History of Angling in the Modern Era, my view

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History of Angling
in the Modern Era
...my view

I could not resit writing this page about the history of angling in our modern era as I see it:

Here it is

After the war, a positive, energetic period dawned. These "boom" years lasted for a good twenty years but this time for a larger portion of the human family, and worldwide (excluding the Soviet block and its allies which saw an implosion in both values and material conditions). One Italian writer, Cesare Zavattini, visiting New York and Tiffany in the '60s said "In America they sell jewels like salamis, in Italy we sell salamis like jewels". Naturally, the fifth avenue is not the US, nevertheless it's a sign...
Of course, two major events that we cannot forget were the Korean war (1950-53) and then the Embargo of China goods which made bamboo again very hard too find. Those rod manufacturers who had some stocks could manage to survive, the others had to change or disappear. Probably it's because of this lack of bamboo that other materials were researched. Aero-space materials, i.d. science-fiction ones in the eyes of the contemporary man of the street: fibreglass!

I go fast forward here. The time window 1950-1973 was a tremendous time for many technical and social improvements and changes, including the angling history. A large mass of people got to new wealth heights, easy life conditions became widespread (e.g. cars, the washing-machine which freed women from a lot of hard time...), an unprecedented fact in human history - with perhaps the exceptions of the middle period of the Roman Empire, and the XIII-XIV century- and built up the "market" as we see it today.

1973 is year of the first oil crisis...and I enter the scene: I remember those Sundays without cars (all cars except for service cars were banned from the roads) and us kids roller-skating on the highway and in the streets in all liberty! In 1977, Tom Dorsey designed and produced his first Winston graphite rod, grpahite which had started to appear and be experimented a few years earlier (e.g. Orvis 1974)

Today - We are struggling to keep up with the same standards after many oil crisis and the relatively frequent financial crack-downs like the huge one which started in 2008. There are simply not enough jobs for everybody. never there were, but with the population exploding from 1 Mia to nearly 7 Mia in just over 150 years, things have increased in magnitude. At 35 you are old. The "market" is global, China and India are becoming the "World Factory", society is open, the family is breaking, fishing is replaced by playstations. Mono-parental families cannot afford nor have any knowledge about fishing so that kids - once simply considered as future adults but now set in an edonistic class of its own - loose contact with nature and scope.

This is a "pill" of the angling history as I see it. I am not sure that I foresee a rosy future. In a recent (2009) fishing sport trade show I read the organizers saying there were more people and professionals attending, but I don't see what it should mean....Kids are the future, not adults.

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History of Angling in the Modern Era ...my view

History of Angling
in the Modern Era
...my view