“Bait the hook well: this fish will bite.”
-From “Much Ado About Nothing,” by William Shakespeare (the English writer, not the Kalamazoo luremaker)
It is a wintry Sunday morn, and we are gathered here at the Holiday Inn to celebrate Shakespeare.
Not the Bard, the bait.
William Shakespeare Jr. of Kalamazoo, Mich., was one of the earliest makers of wooden fishing lures, or baits. At the turn of the century, his company manufactured Bucktail Spinners and Revolution lures, and his products cause much ado at this gathering.
For this is the Olde Outdoorsman Show, and no place to be a fish.
Inside the Holiday Inn’s meeting hall is a scene to strike terror in the gills of even the most brazen bass: Table after table of treble-hooked terror, most of it with names that seem borrowed from the writings of that other legendary wordsmith, Dr. Seuss.
We’re talking Hawaiian Wigglers, Hula Poppers, Pocono Minnows, Wiggle Wizards, BassMerizers, Waukazoo Surface Spinners and Bassey Biff Surface Single Wobblers-all of which have been set here to hook fishermen, not fish.
Fishing lures, particularly ancient treasures from grandpa’s tackle box, have quietly become collectors’ items, and some are now worth more than a fully-rigged bass boat.
One bait-fishing tale circulating here has it that a prominent lure collector was attending an outdoorsman’s convention in Chicago when he came upon another collector known to have an extremely rare lure still in the original box.
After haggling all day, the owner of the prized lure finally allowed that the only thing he would take in trade would be a new fishing boat. The other collector promptly agreed to the exchange.
A $4,400 bass boat was then traded for the choice bait in its original packaging. And the man who traded for it claimed to come out ahead on the deal. It seems the lure was worth about $2,000, but the box it came in was valued at $3,000.
“I don’t doubt that story; I’ve heard of refrigerators being traded for bait, and I know of a guy who had a bait so rare that he wanted a car for it,” said Indianapolis insurance agent and lure collector David Budd.
“Boxes are in the `in’ thing,” he added. “It is not uncommon for a real early box to be worth a thousand bucks.”
Budd is president of the National Fishing Lure Collectors Club, which was founded in 1976 and now has more than 4,000 members. The club sanctions bait shows and auctions around the country and stages an annual convention that this year will be July 6-8 at the Pheasant Run Resort in west suburban St. Charles.
According to Budd, antique-bait collecting began as a winter hobby for fishermen frozen out of their favorite spots. In the early days, collectors were mostly interested in specific brands of bait for sentiment or sport, and nearly all trading was done by swapping or bartering, which is generally not only more economical, but also harder for revenue agents to trace.
Big money bait trading came only after a rare Haskell Minnow surfaced several years ago, Budd said.
In 1859, Riley Haskell obtained the first U.S. patent for a fishing lure in which wood is mentioned as a possible material. Although the wood version was apparently never manufactured, the silver-plated metal Haskell Minnow is a legend in lore lure.
“One went up for auction for the first time about eight years ago, and it commanded a price of $22,000,” Budd said. “That woke a lot of people up.”
When word spread of a minnow lure going for a whale of a price, fishermen around the country began to look at their fish bait in a new light.
“It made people jump, or dive into their tackle boxes,” Budd said.
Old tackle shows well
Those who bring tackle-box treasures to the Olde Outdoorsman Shows each month are likely to be pounced upon themselves, said organizer George Mace of Paw Paw, Ill., whose next show at the Rochelle Holiday Inn is set for Feb 12.
“I remember one day a fellow walked in here with an old tackle box in his hand, and he didn’t get 10 feet inside the door before suddenly people had him surrounded so that you couldn’t even see what was going on,” Mace said.
“The guy just set the tackle box on the floor and opened it, and everybody made a circle. By the time he stood up he had an empty tackle box and was already out of business.
“We laughed about it later because there were guys standing around the outside of the circle holding up money, hoping they’d just get a shot at something.”
While many journey to the shows to sell and trade, others come simply to find out if their baits have any monetary allure. Robert Huber of Sycamore walked into the January show with a piece of foam pad about the size of a postage stamp pinched in his fingers.
He carried it gently to an exhibit table set up by West Chicago painting contractor and Wisconsin fishing guide Don Ludy, a noted connoisseur of lures. Huber opened the foam pad and produced from it a tiny antique bait that Ludy expertly identified for him.
“That’s a Fly Rod Punkin-Seed. They came two to the box, and they are worth about $70,” came Ludy’s appraisal of the old Shakespeare product.
Impressed with the market value of his little lure, Huber said he didn’t plan on putting it up for sale. Nor would he be casting it back in the water.
“I’m not hurting for the money, but I guarantee you it won’t be rolling around loose in the tackle box anymore,” he said.
According to collectibles expert Carl F. Luckey, author of “Old Fishing Lures and Tackle,” pricing old fishing lures is “as full of unseen hazards as there are standing hairs on a mad cat’s back.”
