Bobby Burns - The biggest catch: A long life of family and fishing

Family legend has it that Precilla Brooks caught the biggest bass ever to swim in Contentnea Creek.

It was in late summer or early fall, a few years before the flood, a short walk from her trailer on Lenoir Street.

She baited a hook with a worm, tossed the line out from a cane pole and waited on the bank, like she'd done a thousand times before.

A stronger person, and less experienced angler, would have fought too hard and broken the line after the big fish struck.

Not Precilla. She was 92 then, and she had fished all her life. Precilla Strong Brooks, who died this month at 105, loved to fish.

The trailer she lived in sat behind her daughter's house on the south side of Grifton. All she had to do was walk down to the creek, said daughter Malissa Privette, 72.

Brooks ran the banks of that creek when she was a girl and her name was Precilla Quinerly. Her father took her there to play. She went to school at Shiloh and she married at 21 or 22 to Arthur Strong. They had 10 children and lived in the country outside Ayden, Malissa said.

He worked on farms and raised a garden and livestock; she cooked and cleaned and raised the children. “She'd cook for us three times a day,” said daughter Virgie Smith, 77. “We had a garden, chickens, a cow, we made butter, we done everything. We lived happy.”

Whenever she could, though, Precilla grabbed her pole and headed to the water. She used worms most often for bait because she could dig them up. But she also used crickets and pieces of fish and meat. Later on in life she used a rod and reel.

“She would fish until dark,” Malissa said. “We would be waiting for her to come home and the sun would be about to go down ... I used to love to see her when she'd come.”

She'd always share her catch with her family, but she'd rarely eat the fish herself. She didn't drink alcohol, she didn't smoke or use tobacco, and never “crowded her stomach” by overeating, her children said. She went to bed early, rose early and always ate breakfast. She got plenty of rest by taking a “nod” or two during the day.

Arthur died in the early 1960s and the children got jobs, got married and started their own families, except for the baby, Ruth, who had Down syndrome. Precilla continued to care for Ruth. She remarried and moved north to New York and Baltimore, where she worked in a factory that made toy cars.

Virgie missed her mother during those years. Of the 10 children, she shared her mother's passion for fishing the most. On Friday a pair of poles leaned against the wall on the front porch of her house on Allen Drive in Ayden, where Precilla spent her final years.

She returned to Pitt County after the death of her second husband. She would drive Ruth daily from Ayden to East Carolina Vocational Center. In a little station wagon, she'd carry Virgie and a crew of companions to rivers, creeks and sounds, Virgie said.

Her mother found peace when she fished, Virgie said. “It's a soothing thing. You get out there around that water and you sit out there and it's good. That's a good thing to do.”

By 1982 Precilla had moved to the trailer in Grifton. She spent more and more time by Contentnea Creek. On the day she caught the big bass, a fisherman nearby told her son William Strong that “my mama was just strong enough to hold that fish till he wore hisself down. That's what he said.”

Malissa's nephew helped haul in the fish. Malissa began to clean it to make a stew. By the time the family thought to call Channel 9, they had to piece it back together so a reporter could film it.

The television report said the fish weighed close to 20 pounds, said William, 71. The proof could be sitting on a tape somewhere in the WNCT archives. “My sister ate a million dollar fish,” William said.

The family gathered at the place in Grifton every August to celebrate Precilla's birthday. She stored a lifetime of memories in the trailer along with jars of money, including coins and bills squirreled away over the years.

Hurricane Floyd swelled the creek in 1999. At age 95, Precilla evacuated. She drove her new Toyota truck to Virgie's house. She tried, but couldn't get back for a month. When she did, everything was gone. Precilla's mind began to fade.

“A couple years after that, she began to kinda go back, you know,” Malissa said. “It took something out of her, because we lost every thing we had.”