A Life Well Lived!

Part II: The Life and Times of Jimbo Meador

Jimbo Meador has experienced many different and interesting occupations throughout his life, and most were squarely in his wheelhouse. He managed Bon Secour Fisheries for several years at the peak of the oyster and shrimp business. While there, he and Chris Nelson, a marine biologist and owner of Bon Secure Fisheries, had a grant to grow oyster spat in a lab for farming oysters in Bon Secour Bay before it was a widely accepted thing. 

As the Orvis Regional Business Manager, he was responsible for locating and opening new stores across the Gulf Coast including Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. “There weren’t many Orvis stores in the South at the time, so I was the guy they hired to populate the area.” McCoy Outdoors in Mobile became an Orvis store.

“A requirement for operating an Orvis store was to be an experienced fly fisherman, so I convinced a fly fishing  guide to move from Jackson Hole, Wyoming to Fairhope to get Middle Bay Outfitters open in Fairhope.” When he started working with Orvis and learned how much it would pay, Jimbo supplemented his income by repping Hewes Boats and as a fly fishing guide. 

Hewes is a popular, well-regarded fishing boat manufacturer who also manufactured a special Orvis-edition flats boat designed to fly fish in shallow water. It had a raised platform at the stern where the guide would pole the boat and call out fish for the anglers to cast towards. One day, a couple of guys who were fishing with Jimbo in the Keys, looked around at the beautiful scenery and said out loud, “I wonder what the poor folks are doing?" Jimbo responded, “They’re poling the boat.”

As a guide, Jimbo fished for tarpon in Homosassa Springs, Florida, and Boca Grande, Florida, all on a fly rod. He’s fished all over the Gulf Coast including the Mexican border, the East Coast up to Martha’s Vineyard, and the Pacific Coast, sight-casting for tailing redfish, Bonita, and other game fish. 

“I started as a commercial fisherman selling the fish that Duke and I caught in the Bay to Mr. Stern in Fairhope. Then I managed Bon Secour Fisheries for a while, a commercial seafood processor and distributor. I moved on from catching and eating to catching and releasing fish worldwide.” 

He tells me that he and Jimmy Buffett were friends before he became famous. “He was brilliant, and never let his celebrity go to his head. Jimmy was good to me over the years. We enjoyed each other's company. He was a hell of a pilot, a sailor, as well as a fisherman. We would kayak or paddleboard into the mangrove creeks in the Bahamas. Jimmy liked to say that we wanted to fish where nobody else could get to, and the fish weren’t disturbed. We called these places the promised land!”

Along the way, he met many famous people, like writer and outdoorsman, Charles Gaines, who wrote Stay Hungry and Pumping Iron. Both became movies, the latter based in Birmingham with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He and Charles remain close friends today. Charles and his wife have a beautiful place in Nova Scotia on a little slice of land overlooking the water.

Charles’ article The Last Best Place describes the country beautifully and has attracted other well-known people who want to escape the modern world. Charles wrote A Family Place: A Man Returns to the Center of His Life there. Jimbo and Lynn visited Charles several times and ended up purchasing a 75-acre property with a farmhouse where they would spend time. 

Jimbo tells me he shares the same birthday, December 11, with a couple of close friends, Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison. Tom, who was also Jimmy Buffett’s brother-in-law (married to Laurie), purchased Jimbo’s family home in Battles Wharf when he and Lynn bought her family home next to Zundel's Wharf in Point Clear. 

“Tom is a great writer and has produced some great novels and screenplays. One of Tom’s first novels and movies he was famous for was Ninety-two in the Shade. We’ve enjoyed each other’s company and fished and hunted together for a long time. He was a great novelist, poet, screenwriter, and outdoorsman. He loved dogs and was the person responsible for getting me into saltwater fishing. Tom is the one who convinced me to stop drinking.” 

Jim Harrison is the other friend who shared a birthday with Jimbo. “He passed away while at his desk writing in 2016.” Harrison’s work has been translated into many languages and he was the recipient of the Mark Twain Award for distinguished contributions to Midwest literature. He was considered a master of the “novella,” and wrote Legends of the Fall. Born in Michigan, he spent time in Fairhope and had a home in Patagonia, Arizona.  

