Retired educator Raymond Stone swears the catfish joke came from Rep. Wayland Spruill.

Stone, who worked for the N.C. Association of Educators in the 1950s, said he recalls the Bertie County Democrat telling the joke frequently.

"He was a great big bald-headed potbellied man who could stand on the floor and wax poetic about the rippling waters of the Chowan River," Stone told Dome. "That was always the thing — 'Hold still, little catfish.' I can hear him right now saying that."

Stone said he could not recall Rep. Cutlar Moore making the joke, as previously reported in Dome.

But he said that regardless, Spruill was a "bigger character" than Moore.

The first known reference to a "catfish amendment" is from 1957.

As Dome speculated earlier, a minimum wage bill in that year's legislative session may have helped popularize the phrase. We've now tracked down that story.

In an unsigned article in the N&O on April 17, Lumberton Sen. Cutlar Moore is quoted complaining about changes made to a bill to boost the minimum wage to 75 cents an hour.

There was a fisherman, he said, who was having difficulty skinning a catfish which squirmed frantically under the knife.

"Finally," Moore said, "this fellow said, 'Hold still little catfish. All I'm going to do is gut you.'"

The amendments exempted hotel and laundry workers, firms with fewer than five employees, children under 18 and those who work fewer than 18 hours a week. They "chopped the bill down to a mere shell of its former self," the article notes.

It's possible that the phrase "catfish amendment" was already in use by then, and the joke was certainly not original. But the high profile of the minimum wage bill and the numerous amendments make it a plausible candidate.

The full text of the 1957 article after the jump.

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The use of the term "catfish amendment" can be traced back further.

Roy Parker Jr., a former political reporter for the N&O in the 1950s and '60s, credits former state Sen. Cutlar Moore with popularizing, if not coining, the phrase in North Carolina.

Parker said the Lumberton Democrat, who served in the Senate during that era, proposed a bill regulating the insurance industry. Other legislators then sought to kill it with seemingly friendly amendments.

He said Moore explained the term as "gutting" the bill.

"He’d say, 'They tell us this amendment won't do much, but I feel like it may be a catfish amendment,'" Parker recalled. "I can see him standing up there now saying, 'Don’t worry, little catfish, I'm not going to hurt you. I'm just going to gut you."

That appears to be a common Southern joke, however.

More after the jump.

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