This is the story of an eighty-seven year old woman who fell in love with The Gander River in Newfoundland. And just like the north Atlantic salmon she loves to catch, Rita Fraad returns every year to the Gander when the fish show up. What is it about this river that draws this New York native from the big city lights for the past fifty-three years? Rita says it’s the magic of the river and her guide for twenty-two years says she just loves to fish, all day, in all types of weather. But there’s more to it than that. The month she spends on the river every year is filled not only with fishing, but reading and remembering.

It was 1950 when her husband Dan Fraad suggested a trip to the Gander River. Dan was an American businessman with a flourishing international company at the Gander airport. Back then international flights had to stop in Gander to refuel before crossing the Atlantic. His company supplied these flights with ground services. Rita, then a young woman, wasn’t keen on coming to the Gander River at first but fell in love with it on first sight. She said the river, the outdoors just got to her and she told her husband from then on she would always come back.

The idea of having a cabin on the Gander River was Dan’s and at first it was a modest one that would soon grow into a luxury fishing camp known by most as the Allied Camp. People from all over the world came to fish there from bank owners to real estate tycoons, to artists. In the meantime, Dan built a smaller place beside the main camp just for Rita and when he died in 1987, Rita kept coming back.

It’s a long way from the busy life she lives in New York City consumed by art exhibitions and galleries. Rita is an avid art collector and the Fraad collection is considered one of the finest private collections of American art. But Rita gladly abandons that sophisticated city life every July for the simple pleasure of the back woods and casting a line on the Gander River.