Pat McManus, outdoor humorist extraordinaire, died Wednesday in Spokane, leaving behind a legacy of smiles and gratitude.



A Pacific Northwest native, Pat often traveled through Portland.



Selected here from The Oregonian archives are accounts of two of his visits; prime examples of how he collected material for his zany accounts.



In the below cases, of course, everything actually happened:





May 1991



OUTDOORS HUMORIST GETS HIS STORY



By Bill Monroe



I'd always dreamed about actually going fishing someday with Pat McManus, back-page humorist for Outdoor Life and author of numerous gut-giggle books.



My wife and I often read McManus stories to each other at bedtime, laughing ourselves to sleep. He is an idol, a writer's goal, the ultimate in timing, imagination and entertainment . . . a true master of understatement.



As my own career unfolded and it became apparent that my luck was destined to follow the wayward path of a typical McManus episode, I even began patterning my own writing to reflect his light treatment of excuses. After all, a guy whose best friend, Rancid Crabtree, attracts more flies than he casts, and whose dog is named Strange because it is, has insulated himself forever against accountability.



In April, Pat's call came out of the blue -- he would be in town May 13 and 14 to sign some books . . . would I have time for a little fishing?



Would I? Wow!



I decided to up the ante -- I called Pilgrim, my own version of Pat's friend, Rancid Crabtree; a guy whose luck with me is so bad we've been known to chase seasoned fishing guides off the river by merely showing up.



''Want to fish with McManus?'' I asked casually.



Pilgrim didn't get to be a top business executive by passing opportunities.



''Let's do it!''



That was April 17, and no sooner was the telephone back on the receiver than a huge lightning and rainstorm swept across Portland, dropping an inch and a half of rain in less than an hour. That night, a massive landslide closed Highway 6 to Tillamook. For the rest of April and into early May, the clouds have been thick over Portland and fishermen have been begging me to call it off.



Unfortunately, Pilgrim and I overlooked the possibility that the Blazers might still be trying to climb another rung in the National Basketball Association playoffs.



Sunday night, minutes after the team wona squeaker inSalt Lake City, bringing the series back to Portland on Tuesday for a chance to wrap it up, Pilgrim called.



''I can't do it, Bill,'' said the avid Blazers fan. ''I can't take the chance of spreading our bad luck that far.''



And so it came to pass Monday morning that Pat and I climbed aboard guide Bob Toman's boat on the Clackamas River, looking for a story, any story, but without my secret weapon in tow.



Toman, meanwhile, hadn't been cowed at all by the trademark McManus bad luck.



He had armed his boat with two of his best customers, Mary Wilson of Sandy, who for the past two years has caught the largest spring chinook of Toman's season, and Gwynne Sharrer of West Linn, a 78-year-old forestry consultant who in 1954 was the first Oregon director of the Bureau of Land Management and whose job it was, when he was a boy, to catch 25 trout a day (on a fly) in Northern California streams to feed the employees in his father's mining operation.



We spent a little time talking while Toman rigged our lines with his secret lures.



''There's usually something to key a story on,'' McManus said of his technique. ''Most of them are true, or at least began that way.''



He was particularly interested in Toman's true account of a local angler who had sliced off part of his finger last year at the Carver boat ramp and wasn't able to save it for surgery because a hungry mallard drake beat him to it at water's edge.



As the boat pulled out into the current, McManus let his line out first in the secret hole behind Toman's house. A large springer jumped into the air to get out of the way.



At 9 a.m., Sharrer's fish was the first in the boat, a fat 12-pounder that hit a flatfish.



Then Wilson caught a scrappy 11-pounder on a diver-egg-shrimp combination.



My turn was next as we returned in early afternoon to the hole where the fish had slam-dunked McManus. Amazingly, the very same fish -- a 21-pounder -- swallowed the egg-shrimp cocktail on my diver.



One last chance for Pat -- a fish nibbled on his rod, but quit as soon as a hand touched it.



Toman threw up his hands in disgust.



A dropping from a passing bird hit his finger.



McManus smiled broadly.



''I've been skunked, bird dropping on guide's hand, duck eats finger . . . I'd call that a wrap,'' he said cheerily, relishing in his victory. ''Another story is born.''







April 2007



GETTING A LINE ON NEW MATERIAL



By BILL MONROE



The 73-year-old's mind is sharp as a honed hook, even at 5 a.m.



He's been up for an hour and is prowling the lobby of a downtown Portland hotel, cup of cooling coffee in hand, anxiously watching the dark street outside for his ride.



Patrick McManus, among the most popular humor writers in the world, is going fishing --a busman's holiday during a recent book-signing tour that brought him to Portland.



