Billionaire, fly fisherman, and wildlife conservationist Ted Turner died recently at the age of 87 after a long illness. Though I never met him or spoke to him, on two occasions our lives intersected at a distance, and he ended up serving—very loosely—as the model for the charater J.T. Allman in my novel, Rolling Back the River. In 2002, shortly after I become editor of Fly Rod & Reel Magazine, we decided that Turner would be the most worthy recipient for our annual Angler of the Year Award. Turner had recently enabled the creation of a significant new piece of habitat for the beleaguered Westslope cutthroat trout subspecies in a stream called Cherry Creek, which ran through one of his ranches in Montana. The project involved using rotenone to kill all the brown trout and rainbow trout in the creek, after which a reproducing population of cutthroats was established in the stream. Removing the non-native fish was necessary because of the fact that they tend to out-compete natiive cutthroat whenever they share a habitat. Rainbow trout, in particular, tend to hybridize with cuttthroats, creating hybrids called "cuttbows" and thereby diluting the gene pool of the native species. The Cherry Creek project ended up being somewhat controversial, as many anglers had enjoyed fishing for brown and rainbow trout in this stream, and many were, at best, indifferent to the idea of restoring native species. My other distant connection with Turner occurred in 2022, when I was fishing for landlocked salmon on the Traful River in Argentina. One entire side of the Traful, starting at Traful Lake, was owned by Turner, and I fished both sides of the river, frequently finding myself on Turner's property. This experience gave me the idea for Rolling Back the River, a story of two ranches divided by a river, one owned by Argentines and the other by an American biillionaire and conservationist, which both compete and cooperate with one another in various ways. My protagonist, Vincent Mapp, ends up facing off against the mysterious and somewhat dangerous billlionaire, J.T. Allman—while at the same time befriending his very friendly adult twin neices. In this way, Ted Turner served as something of a model for Allman. Rest in peace, Mr. Turner.