On the afternoon of May 8, 1937, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in the fighting chair of a wooden fishing boat off the coast of Port Aransas, Texas. His guide was Barney Farley, the island's most famous tarpon man. At exactly 3:27 PM, Roosevelt landed a five-foot, 77-pound silver king — and the photograph that followed would become one of the most iconic images in American sport fishing history. The signed tarpon scale still hangs in the Tarpon Inn lobby today.
Why FDR Came to Port Aransas
Roosevelt needed to disappear. Back in Washington, his Judicial Procedures Reform Bill — the infamous "court-packing" plan to expand the Supreme Court from 9 to 15 justices — was generating fierce political headwinds. Despite winning a landslide reelection in 1936, FDR was losing the public relations battle. His staff arranged 10 days of fishing on the Texas coast. The official story was recreation. The real story was survival.
His son Elliott Roosevelt had visited Port Aransas in 1936, likely scouting it for exactly this purpose. The island had everything FDR needed: world-class tarpon fishing, distance from the press corps, and a community that knew how to host famous visitors without making a fuss.
The Journey South
FDR left the White House on the evening of April 27, 1937. His special train departed Washington the next morning, heading south. On April 29, the party stopped in New Orleans for lunch at Antoine's Restaurant with Louisiana Governor Richard Leche and Mayor Robert Maestri. The famous anecdote from that meal: Mayor Maestri, lacking the polish of Washington dinners, supposedly asked the President of the United States, "How ya like dem ersters?"
That evening the presidential party boarded the destroyer USS Moffett, anchored in the Mississippi River. Escorted by the USS Decatur, they steamed into the Gulf of Mexico. On May 1, they arrived off Aransas Pass and transferred to the presidential yacht USS Potomac, which anchored in the mouth of the Lydia Ann Channel.
The Fishing
The first few days produced mixed results. The party caught 12 tarpon on May 3, and FDR hooked his first off the south jetty. But the real problem was the boat. FDR's own 35-foot vessel was too large and unwieldy for the choppy Aransas Pass conditions. A local captain suggested what every Port Aransas guide already knew: you needed a Farley boat.
Barney Farley's nephew Don brought a Farley-built craft to the presidential fleet. The boats the Farley family built were designed specifically for these waters — V-bottom hulls with a hard chine that handled chop, low sides for landing fish, and high bows to combat the surf. They were the right tool for the job.
“No blueprints. No formal plans. The Farleys sketched their designs directly on the wood flooring of their shop using colored carpenter's crayon.”
3:27 PM, May 8, 1937
On his final fishing day, FDR went out with two of Port Aransas's finest: Ted Mathews at the helm and Barney Farley Sr. handling the boat. They worked the waters about half a mile off the bow of the Potomac.
At 3:27 in the afternoon, Roosevelt hooked and landed a five-foot, 77-pound tarpon. Newsreel photographers and press in a nearby boat captured the moment. The iconic photograph shows Barney Farley in the boat with Elliott Roosevelt behind him, holding up the silver king. The fish was a trophy. But for Port Aransas, it was something more — it was proof, in the national press, that this little island on the Texas coast was a world-class fishing destination.
Sid Richardson, the Texas oil wildcatter who owned St. Joseph Island across the channel, paid the guide fees for the day.
The Bull Chute
The trip wasn't all fishing. On May 7, FDR toured Sid Richardson's game preserve on St. Joseph Island, which featured longhorn cattle, buffalo, and hunting grounds. The problem: there was no proper dock. Richardson proposed using a cattle loading chute to get the wheelchair-bound president onto the island.
FDR looked at the chute and said: "What in the world, Sid; do you mean you're going to roll me down that bull chute?" Richardson replied: "Why, Mr. President, you're the biggest bull that ever went down that chute!"
After St. Joseph Island, the group crossed Cedar Bayou at low tide to Clint Murchison's 13,000-square-foot home on Matagorda Island for mint juleps on the veranda.
A Young Congressman on the Dock
On May 11, the Potomac arrived in Galveston to a 21-gun salute from Fort Crockett. Waiting on the dock was a freshly elected 28-year-old Congressman from Texas named Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ had just won a special election running on a pro-court-packing platform — one of the few candidates in the country willing to publicly support FDR's embattled plan.
Johnson rode with Roosevelt on the train from Galveston to College Station. It was the beginning of a political relationship that would shape Texas and American politics for the next three decades. Two future presidents, linked by a fishing trip to a barrier island.
The Scale That Survived Everything
Following the local custom, FDR signed a tarpon scale from his May 8 catch. That scale was mounted in the lobby of the Tarpon Inn, joining over 7,000 others — a tradition stretching back to at least 1892.
FDR never actually slept at the Tarpon Inn. He stayed aboard the USS Potomac in the Lydia Ann Channel. But his signed scale became the most famous artifact in the building. It has survived Hurricane Celia in 1970, which closed the Inn for five years, and Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which flooded the bottom floor with an 8-foot storm surge. The lobby walls held. The scales survived. Roosevelt's signature is still there.