May 13, 2025
By In-Fisherman Staff
As we continue to tell the story of the In-Fisherman inception, it would be incomplete without at least one thorough discussion about legendary fish artist Larry Tople. Chuck Beasley spent 16 years as Art Director of In-Fisherman magazine, and now Jim Nagy holds the title after a couple of years. Both men have a lengthy history working with Tople over the years and share their insight into what made him so good, incomparable actually. This is the first discussion about Tople and afterwards, we all decide one episode isn’t sufficient. We’ll be doing this again.
Truncated transcript:
00:00:18.000 --> 00:01:01.000: Well, guys, welcome. We're doing another special edition of In-Fisherman Storyline. This is a part of the greatest fishing story ever told. And this one particular is pretty neat. And what I like about what we're going to talk about today is that we lost a gentleman, a very, very important contributor to the In-Fisherman culture in 2024. In fact, the date was August 13th of 2024. Larry Tople passed away, who was a long-time contributor, painter, artist to the In-Fisherman experience.
00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:26.000: And every time you would walk through a store and a magazine would catch your eye, you would get the experience of Larry Tople art. And it was customized many times for what was going to appear in the magazine. And I mean, these are some recent issues, but they go way, way back. And I've actually wrangled up some help today because as much as this is important to me, I really can't speak to the history.
Advertisement
00:01:26.000 --> 00:01:46.000: I'm not able to provide a lot of experience with, I guess, the steps that got us to this point in the history of Larry Tople. So this is really going to be an In-Fisherman Storyline owed to Larry Tople, where we're going to talk about his work. And joining me are some associates here in the In-Fisherman headquarters.
00:01:46.000 --> 00:02:14.000: We're going to start over here on my left, Jim Nagy. Is that right? Yeah. I thought I pronounced it right a minute ago and you corrected me. It's got four letters. How can I get that wrong? Well, that's true. But no, no, Nagy is correct. Just call me anything you want. Just not late to dinner, as they say. Jim is the art director for In-Fisherman Publications. And since I've been here, he started up with us after a year or two, but you have a history of working with In-Fisherman, not just as you are now.
00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:43.000: Right. Back even, you know, as far back 20 years ago, I worked at a place called Nelson Graphic Design. Chuck Nelson was actually the first art director on In-Fisherman. So at that point, I actually worked at the agency, but there was times where Doug or someone would say, hey, we need a different look. So can do you have any other illustrators over there? And occasionally I would be used to do some illustrations for the magazine.
Advertisement
00:02:43.000 --> 00:03:04.000: We found some of your drawings down in the vault together, didn't we? We did, right? They're as old as I am almost. And the funny thing is, illustration that I did, it was incorrectly credited to Ron Finger. And I took that as a huge compliment because Ron is a much better illustrator than I will ever be. So I was like, well, no, that was mine…
