As a lad, Dan Pieczonka cadged free liver from Schlesinger’s butcher shop at the corner of Western and Armitage. He and his pals would cut it to pieces, anchor them to lines of string, then toss them into a Humboldt Park pond. When a crayfish took hold they’d yank it ashore and dump it in a bucket. After collecting a dozen or so they’d hop a bus to the North Avenue pier and bait perch with them.
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Up a flight of stairs lined with fish posters and photographs, Pieczonka’s second floor is a warren of gear, lures, flies, sinkers, lines, rods, guidebooks, videos, waders, reels, hooks, jackets, and every imaginable color of feather, fur, thread, yarn, or tuft of synthetic fluff you might need to tie a fly. He stocks around 500 different types of line, the boxed spools stacked precariously in front of the window of his grandmother’s old living room.
Somehow customers from all over the midwest find their way to Pieczonka’s parlor. He’s been angling since he was four years old and selling tackle since he was a teenager, and word’s spread that he knows his stuff.
One of his favorite pieces of literature is the Treatise of Fishing With an Angle, said to be written by Dame Juliana Berners, a 15th-century English nun. Berners argues for fishing’s superiority over other “good sports and honest games” such as hunting, hawking, and fowling on the grounds that it attends to three necessities: “merry thought,” “work which is not excessive,” and “moderate diet.”
Alongside thousands of flies with names like Key Lime Squid, Cinnamon Ant, and Estaz Woolybugger, Pieczonka has rows of antique and discontinued gear. Many of his flies are impractical for use and valued solely for their aesthetics–like a gorgeous variation on a Durham Ranger designed by north sider Woytek Medder. Pieczonka’s is encased in Lucite. He still has a reel he used as a kid that was manufactured after World War II by the Zero Hour Bomb Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Then there’s the “frog harness” for casting live amphibians, and a chrome lure in the shape of a bat, which he says sold well but didn’t work.
