Jay Ford Thurston - Trout Expert and Author

Born in 1933 in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Jay Ford Thurston’s early years passed by in Felch, near Iron Mountain, where the woods are deep and the trout streams flow free. This is where he learned to fish trout. In his teen years, Jay’s family moved to Pardeeville, Wisconsin and then on to Fall River, Wisconsin, where Jay graduated from high school. His two years in the Army afforded him a college education on the Korean GI Bill. Earning a B.S. degree in geography and history from the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, and a Master’s degree in outdoor education from Northern Illinois University, he taught grades one through nine for twelve years and then became an elementary school principal in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Each year he was principal he took fifth or sixth grade children school camping where he taught them how to canoe. After serving the School District of La Crosse for twenty-two years, Jay retired in 1995.

From 1973, until his retirement, Jay was often fishing trout in the spring creeks of Southwestern Wisconsin, or engaged in competitive canoe racing with his wife Diana, or cross country skiing, camping, hunting, or ice fishing. Jay and Diana moved to “Trout Central,” Viroqua, Wisconsin, a city in Southwestern Wisconsin surrounded by spring creeks full of trout.

He has published over 400 articles, five books: The Wild Flower, Poetry of Nature and Romance, Following in the Footsteps of Ernest Hemingway, Out of the Rainbow, Spring Creek Treasure, and Trout Central, as well as giving more than sixty presentations mostly about trout fishing,

Today, if he’s not on a local trout stream, paddling a canoe, or skiing, you will probably find him doing volunteer work in Viroqua, or sitting in his office, with a Labrador dog at his side and soft music in the background, as he writes another story, another book.