Guy de la Valdene, one of Jimbo’s closest friends, was a lifelong hunter, fly fisherman, and wild-game gourmet, who produced the film, Tarpon. Jim Harrison and Tom McGuane are shown fishing for tarpon in the movie, and Jimmy Buffett does the music. “It’s a fantastic movie from the 70s filmed in Key West with some of the greatest footage of fly fishing for Tarpon ever produced.” He goes on, “Guy had the finest quail hunting property I’ve ever experienced, and I spent a lot of time there hunting quail. It was like a little piece of heaven to me.” 

As the Orvis Regional Manager, Jimbo also taught fly fishing at several Orvis lodges and dealerships. “The first fly casting classes I taught were before I went to work for Orvis, at the Orvis Plantation at May’s Pond, near Monticello, Florida. As a writer, he’s written about snipe hunting, bird dogs, and mullet for Garden & Gun, Sports Afield, Kayak Magazine, and a couple of sporting websites. Ain’t No Mullet Like a June Mullet was the title for one of his stories in Garden & Gun, but they changed it before it was published.

His days at Orvis lasted 15 years, and he developed such a large dealership network, that he soon had to give up guiding and repping Hewes fishing boats. After Orvis, he worked with a friend helping him launch a line of fly fishing skiffs called Hells Bay Boatworks. Jimbo promoted Hells Bay boats and sold them to boat dealerships. 

Then, Beretta, manufacturers of some of the world’s finest shotguns came calling. Based in Italy, he was placed in charge of opening Beretta Endorsed Hunting Lodges before being leading Beretta’s Custom-Built Shotgun division, the most expensive shotgun in the United States. Jimbo tells me he was able to hunt in some of the most beautiful places throughout the United States before being placed in charge of the custom-built shotgun division. 

He remembers sitting down with an interpreter and talking to one of the Beretta executives in Italy. The gentleman was listening closely to Jimbo's talk, trying to understand what he was saying. Jimbo ended a sentence by saying, “All right?” as only Jimbo can say it. The Beretta executive asked, “Is that a real word in the dictionary?”  “I traveled to Italy a lot. It was almost like an office job,” he says with trepidation.

This led to working with Andy Zimmerman, who built and sold Wilderness System Kayaks. Andy, who had a 5-year non-compete clause after he sold the business, opened several retail camping stores and carried a few kayak brands. After his non-compete expired, Jimbo helped him start Native Watercraft, a large kayak manufacturer. Andy asked Jimbo if he could design a kayak that one could stand up in for fishing and fly fishing, allowing anglers to sight fish for bonefish and redfish in shallow water.

“I took the kayak we designed for fishing to a big sporting goods retail trade show in Salt Lake City to demonstrate how it worked. They had a big pool where you could put the kayak, and when our turn came, I stood up in the kayak with a fly fishing rod and cast, and nobody had ever seen anyone do this before.” The next year everyone was standing up in kayaks but they had no clue what or why they were doing it. 

“We had the only kayak designed to be stable enough to stand up and fish. It was designed for fishing and carrying equipment. At one time we were running three shifts a day to produce fly fishing-friendly kayaks before anyone else.” Eventually, Native Watercraft was sold and Jimbo was out of the kayak business for a while. 

While at a sporting goods trade show, a guy was pitching long-handle paddles from Hawaii. This intrigued Jimbo, so he purchased a couple of the paddles, came home, took his old windsurfer board, and began experimenting by standing up and using the long-handled paddles to maneuver. “Like the Seminole Indians did. They paddled shallow.”

The thought struck him to design a stand-up fishing paddle board with a shallow concave deck that was stable so one could lower their center of gravity and fish standing up. I remember seeing Jimbo in the mornings on the Bay paddling with his dog, Dixie, onboard. His paddle boards were designed to slip into shallow areas without disturbing the fish. 

As a young man, Jimbo moved to Point Clear and lived year-round. His friends thought he was crazy. “People came for the summer and then went back to Mobile for the rest of the year. We called those people “Chicken Neckers.” We used fish heads and trash fish to catch crabs. They would go to the store and buy chicken necks, thus the name.”

When at Bon Secure Fisheries, Jimbo, a self-proclaimed health nut, says there was no one around Point Clear after Labor Day. For exercise, he started running. “If it was daylight, I would go to Gulf Shores and run barefoot along the beach at the water’s edge. If it were nighttime, I would run the golf course at Lakewood, barefoot in my bathing suit without a shirt. I had let my beard grow long, and would run through the sprinklers to cool off.”

One night, the Grand Hotel security and a police officer stopped him after getting a complaint that some crazy man was running around naked on the golf course. “They asked me, “Why are you running?” He replied, “I like to run. You can see I’m not naked, but I might be crazy.” 

We talk about the Battles Wharf Market, a former gas station that doesn’t sell gas anymore. “I call it the NO Gas Gas Station. It used to be Mr. Price’s gas station. That’s where I would get my mail delivered. The letters would be addressed to Jimbo Meador, Battles Wharf, Alabama. “No address, no zip code, that’s all.”

If you’re picking up on a theme about Jimbo, you should. Growing up at the Bay Treat property near the Grand Hotel, next to Touveson’s Boat Works, with a Southern accent second to none, you might think he served as the inspiration for the book and movie, Forrest Gump. Indeed, Winston Groom’s character is a close resemblance to Jimbo Meador.

After the book's release, one of the executives at one of the major film studios tried for years to convince her bosses to purchase the movie rights. No go. She eventually moved to Paramount and almost immediately Sid Ganis purchased the rights to the movie. Jessica Drake, a dialect coach was hired to help Tom Hanks imitate Jimbo’s voice and mannerisms. The boy who played Forrest as a child had a speech impediment, and they decided to run with it. The rest, as they say, is history. 

After the movie was released to great acclaim, CBS Sunday Morning sent a team down to do a feature on the movie. “They scheduled an interview and came by the house first and then asked if I could show them some shrimp boats. On the way out of the marina, my dog saw some ducks and ran through everyone to the bow. I said, “That’s my dawg, that’s my huntin’ dawg, Dixie.”

Many people have encouraged Jimbo to write a book. The list includes Winston Groom, Jimmy Buffett, and many others. Jimbo has been profiled in The New York Times, Garden & Gun, Mobile Bay Monthly, and many other prestigious publications. Who knows if it will ever happen? His stories are legendary, and his persona is as real as it gets.

Most recently, Jimbo designed a special Delta skiff, built in Louisiana with a shallow draft, that allowed him to take up to six guests on the Mobile and Tensaw Rivers Delta. His friend, David Cooper, gave him access to a boat ramp and he was able to run his Delta Excursion tours, called Jimbo's Delta Excursions, from the Blue Gill Restaurant on the Causeway.

He helped his friend Skipper Tonsmeire’s daughter, Elizabeth, launch 17 Turtles Kayak and Paddle Board Rental business at Fly Creek in Fairhope. Skipper served on The Nature Conservancy board in Alabama when Linda was its Director of Development. Jimbo says, “Skipper won’t take credit, but he’s done more to protect and preserve this area than anyone I know.” 

One day, as he was preparing to leave the dock on the Causeway with a film crew from the New York Times to go on a Delta Excursion, there was some concern about thunderstorms in the weather forecast.  Jimbo eased their minds with a big smile telling them, “The worst thing that can happen is you’ll be struck by lightning in a beautiful place.” He goes on, “I’ve spent a lifetime on the Delta, and each time I return from an ecotour, I always ask, 'What was your favorite part of the trip?’ “Your stories,” is always the answer.

These days Jimbo seems content to grab a cup of coffee and visit with friends when he can. He’ll catch one of his grandkids’ ball games but spends most days and evenings caring for his wife of 58 years. He tells me he and Lynn have been together for 68 years and began dating when he was 16 and she was 14. He tells me he has always been a student of nature and misses being able to explore the Delta as much as he used to, but there is no remorse, only love in his voice.

Part I: The Life and Times of Jimbo Meador, That’s All I’ve Got to Say About That.