MINNEAPOLIS — Saturday, at the crack of dawn, these old boys weren't on the water. They were near it, in the same cabin at the same resort they've been visiting for decades; in no hurry on this fishing opener to push away from the dock.

They're weren't worried. They'll catch their walleyes.

For 64 years running — 65 this opener — they always have.

Four of this bunch first met as kids in south Minneapolis. The year was 1957, a time when most blocks south of downtown had an empty lot, and it was there that kids could goof off, throwing their bikes in the dirt as they came to running stops, streetcars clanging in the distance.

In those years, the four boys had a serious hankering for fishing, and knew where to dig worms and collect them in tin cans they swung from their bikes' handlebars. Their hot spot was a pond in Lakewood Cemetery that they sneaked into for largemouth bass and giant sunfish.

"We weren't supposed to be there," Bill Voedisch said the other day. "But we knew we could outrun the cemetery people if we dodged among the headstones on the way out."

Years later, Voedisch ("Vodi"), Dean Sweeney ("Scrawn"), John Zollars ("Z") and Dave Johnson ("DJ") — the four schoolboy chums — would enter Southwest High School, and it was there that they cooked up the idea of taking their fishing addictions on the road.

Any road, as long as it led north.

So it was on an early summer morning in 1960 that Vodi, Scrawn, Z and DJ clambered into Scrawn's 1953 Buick Roadmaster and watched as the Twin Cities grew smaller and smaller in the hulking vehicle's rearview mirror, cigar smoke billowing out its windows.

Vodi was 15 years old. DJ and Scrawn were 16, and Z was 17.

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