FDR, Churchill and Goldfish
A WWII Visit had World Leaders Talking Fish Not Nazis
© Jim Rada
May 22, 2008
In the midst of WWII, all two of the world’s most-powerful leaders could talk about one Sunday afternoon in 1942 was goldfish.
Goldfish Farming
About 80 percent of the goldfish sold in the United States came from farms in Frederick County, Maryland in the early decades of the 20th Century (1925 Frederick News-Post Year Book and Almanac, Frederick, Md.,). Many of those goldfish farms were near the rural town of Thurmont.
One of those goldfish farming operations was Hunting Creek Fisheries. On weekends, Frederick Tresselt ran a retail store next to the main north-south road through the county. According to Frederick’s son, Ernest, the store had a large pond with a Hunting Creek Fisheries sign in the middle of it. Above the name was a large fantail goldfish painted in bright orange. The area was nicely landscaped with water lilies, shrubs and bamboo. It was an attractive location and an eye-catching sign, so eye-catching that one Sunday afternoon in 1942, three large, black cars pulled off the road and stopped.
A Chance Visit
A military man stepped out of the car and Frederick recognized him as General George Marshall, President Franklin Roosevelt’s chief of staff. “Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt and I are interested in seeing your operation here,” Marshall said, according to Ernest.
Frederick agreed, and the drivers pulled the cars in closer to the fish house, the storage building with concrete pools and wire vats.
“President Roosevelt looked in the door, but he didn’t come in, since he was handicapped and couldn’t get out of the car,” ErnestTresselt wrote in his autobiography History of a Goldfish Farmer (Emmitsburg: Chronicle Press, 2005).
However, Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Great Britain, got out of the car and walked into the fish house with Frederick. They began talking about Tresselt’s unique crop. Churchill showed an interest in the golden orfe, which were fifteen to eighteen inches long. Churchill said he had even bigger ones in his pond in England. Tresselt told the prime minister that he, too, had larger fish in his ponds on Hunting Creek Fisheries.
As the cars with Roosevelt and Churchill departed, a Secret Service agent told Frederick not to tell anyone about the visit. “This made no sense to Dad because there were already at least a hundred local people out there taking it all in. But Dad didn’t tell anybody, not even us kids,” Ernest said. He found out at school the next day when everyone but Ernest seemed to know about the visit of the two world leaders.
Validation of the Story
Ernest said that National Geographic Magazine looked into the story when they did an article about goldfish in the 1970’s. The researchers could find nothing that definitely said the world leaders had stopped at the goldfish stand, but they did acknowledge Churchill had been in the U.S. at the time and visiting the Presidential retreat at Shangri-La, which was located in the Catoctin Mountains near Thurmont.
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