From flying to fly-fishing: Dibblee's still hooked

Robert Dibblee retired eight years ago, but you wouldn’t know it. After a 33-year career as a pilot for Delta Airlines, he says retirement took some getting used to. “I relaxed into it for a while but I soon found that I missed the social component of the job,” he says. “I always enjoyed that. On the airplane, I was always one of those guys that greeted and said goodbye to the passengers at the aircraft door.”

Dibblee’s doorway back to an active social life came in the form of fly-fishing, which he describes as the “crack cocaine” of fishing. “It’s very addictive and can be very expensive,” he proclaims.

“Ironically, it was my son who got me into this mess,” he continues. “He started fly-fishing with his grandfather when he was a kid and loved it. I was too busy working. Anyway, he got me into it a few years before I retired and moved out here.”

In 2002 Dibblee joined High Country Fly Fishers, a Park City-based chapter of Trout Unlimited (TU). TU is a national organization committed to the sport and to the conservation and enhancement of quality habitat for trout. He found new friends and a new social network there and was soon elected president of the club.

One election led to another. This winter, as the newly-elected president of TU’s Utah state executive board, he’s neck deep in a fight to gain access to hundreds of miles of prime trout-fishing waters across the state that have been off-limits to anglers since statehood.

A recent Utah Supreme Court decision granting anglers access to all Utah rivers and streams left many members of the Utah State Legislature steaming. Some influential legislators vowed to pass legislation overturning the ruling. House Bill 187 would not allow public access to many miles of prime water on the Provo and Weber rivers, as well as several other waters in the state.

Dibblee is leading the charge to uphold the spirit of the Supreme Court’s ruling. During a lunch break from his busy schedule of meetings with state legislators, Division of Wildlife Resources officials and his TU colleagues, Dibblee declares, “I don’t know now how I ever had time to work for a living.”

Born and reared in Hammond, Ind., he enjoyed a prototypical childhood in America’s heartland. He remembers long, lazy summer days at play with his three sisters, friends, and a beloved dog, highlighted by family vacations to prime fishing waters in Canada. “We were a very close family,” says Dibblee, who remains in regular contact with his children and sisters. He was a good student and a percussionist in the Hammond High School band.

Growing up, he was fascinated by airplanes and had an impressive collection of model planes hanging from the ceiling of his bedroom. “I can’t explain why I was so obsessed with flying. I remember making pretend fighter-plane cockpits from cardboard boxes and using a plumber’s helper as a control stick. I shot down a lot of enemy airplanes in my bedroom,” he laughs.

Dibblee attended nearby Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., where he enrolled in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corp, a requirement at the college. At the core of the program was flight training toward a private pilot license. ‘That’s where I learned to fly for real,” he says. He took to the ROTC program and set his sights on an Air Force career. After taking a business degree, he reported for active duty and flight training in Del Rio, Texas. Dibblee was then stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, where he piloted C-141 Starlifters, massive military transport planes, as well as F-100, F-84 and F-4 fighters in the Air National Guard.

After five years of active duty, Dibblee transitioned directly into the job he held for the next 33 years, that of a pilot with Delta Airlines. Over the next two decades, Dibblee married, settled in the Chicago area, started a family and flew international flights all over the world. He has three grown children, though the marriage did not last.

He took up skiing in the 1980s. On an exploratory ski trip to Park City after Delta opened its Salt Lake hub, he fell in love with the town and the snow. He bought a Racquet Club condo in 1987 and a town home on Woodside in Old Town a few years later. He spent at least a week here every month for the next 15 years.

Dibblee married Diane, his “true love,” in 1994 and gained another daughter. “We met at a local gym near my home in Chicago and I think she married me for my body,” he jokes.

“After I retired from Delta in 2001, we spent most of our time at the house on Woodside. We really enjoyed living in Old Town but, when we decided to move here full-time, realized we needed more space. We sold our home in Illinois and built a log home in Deer Mountain.”

Since assuming the helm for TU’s Utah council, Dibblee has had less time to indulge his other two passions: skiing and fly-fishing. “I usually have 45 days of skiing in by now, but this year I’ve only got about 20,” he laments. As for fly-fishing, he looks forward to warm spring days on the Provo River and trips with his son to the fabled Green River below Flaming Gorge Reservoir.

Dibblee draws satisfaction these days from the work he does for High Country Fly Fishers and TU. “I’m passionate about taking care of the environment,” he says.

He says the club has some great projects coming up this spring, including a Provo River clean-up day with students from the Oakley School and a fly-fishing workshop for women only.

As for the future of the Utah Supreme Court decision and House Bill 187, he says flatly that people should have the right to recreate on all of Utah’s rivers and streams.

It’s a cause that’s lured Dibblee back from the brink of retirement. Though he admits that Utah politics leaves him scratching his head sometimes, there’s no place he’d rather be than in the thick of it.

From flying to fly-fishing: Dibblee’s still hooked

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