By Mickey Dunaway| Reprinted with Permission of Current;s Magazine | NOV 2025

The CD Enigma

A few days before I sat down at my iMac to put pixel to paper for this column, I was clearing out some DVDs from a shelf in my office. Nothing interesting in that. I agree until it became very interesting. Ironically, I must have had 50 DVDs on that shelf, but no DVD player to play them on! Why did I let them take up valuable shelf space? As recently as a few years ago, I had a humdinger of a 3D DVD player. Can’t remember what happened to it. Streaming is my best guess, and 3D for home viewing died away.

After feeling a bit foolish, I found a computer CD in a brown wrinkled mailing envelope. I had opened it at one time but didn’t recall its contents. However, when I saw the return address, I became sentimental as it was from Jim Mattingly in Owensboro, Kentucky. Jim and I had worked together in the Owensboro Public Schools. When I opened the khaki-colored mailing envelope, I found an orange CD that Jim had sent at least ten years before. Our address on the envelope was at least that old. Why had I kept it for so long? I could not remember, but I knew, sadly, whatever I found would be tainted with sadness because Jim had passed away in 2022. 

I hauled out a used stand-alone Apple CD player that I could connect to my iMac and find out what Jim had sent me. Once the CD player was attached and the CD inserted, I found only one file—a 60-page document titled “Fishing with Ben.” I knew Ben was Jim’s older brother. And then I remembered why I had kept the CD over the years. 

Two Friends in Owensboro

I led the Department of Instruction as Deputy Superintendent from 1997 to 2002 in Owensboro, Kentucky, a school system of 5000 in a town of 50,000. Jim was one of the principals who all reported to me, but he became much more than that. He grew into a dear friend who was never intimidated by our different positions. 

Jim was a born fisherman and as good a school leader as I ever met.  

Today, I treasure the times I went to his school. Jim was a teacher of teachers and might be out among his teachers and kids when I arrived. So, I would just go ahead and sit down in his office, because behind his desk was a mount of a giant rainbow trout that I never tired of admiring. His state record trout weighed 14 pounds, 6 ounces; caught September 10, 1972, in the Cumberland River tailwaters. His state record still stands after 53 years!

For all our talking about fishing, Jim and I only fished together twice. Jim, his son Paul, and I once caught a cooler of crappie in Rough River. The other time, Jim took me to a flooded coal pit of the kind that I had often read about in fishing magazines. The water was as black as the coal that had come out of that pit, and the bass were the darkest green I have ever seen on a largemouth. 

Jim the Creek-Wader

After Jim retired as an Owensboro Principal, he led the Catholic Diocese Schools as Superintendent. Although the Diocesan headquarters were in Owensboro, the diocese extended from Bowling Green to Paducah and encompassed most towns in between. After a trip to one of his outlying schools, Jim would email me about stopping and fishing a creek on his way back home.

Jim was, above all, a family man. While Jim worked his way up in the profession, he never lost sight of his family. While I moved from district to district and state to state during my years in my profession, Jim put emphasis on his family, and he lived it out in Owensboro.

Jim revered his older brother, for whom his tribute (Fishing with Ben) was written. Ben, a guide on the Cumberland River, died early from cancer, yet he published a book, My Father’s Waters. 

Like is beloved brother, My friend and colleague left this world far too early in 2022 at age 69 from the early onset of Alzheimer’s.

Unforgettable

My Father’s Waters sits prominently in my office, and next to it is that priceless CD I found that day. And though I never met Ben or Jim’s father, I felt the impact he had on their love and respect for the outdoors. 

My father was like that. 

. . . . .

God does not charge time spent fishing against a man’s allotted life span. – American Indian Proverb