Mickey Mouse mystique
HILLIARDS — Mickey Mouse has still got it.
The cartoon has always been pretty good. The fishing pole is even better.
Hilliards resident Steven Stitt and his brother, David, proved the latter recently while fishing the glades behind Moniteau High School.
“My mom got me this Mickey Mouse fishing pole as my first pole when I was 5 or 6 years old,” Steven Stitt, now 26, said. “It's always been lucky for me. I've got 11 brothers and sisters and just about all of us have used that pole at one time or another with pretty good success.
“All of us have caught plenty of fish with it. It's been uncanny, really.”
Stitt has kept the Mickey Mouse pole under safe-keeping for sentimental reasons. He's always wanted his own child to eventually use it as his or her first fishing pole.
He has a six-week old son now.
“I can't wait until he's old enough to go fishing with me,” he said. “But I recently realized we had no pictures of anyone using that pole and catching fish with it — we just never took photographs — for him to see how lucky this fishing pole is.”
Steven and younger brother David, 21, of Fairview decided to rectify that situation.
They broke out the Mickey Mouse pole last Friday night and took turns fishing with it — and stayed busy all evening.
“From 6 to 10 p.m., we caught 100 fish, not including five bass that didn't count our limit,” Stitt said.
“It was pretty crazy,” David Stitt said. “As soon as we'd catch one and threw the line back in the water, something else was biting on it.”
They wound up with quite the collection of bluegill, crappie, pumpkin-seed and catfish.
“We kept rotating,” Steven Stitt said of using the pole. “I caught 20 fish, gave the pole to David. He'd catch 20 and give it back to me.
“We did that four times, then we both caught 10 more to reach our limit. I had never hit my limit before here, not even close.”
David had not reached his limit previously, either.
“We got some pretty good-sized bass that night, too,” he said. “That was a strange night. There has to be something about that pole.”
The Mickey Mouse pole was a combined Christmas and birthday present to Steven.
“I don't know where our mother got it from ... I wish I did,” David said.
Regardless, the luck hasn't left it.
“It had been put up in the attic for years,” Steven said of the pole. “We proved the luck is still in there. Now it's waiting for my son.”
