The Peg-Legged Man in the Hollowed-Out Tree

By: Russell Haas

My Dad was born in 1927 in Mobile Alabama. He was a big man, with a big voice, and he liked to tell stories. And, I think because of his size and his booming voice, sometimes it sounded like he was exaggerating, maybe he was, I wasn’t sure. However, like most little kids, I enjoyed these big stories, but as I began to get older, I began to wonder whether these stories were real, heavily embellished, or maybe not true at all.

One of the more interesting stories that my Dad told us was about the time he and his uncle Frank Venturini were fishing on Dog River, a large tidal estuary just south of Mobile, and happened upon a one-Legged old man living in a blown over, hollowed-out tree, on a high spot in the middle of the river. The story went that they took the old man home to Uncle Frank’s Alligator Creek fish camp house, and he lived with them until his death many years later. It seems that the old man had been a newspaper editor in the St Louis Missouri area, but there were no additional details about how he ended up in the middle of Dog River living in a hollowed-out tree, or really anything else about his life. One detail my Dad did proudly proclaim was that he had helped carve Mr. Bishop a pegged leg out of a piece of an old red cedar tree, he used cedar because it doesn’t rot.

As the years went on, the story added another chapter. As my dad told it, there was an alligator hanging around the fishing pier at Uncle Frank’s fish camp, and Uncle Frank was worried he would get ahold of my dad or his younger brother, both small boys at this time. So, Mr. Bishop devised a plan that involved catching a coon, skinning it, and using it as bait to catch the alligator. This story clearly teetered on believability, and I was sure it was nothing but entertainment for my siblings and me.

For most of my adult life, well into my 60s, I assumed the story was a “big fish” story with little, if any, factual basis, simply concocted by my larger-than-life father to amuse his kids. Several years after my father passed away, I was at his younger brother’s house in Fairhope Alabama, going through some old pictures. “Uncle Will, who is this?” I ask. That’s Mr. Bishop, the peg-legged newspaper man, and at the bottom of the photo is the alligator we caught with that skinned coon!

Well, I guess, sometimes big fish stories are real!

‍