BOULDER • At 91, A.K. Best sometimes thinks back to the things his dad said.

“Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, pay attention,” the man used to say back in Depression-era Iowa, where he farmed with a team of horses.

Best paid attention, explaining how he made a name for himself.

He is a legend in the fly fishing world for tying flies, and one does not become a legend that way without an uncanny attention to detail.

If you’re unfamiliar with how these lures are made — how a master does it — you get a quick sense from Best’s 1989 book, “Production Fly Tying.” It’s the painstaking guide for weightless material and fine techniques that Field and Stream Magazine once hailed “a bible of invaluable secrets.”

Just from the table of contents, you get an idea of the miniscule hooks, threads and tendrils of fur that go into fly tying, along with Best’s long list of special tools, among them a proper vise and lamp, small scissors, pliers, tweezers, bobbin holders and your own fingernails. You can get another idea of how precise the craft is by the finest fly tying students Best says he ever had: heart and brain surgeons.

Best was called the “dry fly guru” by acclaimed fly fishing writer John Gierach. He provided the introduction to “Production Fly Tying,” recognizing it as a “dense book” that readers would be tempted to flip through. He implored reading cover-to-cover.

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“You’ll miss too much if you don’t,” Gierach wrote, “like why you should use deer hair for the wing on an elk hair caddis, where on the skin that hair should come from, why the deer should have lived in a field rather than a swamp, and how the venison from each animal is likely to taste.”

Of course Best dedicated the book to his dad, “who taught me the love and excitement of fishing with the twinkle in his eyes and the quickness of his step every time we packed the gear in the car.”

It was another thing his dad said: “Come on boy, let’s go.”

Best isn’t fishing much anymore. “I’m 91,” he says. “I probably shouldn’t go alone, you know.”

Nor is he tying flies anymore. It’s been almost a year since his last one, he says.

It was time, he says. “It’s been a helluva ride.”

And so the workbench and vise and drawers and crates piled high with material sit idle here in his Boulder basement. For 40-plus years, this is where Best tied flies for Orvis and fly shops around the country at a shocking, one-man pace. Trade magazines told of him cranking out 30,000 flies per season out of “the cave,” as Best calls it.

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“He’d turn on his stereo, classical music or jazz, and just go to town,” his daughter, Sue Morgan, says. “I remember yelling down the stairs at him. ‘Dad, are you coming up for dinner or what?’”

He’s still down here in a flannel and overalls, still sporting that salt-and-pepper mustache and ball cap — still that quintessential image of a fisherman with a quick, dry wit. He was recently reached by his flip phone, running errands: “I gotta get some more cigars and a fifth of whiskey. Gotta cover my needs, you know.”

He’s otherwise found in the basement, still down here working on something, ever a busy farmer’s son. Only now it’s not flies. Now it’s wooden model airplanes.

“It’s not very good,” Best says of his first product. “I made some mistakes. But at least the wings are on straight.”

He is ever the perfectionist. But this latest hobby, a return to a childhood one, feels different from his life’s hobbies-turned-jobs: music and flies.

“I’m doing this not to get any approval,” he says over a plane under construction. “I’m doing this just because I enjoy it.”

The thrill of applause

Best still remembers that first feeling of approval. This was back in Iowa, on the wooden floor of a barn dance. His dad played the banjo, his mom the piano, and he was just a kid playing saxophone.

“That’s when I first got that thrill,” he says. “That applause.”

He’d pursue it through college in the late 1950s. While studying music education at Drake University, he’d play one-nighters all around the Midwest. He’d study all the parts of a big band, once asking for help from a pianist and flutist he met on campus.

She happened to be beautiful. Jan happened to appreciate the concert circuit and a good time as much as him — “one of the original groupies I think,” Best says. One night at a Christmas party, Jan said yes to marrying him.

Off they went on to their careers teaching music. Jobs took them to Michigan, where they raised a family and Best kept fishing in his spare time.

“That’s where I discovered brook trout, which changed my life,” he says.

He couldn’t get enough of them. Nor could he get enough flies between his meager salary and his family to support.

“I couldn’t afford to buy them,” he says, “so I learned how to tie them.”

He turned out to be pretty good — good enough for a fly shop in Boulder to seek his services. That’s where Gierach, emerging himself in the sporting world with his writing, met Best, who at that point had been selling his flies to gas stations and fly shops here and there.

The broader industry got to know the “dry fly guru” from Gierach’s stories.

“A couple of people credited me with making him famous, and I don’t think I did,” Gierach says. “I think he made himself famous, because his flies were really exceptional, and he had some ideas about flies that weren’t exactly common wisdom.”

While anglers strove to be entomologists, understanding the biology of insects behind the fish’s craving, Best took an intense eye to their aesthetics. Analyzing an insect was like analyzing a sheet of music, he came to understand.

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“There’s no such thing as an unimportant detail in music,” he says. “The composer put that dot on the paper with an ink pen for a specific reason. Just like when you look at a picture of an insect, every dot is important.”

Best would measure the proportions of bugs, their bodies and legs and wings, and obsess over their textures and colors. With pictures, he was all too aware of how lighting could distort those real-life colors.

“He always felt if he could tie a fly that looked so much like nature, then it would work,” says Morgan, his daughter.

He would test the flies on the water. “He was spookily good,” Gierach says. “He could simply catch fish that other people couldn’t catch.”

His reputation, too, was based on his sheer production. The flies would pile up on his bench, thousands upon thousands. “It was a huge commitment,” Morgan says.

Gierach once described Best as “a guy who has a shoulder cradle on his telephone receiver, so he doesn’t have to stop tying when he gets a call.”

Life of bliss

Best’s reputation spread beyond America. For decades he was invited to conventions and private events all around the world. He relished this.

There was that applause, again and again.

“It’s a direct shot of adrenaline, and you want to do more and more because it feels good to get that applause. It becomes addictive,” Best says. “And then you suddenly run out of things to say.”

He’s not writing anymore. He’s not traveling to speak or teach. He’s not tying flies. Not since last summer, he says.

Last summer, after 67 years of marriage — “67 years of bliss,” Best says — Jan died. That’s when Best stopped tying flies.

“Now half of me is gone,” he says.

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Time flew with those time-demanding flies, it seems. Best characterizes his career’s praise as “a disease” and “a poison,” and that seems to cast a shadow on a legacy that friends and family see as a bright testament to life: Best found joy in music and tying flies, and he spread that joy.

Now he’s finding new joy in model airplanes, that childhood hobby. He’s reflecting more on childhood and the life he and Jan resolved to live out of the Midwest: a life of bliss, even though all that praise never amounted to riches, even though more money probably should have been saved.

“Growing up in rural counties, we watched farmers work their whole damn lives and save their money and move to town and then die of heart attacks,” Best says. “We watched my father, he was the same way. Worked his entire life, had all kinds of money, and never got to enjoy it.”

The man came to Colorado to visit once. “Only time he ever left Iowa,” Best says.

He wanted to take his dad to Rocky Mountain National Park. Best drove to a high point that should have been a great view.

“We ended up in the clouds,” Best says. “He said, Where are the mountains? We were looking down on them, they were below us, through the clouds. It was like being in heaven almost.”