SRS –

I know that one of my associates in Washington state, who did a lot of fishing off the docks in Seattle and vicinity, called a rather strange saltwater critter a bullhead, and I'd agree it was so ugly, slimy, spiny, bony (add adjectives as desired – all bad ones work) that I couldn't imagine anyone attempting to eat one. He also asserted that they were venomous, but I didn't find any confirmation of that.

If you were fishing in a Washington state lake, however, the most likely "bullhead" you'd have caught would have been a brown bullhead, Ictalurus nebulosus, and quite edible. It's an "introduced" species (ca. 1880) not native to Washington, but would likely have been fairly common in your (our) times.

The Washington Department of Fisheries and Wildlife asserts:

"Bullheads also make excellent table fare; many anglers consider catfish taken from cool, clean water to be the ultimate in piscatorial cuisine. The fish are normally skinned, at which a little practice is required to become proficient. Any brown bullhead over 12 inches is a good-sized one, so expect to work for a family meal."

The only reason I can think of for not liking them is, if your father was raised on trout and salmon, he might have failed to skin them, or didn't do a complete job of getting all the skin off. Although the WDFW implies that they may be prepared with the skin on, the usual "slime level" and tough skin would require extreme cleaning (or marinating?) measures, in my opinion, to avoid the rather oily, and sometimes slightly bitter, taste of the skin.

It is possible that what you were catching was something else, and that "bullhead" was a local name for it; but if it wasn't good to eat (when taken from reasonably clean water) – it wasn't a catfish.

An interesting page on fish in Washington state, from which the above quote was taken, is at Warm Water Fish of Washington. The extremely sparse variety of native freshwater fish ("Before the late 1800s, the only resident freshwater fish living in Washington State were trout, char, whitefish, burbot, squawfish, suckers and smaller fish generally unimportant to anglers") has led to a lot of introductions of non-native fish, deliberately and illegally or accidentally. The page gives a good historical outline of what's there now.

OTHERS -

Several folk have made reference above to the "thousand pound catfish" legends. Catfish can be quite large, but most of these stories are "apocryphal" or "urban legend" stuff. There are numerous historical photos of some rather large ones, but specific identification is difficult. Current thinking is that most of the very large ones taken from the Mississippi and its tributaries were probably blues, or in a few cases flatheads, as they seem to have a greater "growth capacity" than channels. Few people, a hundred or so years ago (or even now), would have been able to tell the difference between a blue and a channel cat, especially a very large one.

One well known photo from my region, that shows a catfish reported at 850 pounds, hanging on the trading post scale, can be estimated to have actually been not more than (possibly) 300 pounds by comparison with more recent accurately document fish. In the era of the original picture, most trading posts had two sets of weights – one for buying stuff and one for selling. They often were in a ratio of 3 or 4 to 1, and neither set was likely to conform to any "official" standard. Also, in that era, the "average" man was unlikely to be more than about 5' 4" tall, and local publishers were not less prone to exaggerated headlines than current ones.

The current US record for any catfish caught by "sporting" methods is a flathead of 123 pounds. Somewhat larger ones have been "found" by sometimes bizarre (and/or illegal) methods, but many of these cases are poorly documented, and at least some may have been saltwater cats (entirely different critters) that "migrated" accidentally into the lower regions of the Mississippi.

Keep the faith that there are bigger ones out there – and some are big enough to eat ya'; but how big?...

John