I will take you to my version of a wayback machine. I started flyfishing in the 1960's way before there was an internet and flyfishing information was hard to get. The old fly fishermen were secretive old cusses and maybe your father or an uncle would help you out, but no stranger. Wooly buggers weren't really popular yet and bead heads and flashy flies were yet to come. One friend was early into wooly buggers and he never showed us one. He would climb trees to get snagged buggers so other people wouldn't catch on to his secret. Sure a different world today!
I grew up in Phillipsburg NJ so fished Warren Co NJ and the Lehigh Valley streams.
The bread and butter flies were bucktails. Mostly simple two color bucktails with a silver or gold tinsel body. Red/White, Natural/white, black/white, or black/yellow were popular. Tie them slender. Next step up were more complex ones like Mickey Finn (still a killer) or black nosed dace. Need to keep each of three layers even sparer. Marabou streamers were a new hot thing - white in clear water; yellow in stained water. Feather wing patterns were more a New England thing, but Bob Jacklin introduced the South Branch Chub when he still lived in NJ.
Wet flies were used by the old pros in teams of two or three. See the attached Al Troth catalog of 1979 for examples. https://fiberglassflyrodders.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=46605 He started out in PA and those wets like Uncle Phil and Red Assed Kelso are PA patterns I think. The flies were big - 6's and 8's were common. However, everyone's box had some smaller yellow wets because sulphur season was best fly fishing time. Nice weather, good stream levels, and hungry fish.
Nymphs I remember where mostly pheasant tails and fuzzy hair bodied blobs. BTW, no fly shops with tons of materials and people had less extra income, so a lot of flies were tied with things shot or trapped locally, like muskrat fur, squirrel tail, buck tail, or pheasant tails and a few common materials like peacock herl and tinsel.
I was young so I didn't dry fly fish much. Light hooks were flimsy, good dry fly necks were rare, and floatants (mixtures of white gas and paraffin) were awful. My flies never floated very long, but maybe that was just me; I was young and didn't know much. Had a few memorable dry fly days, but was not consistent, Tippets weren't as good - 5X was considered tiny and 3X and 4X were more common. Now a 5X is a starting point for me, not the fine end of things.
However, we caught fish and those flies till do.
BTW, any of Ray Bergman's books are worthwhile reads.
