Walters was responsible for getting anglers caught on the fly.

Byline: INSIDE THE OUTDOORS By Mike Stahlberg The Register-Guard

If all the people Stan Walters taught to fly-cast during his lifetime were to fish the McKenzie River at the same time, the "hatch" of feathers fashioned into imitation insects would be as thick as a plague of locusts.

Bugs would be darting back and forth as men and women in chest waders or drift boats made dry-casts over every hole and every ripple from Vida to McKenzie Bridge.

The river would be lined with anglers. Thousands of them.

Such was the magnitude of one mild-mannered man's contribution to his sport.

Walters taught fly-casting and fly-tying to an average of nearly 300 people a year for more than 40 years - about 12,000 in all, he figured in a 2005 interview.

The students signed up for courses offered through Lane Community College's adult education program, local park districts and tackle shops.

Thursday, friends and family of Walters will gather alongside the McKenzie River to remember one of the icons of fly fishing in Oregon.

The memorial service for Walters, who died Wednesday at the age of 80, will be held at 10 a.m. at Eagle Rock Lodge, near milepost 34.5 on Highway 126 east of Vida.

Walters was born Aug. 15, 1926, in Allegheny, Pa. He caught his first fish on a fly he had tied himself at age 9, in northeastern Pennsylvania, and forever became hooked on fly fishing.

As an adult, Walters served in the Navy during World War II, earned a master's degree in music, got married and moved to the West Coast. In 1956, he went to work for The Register-Guard as an advertising salesman. He retired from the newspaper in 1991.

A virtuoso with a fly rod, Walters' began teaching fly-casting courses at Lane Community College in 1964 - the same year he and a handful of other energetic anglers co-founded the McKenzie Fly Fishers club.

One of his co-founders, Bill Nelson, proposed the creation of a national organization of fly anglers that would work to promote fly fishing and the ethic of releasing fish unharmed. Many members of the new club rose to the idea, and the Federation of Fly Fishers was formed.

Walters was chairman of the organizational conclave, held at the Country Squire motel north of Eugene in the summer of 1965.

At the time, fly fishing was something of an oddity as far as most Oregon anglers were concerned.

"We were a bunch of fringe types 25 years ago," J.D. "Skip" Hosfield, another FFF co-founder from Eugene, said on the eve of the organization's 25th anniversary. "Nobody really went around admitting openly that he was a fly fisherman ... it was hard to even find places to buy fly-tying materials in those days."

Even odder to some bait fishermen was the notion of "catch-and-release" fishing, which was a cornerstone of the federation's focus on "conserving the resource."

By the time Walters served as chairman of the 25th anniversary conclave in Eugene in 1990, fly fishing was enjoying a boom in popularity, releasing fish unharmed was becoming a required practice on many waters, and the FFF had grown to more than 13,000 members and published its own magazine.

Today, the FFF is an international nonprofit organization that represents nearly 50,000 organized fly angers, according to Bob Wiltshire, a spokesman for the federation.

"The guys out in Eugene were the catalyst for all that," Wiltshire said.

Just as Stan Walters was a catalyst for getting swarms of people hooked on fly fishing.

Mike Stahlberg can be reached at [e-mail].