Originally published Saturday, November 23, 1996

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

SNOHOMISH -- Some guys roll their own in an adept show of dexterity, while some light a cigar with the nimble facility of a riverboat card-dealer. And some guys, like Vic Mathison, go out behind the garage by themselves, in a phone-booth-size wooden shack, to do their smoking.

Just about everyone around Snohomish knows that Vic, a retired rural-route mail carrier, smokes the best available: Steelhead . . . the official national fish of the republic of Snohomish and all its various territorial waters.

Photo by Paul Joseph Brown/P-I Vic Mathison has everything ready to fire up some of his mouth-watering smoked fish: A smoker, a tray of salmon and plenty of firewood in his Snohomish back yard. The secret to his specialty is patience, he says.

And what Vic Mathison does with a little curing and lots of smoke is a downhome secret that hundreds of fish have been dying for all these years.

For most of his 86 years, Vic Mathison has been helping other folks in and around Snohomish. But his forte is barbecuing or smoking fish for banquets and fund-raising feeds launched by local groups. Just last week, he smoked up a mess of steelhead for the retirement party of a friend in the Snohomish Sportsmen's Club.

When people eat Vic Mathison's smoked salmon or steelhead, they sort of roll their eyes back, lick their lips and fingers and say: "It doesn't get any better than this!" But to hear Vic tell it, 'tain't nothin'.

"The secret really isn't a secret at all," said the plain-speaking fellow who grew up behind the plow here. "It's patience. And doing it my way takes at least 48 hours."

Most folks here will tell you that Vic almost always does things his way. "And he's the kind of guy who won't do much of anything unless he can do it well!" volunteered Ron Stockton, one of Vic's fishing and poker-playing buddies.

One of the founding members of the sportsmen's club, Vic was born with one hand on the plow and one hand on a steelhead rod. He's ventured out onto the big water for salmon and fresh water for trout, but he's most comfortable hip-deep in the Pilchuck River, just a stone's throw from his home, above its confluence with the bigger Snohomish River.

Vic and Lily, his wife of more than 64 years, are pretty much fixtures around Snohomish, both in and outside town. He delivered mail on Rural Routes Nos. 1 and 2 for most of his 42 years with the Postal Service. And Lily, whose family moved here from Granite Falls when she was a girl, substituted on those and other routes for more than 20 years.

Sort of sounds like theirs was a mail-order marriage, but in truth, they met partly because "she had a small dog that would always nip at my heels whenever I substituted on the route past her house," Vic said.

In those days, Vic and his several siblings still helped out on the family farm. Much of those original 17 acres are visible through the dining room window of the neat-as-a-pin white frame house Vic and Lily built up the hill -- and well above flood level -- on Pine Avenue.

The camper they used for frequent hunting and fishing trips is gone now, and Vic doesn't get out waist deep in the Pilchuck as much as he used to. But he's still smoking fish as often as anyone asks. "He's been doing it for groups around here as long as I can remember," said Bill Blake, a retired Public Utility District manager.

"And if there was a cause around town that involved selling tickets, Vic was everyone's super salesman. I knew whenever he walked into my office with that little bit of a smile on his face that I was going to buy at least 10 tickets and he wouldn't leave until I did!"

Every year, the town's Tillicum Kiwanis Club debates whether to once again raise scholarship funds by selling homemade Nutty Bars at the Evergreen State Fair. "And every year, we end up doing it and making money, mostly because Vic Mathison is one heckuva Nutty Bar-maker and salesman," said another friend.

When a special fishing pier for disabled people was just an idea floating around Blackman Lake, Vic was in the middle of the project. "He's not so much a figurehead type person," said the friend, "Vic is a doer, and where there's work to be done, that's where you'll find Vic."

Vic would rather show off fishing or hunting trophy snapshots than admit he's probably spent at least as much time chopping and delivering firewood for needy folks, or finding food for the community food bank. He drove a disabled young man from Snohomish to Everett Community College classes for a couple of years because no one else was available to take on the task.

Back in 1932, when he and Lily got married, chopping wood for the main post office in town was one of the part-time jobs he strung together to make ends meet.

When the Depression really hit, postal pay was cut from 65 cents an hour to 45, he recalled. Vic and Lily moved a half-dozen times before he got a full-time postal appointment in 1939. "That was back when the slaughterhouses in town dumped all the blood right into the river," Vic volunteered. "Not sure if that was pollution or not. . . . Didn't seem to make any difference to the fishing, but fishing around here was a whole lot better then."

Most conversations with Vic tend to swing around, sooner or later, to fishing. Even their courtship and marriage had a fishing story attached. "Vic said he'd marry me if I cleaned all the fish he caught," Lily said. Well, the young lady had no idea what she'd tied into. "I remember when I was pregnant with Betty, our daughter, and I had to clean fish while I had morning sickness," she said.

"Yeah, but I released you from that promise when we celebrated our 50th!" he chimed in.

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.