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  One poster at the time

Text and Photo: Jacques Héroux

The famous Website "The Classics" (www.salmonflyclassics.com) gathers a panoply of World class Salmon fly tiers.  Last fall, Donald Williams, the person in charge for the website send a e-mail asking us whether some of us had a project where the tiers could collaborate.  I did propose the idea to design a poster of traditional salmon flies.  Isabelle, my wife, is a graphic arts designer specialist. She did volunteer to help us designing the poster.

What we proposed was to design and create a poster made up of Classics salmon flies.  Since I work in a Community college, students of the printing program  accepted to print the posters as a class project.  The only costs would be the material, basically the paper.  At the beginning we thought of selling the posters on Ebay and all the profits could be given to charity organization.  We then contacted all the fly tiers from the website “ The Classics” in order to know their interest to take part in the project.  Twenty-one tiers accepted to take part with great interest.  The tiers come from the United States, Italy, England, Germany, Denmark,  Sweden and Canada.

The original idea was to give the amount of the incomes of the sale of the posters to an organization or a charity related to Atlantic salmon.  However, after having consulted the participating tiers, the majority expressed a desire to give the incomes to a human charity organization.  Some tiers proposed the ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.  Everyone agreed that ALS will receive all the profits of the sale of our posters.  The next step was to contact the ALS Societies from USA and Canada.  The ALS Society of Canada had shown a high interest and gave us their full support. 

Gary LaFontaine was a giant among fly tiers and fly fishermen. In January of 2002, after several years of fighting Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also called Lou Gehrig's disease, Gary LaFontaine lost his final battle with the biggest fish of his life, life itself. After contacting his family, we decided that the poster would be dedicated to its memory. 

In December 2002, our work then started.  After having received the 21 beautiful classics salmon flies, the next step was to take them with a digital photograph of high resolution.  Isabelle had to integrate all the pictures into the design that she created in order to conceptualize the final version of the poster.  The students of the printing program at the College began the process to print 2000 copies in four colors.

Meanwhile, Don conceived a web page where the posters will be promoted.  The project was done in April 2003.  The posters are now available to the public at the cost of 20$ USD directly on Internet, www.als.ca. The ALS society of Canada sells the poster directly to the public from their Webster thus eliminating the need for a middleman and allowing for all the revenue to be given to the ALS organization.

It is our hope that what little contribution we can make with The Classics poster project that we can somehow touch the life of someone with ALS. Maybe with the grace of God and the expertise of the ALS researchers someday there might even be a cure for ALS found and wouldn't it be great if our poster had something to do with it.

More Info:
Jacques@salmosalar.info

13.6.2003