Tom Helgeson's death leaves a vast conservation void in Minnesota and throughout the Midwest.
The onetime Minneapolis Star deputy managing editor who died Friday at age 71 from complications of lung cancer once told me he got out of the newspaper business years ago because it became "too big and corporate" for his taste.
A kind man of broad interests, Tom, for many fly anglers, was the face of their sport in this part of the country. He owned a Minneapolis fly shop (Bright Waters) at one time, and struggled with it, but kept moving upstream and down, around river bend after river bend, as it were, before combining his interests in writing and publishing with fly fishing and, importantly, clean water conservation.
He believed so much in clean water that when he established his first Great Waters Fly Fishing Expo, he vowed that seminars on casting and travel and entomology would not outnumber those on conservation. Frequently, his show offered field trips to area streams to see showpiece habitat projects.
He loved to fish. And to teach about fish and fishing. For many years he traveled to the Missouri River in Montana with a group of anglers who not only valued the opportunity to learn about fly fishing, and to see new places and especially new waters, but valued also the opportunity to spend time with someone whose undivided attention was theirs.
Similarly, Tom's annual October trips to Kodiak Island in Alaska for steelhead and silvers became pilgrimages of renewal for him and his friends.
He was, in sum, a very good guy who gave more than he took.
Below is a question and answer interview did with him that was published in the Star Tribune in 2006 on the eve of the third running in the Twin Cities of his Great Waters Fly Fishing Expo.
