When we were college students, we received educations in and out of the classrooms of Slippery Rock University.

The lessons learned have stayed with me and as my friends like to say, your life experiences give you character and as I like to say some times you meet some characters.

It was this time of year many decades ago that I met one of the local characters at a Friday Night watering hole that is long gone from the Slippery Rock scene. The college kids and the locals used to meet up and exchange cultural ideas and eye each other up for the lack of a better term.

One rainy spring night, a fellow came through the doors and declared the suckers are running on the Muddy Creek and I have a whole trunk load of them!

Well, I am always interested in fishing stories and the idea of this fellow having a trunk load of fish definitely captured my interest and I followed out the gang of locals. Much to my surprise, his trunk lid was up and it was full of squirming white suckers.

The white suckers are abundant in Pennsylvania and run in masses up the small streams to spawn. The limit on suckers is high, but I’m sure that this fellow wasn’t too concerned about limits as he took burlap sacks and was giving his neighbors a sack of fish. The word that I heard was that the fellows grind them up and make a very mild tasting fried fish cake.

I didn’t think too much about suckers again until I was trout fishing on the Connoquenessing below the Oneida Reservoir. I ran into a fellow who was coveting a fishing hole and looked at me as an intruder trying to take his hot spot.

I was not trying to use the “PA Pinch,” a term we like to use when a fisherman crowds another angler to get his fishing “honey hole”. Once again, I do like to watch a good exhibition from an adept angler as he goes about his serious business of angling.

This guy was throwing about every lure that he had in his array of spinners and spoons. I offered him one bit of advice and that was to try using a red worm if he wanted those fish.

The angler gave me a look that wasn’t a friendly one, but he wasn’t giving up his hole even if it took him all day to catch a trout. I tossed him a container of garden red worms and he finally relented and put one on a hook.

I told him to let it tumble with the current like it was washed into the stream with very little weight on the line. The worm drifted by the school of fish and sure enough, one took the offering.

The fish fought well and was robust in size and weight as the angler hoisted it onto the bank. As he went to take out the hook, I couldn’t help but to notice his look of puzzlement as he tried to identify this peculiar trout.

All I said to him was, “It’s a sucker, and all of them are suckers”. He looked at me and just tossed the fish back into the creek and walked away mumbling.

I never fished for suckers in earnest until a few local fellows itching for trout season to start asked me if I wanted to be part of a sucker fest. They were going to fish the tributaries of the Allegheny River for the Red Horses.

The Red Horses make up a group of five different suckers that are found on the Allegheny drainage system. They consist of the Silver, River, Black, Golden and Shorthead Red Horse suckers. I am not sure if my friends and I could positively identify each species, but I knew they were looking for the large suckers that they called red-tails.

It was cool out and we had a campfire going along the banks of a tributary entering into the Allegheny. We were cooking some homemade sausage and waiting for the bump of a rod to let us know the soft mouth suckers were hitting our red worm.

All of a sudden, my rod tip bounced and I set the hook on the fish. The fellows all yelled out, red…tail! I knew then that I had joined the ranks of the anglers celebrating this unique spring spawn event of the run of the suckers.

Jay Hewitt is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle