see-ums,’ things that reproduce like crazy,” said Landmichl of ballast water. “The exotics that come over in ballast are spoiling the food chain, so there’s nothing to eat for the fish.”
Landmichl was among the first people to loudly sound the alarm about the possibility of Asian carp invading Lake Michigan. His friends still talk about the day — around three years ago, though neither Landmichl or Vadas remembers exactly — when he marched around the Thompson Center in downtown Chicago with two dead Asian carp strapped to his walker to protest what he saw as the Army Corps of Engineers’ lack of action against the voracious fish. Landmichl also drove around Lake Michigan handing out thousands of photocopied fliers detailing his complaints with the Army Corps.
In the past two years, bits of Asian carp DNA found in and around Lake Michigan indicate that some of the fish have likely passed the electric barrier in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. Vadas and Landmichl think Asian carp can be propelled across the barrier by the momentum from barges, or “pushers” as they call them, a possibility Army Corps officials have said they are studying as part of an ongoing review of how to prevent invasive species from entering Lake Michigan through the canal.
“I give the Army Corps credit for two things – Hoover Dam and the Panama Canal,” Vadas said. “Everything else they screwed up.”
The pair had their biggest victory in 1997, when the state enacted strict regulations on perch fishing. In response to plummeting perch populations in the mid-1990s, Illinois and other Great Lakes states agreed to ban commercial fishing of perch and limit perch sport fishing and charter fishing in Lake Michigan.
In the spring of 1997 as the ban was about to take effect, a state legislative committee co-chaired by Sen. Donne Trotter (D-Chicago) voted to overturn the commercial ban while leaving intact strict limits on sport-fishing of perch. Trotter had little sympathy for the sport fishermen his committee was effecting, suggesting they “take up golfing” if there was no perch left to catch.
Vadas, then president of the sport-fishing advocacy group Perch America, and thousands of other fishermen were furious and threatened to litter Trotter’s house with golf balls.
“To the regular Joe Sixpack, perching in Chicago has been a tradition for generations,” said Mike Jackson, a radio host and the outdoors editor for The Daily Herald. “Friday night perch dinners were a tradition for the working class all around the city, but these politicians just didn’t give a damn.”
Vadas said he urged anyone who came into his bait shop to pressure Trotter to change his vote. Trotter soon switched his position and a still-standing ban on commercial fishing was instituted Trotter did not respond to requests for comment. While smaller than before, Lake Michigan perch populations have rebounded.
Vadas said he has since made it a habit to push customers to contact elected officials.
“People are in here bitching all the time,” he said, his wheelchair parked below colorful lures and signs advertising bait including “nite crawlers” and leeches. “I tell them, ‘Do you know who your senator and congressmen are? Go and tell them the same s–t you’re telling me.’”
Their theories can be quixotic. Landmichl is upset the Army Corps’ electric barrier was, he says, built 300 feet further downstream than originally planned. Vadas thinks foreign ships want to take on ballast in the Great Lakes so they can sell the water in their home countries.
“We don’t have shingles, we’re not professors, we’re not scientists, we’re nothing but real grassroots people,” Vadas said.
Yet the two men know the region’s waterways and fisheries like the backs of their hands, Jackson said.
“When politicians see him go to these meetings their sphincters would tighten up,” Jackson said of Landmichl. “They treat him like garbage, like the court jester – they don’t treat him seriously. But on these issues he’s the most serious guy in this state.”
Landmichl and Vadas are well-versed in many of the environmental issues facing the Southeast Side and often attended meetings with Marian Byrnes, the late activist who founded the Southeast Environmental Task Force. They are upset about the BP Whiting Refinery’s ongoing expansion to process tar sands from Canada, which means increased emissions into Lake Michigan and the air. The pair also keep tabs on the illegal dumping that has long been a problem in the Southeast Side’s marshes and brownfields and they joined campaigns to clean up of the former Wisconsin Steel plant site.
But the men see themselves as anglers rather than environmentalists, and sometimes break ranks with green activists. When national environmentalists lauded the expected closure of the State Line coal-fired power plant on the Illinois-Indiana border, Vadas and Landmichl fretted about losing the fish attracted by the plant’s warm water outflow.
Landmichl and Vadas seem to keenly feel the years passing. John “Duke” O’Malley, the former Daily Southtown outdoors writer and their longtime fishing buddy and ally, died in May and it’s weighing on both men.
“Duke’s gone to the happy fishing hole in the sky,” said Vadas, who spends most of his day in a wheelchair. “I’ll be joining him soon.”
Landmichl no longer drives, relying on a friend to drive him to meetings and protests. And Vadas worries whether the bait shop can stay afloat. But they say they will never give up their crusade to protect the waterways they grew up fishing.
“I was spawned in this here lake,” said Vadas.