It was “Colonel” Starling, the head of the President’s Secret Service Detail, who encouraged Coolidge’s fascination with fishing. He had certainly fished before, growing up in Plymouth, but it was due to the Kentuckian’s influence that he became an avid fisherman, including practice in the art of fly fishing. It was during Coolidge’s famous summer of 1927 in South Dakota that Starling recounted the President’s experience with the Royal Coachman and the Black Gnat,

          “One of the first things he did was to admit to the newspapermen that he used worms to catch trout. This precipitated a hullabaloo, with all the fly fishermen in the region shouting that to use worms was unsportsmanlike. The controversy was silly–any fisherman will use worms rather than go home with an empty creel. But I planned to convert the President to flies if I could.

          “A few days later he was fishing…