Ludy, who attends shows around the U.S. nearly every weekend-except when he is on the Senior Pro Bowling Tour-said it’s hard to gauge the value of antique fishing lures because of so many variables.
And, he said, what’s true for fishing holds for baiting: Even an extremely rare lure isn’t worth much if no one is biting.
“I have a Wiggling Worm from the 1920s that is very rare and probably worth about $150 by my best guess,” Ludy said. “There are a lot of things that are extremely rare, but nobody gives a damn about them.”
Even the legendary Haskell Minnow that brought $22,000 at auction dropped in value by about $18,000 after more than 15 others were dug up following news of the big sale.
Looking to hook a big one
Many unsporting speculators have waded into the bait stream in recent years looking to hook a big one, but most go home disappointed, Ludy noted.
“Most lures have very little value, 90 percent of them are worth only a dollar or so,” he said. “We were in an antique shop recently, and I saw they had a price of $200 on a common lure worth only a buck or two.”
Though he did not make the claim himself, Ludy is hailed as a folk hero among fellow collectors for his uncanny ability to find undervalued treasures in unlikely places, according to Mace.
“Don seems to always know what farm sale or garage sale to go to, or whether to go left or right at the flea market,” Mace marveled.
Recently, lucky Ludy was driving from a show in Minnesota to Illinois when “he got off into some one-horse town along the Mississippi River,” Mace said.
“He goes into a little antique shop that he had never been into before, and of course, he finds a bait worth a couple hundred dollars, and they had `$5′ on it,” Mace said. “Something just told him it was there, so he stopped and bought it.”
Spear-fishing decoys
The increasing appreciation of antique lures as fishing’s folk art has spread to include old reels, rods, creels, nets, minnow traps, ice-fishing spears and poles, even old fishing licenses and badges, catalogs, books and ads for fishing products, Mace said.
Particularly appealing-but also potentially hazardous for unwary collectors-are old spear-fishing decoys. Not to be confused with duck decoys, these are hand-carved and hand-painted in the likeness of fish or frogs.
Weighted with lead so they float just below the surface of ice-fishing holes, colorful spear-fishing decoys were used originally by American Indians and Eskimos to attract larger fish. During the Depression, Great Lakes ice fishermen made and used them to spear their meals.
These decoys came into great demand after folk-art and antique collectors began buying up the creations of such craftsmen as Michigan carvers Oscar “Pelee” Peterson, who is said to have produced nearly 100,000 fish decoys, and Bud Stewart, whose work has been displayed at Michigan State University.
Bona fide antique fish decoys by top carvers go for thousands of dollars, but the market has been flooded with reproductions, many of which are so skillfully done that even many experts are fooled, Mace said.
He told of one trader who regularly buys reproductions and sells them as authentic antiques because he doesn’t know the difference himself. “He is a well-intentioned fellow but he is a johnny-come-lately who hasn’t learned all there is to know yet,” Mace said.
Although many lure shows, including the annual convention, are restricted to members of the National Fishing Lure Collectors Club, Mace allows the general public into his Olde Outdoorsman events to help educate aspiring collectors. The open-door policy also allows outsiders to bring in their old lures to establish value, he said.
But even at Mace’s shows, the hottest trading usually goes on before the doors open to the public. When bait collectors get together, the trading can turn into such a feeding frenzy that a dealer might commit the ultimate sin of both bait-fishing and bait-trading: hooking himself.
“At one convention we had a guy sell a lure from his hotel room, and a little later he was walking down the hall when he saw a guy with that same lure,” Ludy said. “He got all excited and bought it back for $5 more than he’d sold it for in the first place.”
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Write to P.O. Box 13, Grove City, Ohio, 43123 for more information about the National Fishing Lure Collectors Club.
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HERE’S MORE INFORMATION ON LURES TO TACKLE
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If your hunger for lure lore is unabated, here is more culled from Carl F. Luckey’s “Old Fishing Lures and Tackle” (Books Americana Inc., P.O. Box 2326, Florence, Ala.):
– William Shakespeare Jr. of Kalamazoo, Mich., had something else in common with the British Bard. Along with making fine lures and even finer fishing reels, this Shakespeare was the author of the amply titled “Fine Points About Tackle: Being a Catalog of Fine Fishing Tackle, Suited to the Needs of Anglers Who Follow the Art of Bait-Casting.”
– Around 1915, the Detroit Glass Minnow Tube Co. manufactured a lure consisting of a small, minnow-accomodating glass tube. Holes in the front and rear kept water circulating inside so that minnow-misers could fish all day with the same bait. The same company sold a ribbed, metal minnow cage and a Booster Bait that contained a water soluble capsule that let out a smell and taste said to attract fish. All are valued by collectors.
– The Bleeding Bait Manufacturing Co. of Dallas made lures that held a tablet that mimicked the bleeding of a wounded bait fish when dragged through the water.
– During World War II, the famed Creek Chub Bait Co. in Garrett, Ind., sold a lure called the Bomber. Fishing cryptologists eventually figured out that the three red dots and a dash painted on the side were Morse code for “victory.”