"I last went salmon fishing five years ago in Alaska, on the Kenai River," McManus blurts out as he leaps into the car. "Caught about a 70-pounder right off the bat. It was kind of red, though, so we figured we'd catch a lot more and threw it back.

"It was the last bite of the whole day."



Could happen that way on this day, too, the nation's leading outdoor humorist is told.



But at least he'll be fishing in one of the best locations in town --a submerged flat near a bridge alongside the likes of anglers nicknamed "The Chief," "Two Hippies," "Slimey Limey," "Ouzel," "The Banker" and the ever-villainous "Chainsaw."



They jockey and jostle one anothers' boats for position at the far upriver point of a mesalike upheaval on the river bottom.



It is, McManus is told, like fishing on a professional soccer field, except he's in the boat with the "Sultan of Sellwood." The Sultan specializes in arcing trolled bait into the goal net, like putting enough spinning English on a well-placed corner kick to net the ball.

"I can use that!" McManus exclaims. "Even if we don't catch anything, I've already got a column!"



And, less than two hours later, he has a spring chinook salmon --suicidal enough to strike McManus' own line cold turkey. The author lands hatchery gold without a handoff.



He beams, but his smile is slightly puzzled.



"I haven't caught one in so long, I've got to remember what to do with it," he says.



McManus has anchored the back page of Outdoor Life magazine for more than 26 years and did the same in Field & Stream magazine for 15 years before that.



His 17 books, largely collections of his monthly columns, are popular with hunters, anglers and the non-hunting and fishing public.

Two relatively recent events, however, might change his hold on the American public's sense of humor.



His two latest novels, "The Blight Way" and the just-released "Avalanche," are murder mysteries --mysteries with whispers of McManus' whimsical humor, but still mysteries.



"I'm not sure," McManus says when asked when he decided to do a mystery. "It's kind of a mystery of its own. One morning I just woke up and said to myself, 'I think I'll write a mystery.' "



Perhaps just in time, too.



McManus, who lives in Spokane, doesn't own a cell phone, has spoken on one only three times and says he's giving serious thought to abandoning e-mail as well. "I'm thinking I may go back to writing longhand."



It's getting tougher and tougher, he says, to dream up tales for his iconic cast of column characters --Rancid Crabtree, Retch Sweeney and a dog-delinquent, Strange.



Married 52 years --his wife goes by "Bun" in his columns ("She didn't use to," he said when asked if that's her real name --it's Darlene) --the couple has four daughters, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild.



"There's always some material there," he says.



On a more serious note, though, McManus makes three references during the fishing trip to the magazine's recent sudden firing of longtime friend Jim Zumbo over a comment Zumbo posted on the Internet about assault weapons.



"That troubled me a lot," he says. "It's been very upsetting."



The statement by the quiet, laid-back author of all-things-humor and few-things-controversial was tantamount to a temper tantrum.

McManus' contract calls for three more columns, he says, adding, "I haven't decided" whether to renew with Outdoor Life. "Maybe Rancid Crabtree will go to a place of eternal warmth; yeah, like Arizona," he says.



He will, however, continue with his mysteries, set in a fictitious Idaho location, Blight County, and revolving around the activities of its sheriff, Bo Tully, underlings such as Lurch and Daisy and a little dog named Clarence, who attacks passing women from beneath parked cars, dashing out to tug at their umbrellas.



Clarence and Lurch resemble other McManus characters, but none are in the book. Clarence, for example, is Sheriff Bo Tully's jail dog, replicated by a real-life legendary dog in the Walla Walla police department.



The plots are reasonably complicated, draw on McManus' outdoor experiences and are salted with quirky sidelights.



During a lull between bites, McManus hears another real story about a dog once owned by one of the day's fishing partners, Jim Monroe of Salem, a Methodist minister serving the Woodburn United Methodist Church (and this writer's brother).



Penny, Monroe says, was a Brittany spaniel that cost him $75 in his early years serving a church in Nyssa.



He took her on several long hikes up Owyhee Canyon, then on a pheasant hunt at a parishioner's farm.



Penny bolted across a field on a dead run, crossing two other farms and two more roads to a farmhouse a mile away.



By the time Monroe got there, she'd caught and stripped the feathers off two of the farmer's chickens and was working on a third.

"Your dog?" the farmer asked idly.



"Yes," Monroe replied.



"Your chickens, too!" the farmer declared.



Monroe paid for them and within a week sold the dog for $25 to an Idaho farmer and hunter who asked, "Is she a good bird dog?"

"You bet!" Monroe told him.



McManus' face brightens.



"I can use that, too!" he exclaims.



His Portland fishing trip, McManus says, will be Outdoor Life's October column.



"But you might not recognize it."





RIP Pat...Bill Monroe