Fisherman’s Bible

HOW ONE FISH CHANGED THE TACKLE INDUSTRY

—Steve Price

The bass that changed the entire fishing tackle industry was not the world record 22-pound, 4-ounce giant George Perry caught in 1932. Instead, it was a little 2 ½-pounder an angler named Bill Dance caught just after daybreak on June 6, 1967, throwing a 7 ¼-inch blue Fliptail plastic worm to a sunken roadbed on Beaver Lake in Arkansas.

It was Dance’s first cast of the morning and is widely acknowledged as the very first cast by anyone in the All-American Bass Tournament taking place on the lake that week. The All-American, in turn, was the first event conducted by what would soon become the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, a fledgling fishing tournament organization that quickly became the unifying voice for millions of American bass fishermen.

Just as importantly, that unification led to the most rapid expansion the fishing tackle industry had ever experienced. Fishing lures, as well as rods, reels, and other equipment, were already being manufactured, of course, in some cases for more than sixty years; the first patent for a fishing lure was actually issued in 1848. But Dance’s fish, along with those caught and weighed in by his fellow competitors—another fisherman named Stan Sloan won the three-day event with 37 pounds, 8 ounces—created a wave of excitement that continued to build and grow for decades to come.

GEORGE PERRY CAUGHT HIS 22-POUND, 4-OUNCE WORLD RECORD LARGEMOUTH ON A RAINY JUNE MORNING IN MONTGOMERY LAKE, GEORGIA, A RECORD THAT STOOD FOR MORE THAN 75 YEARS. PERRY WAS RELUCTANT TO TALK ABOUT HIS RECORD CATCH, AND EVEN FAMILY MEMBERS KNEW LITTLE ABOUT IT.

More changes took place in the tackle industry during the next twenty-five years than in all previous years combined, because anglers like Dance, Sloan, and the others were not only learning new techniques, they were teaching those techniques to others. That led to the formation of new manufacturing companies, as well as competition between them, which spurred growth and development even faster. The new industry followed the new tournaments, and more than one competitive fisherman started his own tackle company, either because he needed an item not then available, or if it was, he thought he could make it better.

This is not to detract in any way from James Heddon, who is rightly credited with creating the first American fishing lure manufacturing company in 1902, James Heddon & Son. The business was located in southwestern Michigan in the town of Dowagiac, which, incidentally, translates into “many fishes” in the language of the nearby Potawatomi Indian tribe. Heddon had already been extremely successful in the beekeeping business, but he suffered from asthma; his father and grandfather had both enjoyed fishing occasionally, so he was no stranger to the sport himself. Besides, he felt being on the water helped him feel better.

On one such excursion in 1898, Heddon is said to have whittled a stick down to a small size as he waited for his fishing companions to arrive there at the millpond in Dowagiac, and then absently tossed the carving into the water where it was immediately hit by a bass. Heddon, who had long been intrigued by topwater fishing, then began carving additional lures, attaching hooks, and selling them to his friends. These “frogs” resembled little more than a section of broomstick and included a bottle cap at the head of the stick to create action as the lure was retrieved, but they caught fish.

This crude, stick-like lure evolved into the Dowagiac Perfect Casting Bait and became Heddon’s first commercial lure. Although he initially made them in his home, with the paint baked in his wife’s oven, in 1902 the first permanent lure factory was set up on the second floor of a clothing store in downtown Dowagiac.

TRIG LUND, SHOWN WITH SOME OF THE FIBERGLASS RODS HE HELPED DESIGN DURING HIS YEARS WORKING WITH HEDDON. LUND WAS HIRED BY JOHN HEDDON IN 1945 AND REMAINED WITH THE FIRM FOR THE NEXT 23 YEARS, EVENTUALLY SERVING AS VICE PRESIDENT. PHOTO COURTESY HEDDON MUSEUM.

Other fishing companies began about this same time, and some actually preceded Heddon. What is known for certain is that the beginning of the fishing tackle industry gradually emerged during the next two decades. Firms like Creek Chub, Hildebrandt, Shakespeare, Pflueger, and South Bend opened their doors, but none could have possibly imagined the future of what, to that point, was still only a casual pastime.

Surprisingly, perhaps, some lures from this long-ago era are still being manufactured and used regularly by today’s bass fishermen. Without question, one of the most famous is the Zara Spook, a topwater lure Heddon introduced in 1922 as the Zaragossa Minnow. The lure had been designed by Heddon’s son, Will, at their family home in Florida, and named for a well-known street in the red-light district of Pensacola where ladies of the night regularly walked the sidewalks.

The lure became an instant success because of its side-to-side action, which soon became known as “walking the dog.” This term also refers to those creative ladies on Zaragossa Street, who, after being forbidden to approach potential customers on the sidewalk, simply began walking their pets on leashes along the same route.

Some lures were named for famous personalities, such as the Little George, produced by Eufaula, Alabama, angler Tom Mann, who fished against Dance in that first Beaver Lake tournament. Mann had been a game warden, and one day while on a stakeout along a stream he whittled a lure that immediately caught bass. Mann named the lure after Alabama’s governor at the time, George Wallace.

One lure, the Gilmore Jumper, was even sold with a snakeskin covering. As the story goes, a bass fisherman was having a fabulous day on the Buffalo River in Arkansas catching bass with a brown-painted Jumper, but lost the lure when his line broke. On his way back to town to purchase a new brown lure, he ran over a snake on the road, and seeing the snake’s brown coloration, the angler immediately skinned it, glued the skin on another lure, and started fishing again.

In many instances, other lure changes came in bits and pieces over the years, especially in the decades of the 1970s and ’80s. Spinnerbaits, for example, were popular before Dance caught his Beaver Lake bass. The basic safety pin design still in use today was patented on June 28, 1966, by Chicago inventor Jesse M. Shannon, but it was improved on in March, 1970, by John R. Hudson, who patented his design of placing the spinner blade on the wire so it would help make the lure snag-proof. Alabama angler Bill Huntley added ball bearing swivels to the lures, as well as made the change from steel piano wire to satin, stainless wire. Skirts eventually evolved from plastic to rubber, and blades began to change shape from round to long, narrow, and pointed.

TOM MANN GAINED LASTING FAME AS AN EARLY LURE MANUFACTURER BY CREATING, AMONG OTHERS, THE FAMOUS SOFT PLASTIC JELLY WORMS, WHICH HE SOLD IN VARIOUS “FLAVORS.” MANN WAS A HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL TOURNAMENT ANGLER IN THE EARLY DAYS OF ORGANIZED COMPETITIVE FISHING AS WELL AS A TIRELESS PROMOTER OF HIS OWN LURES.

In fact, the winner of that first Beaver Lake tournament, Stan Sloan, used his expertise and name recognition to launch his Zorro Spinnerbaits. Don Butler, another competitor in that same tournament, started his Okiebug Spinnerbait company. And Charles Spence and Ray Murski, who also competed at Beaver Lake (Murski finished fourth), were poised to take Spence’s fledgling spinnerbait company to heights undreamed of by either of them.

The previous year, Spence had purchased a small, garage-based lure company in west Tennessee and immediately re-named it Strike King. Spinnerbait blades were punched out by a single machine that simply dropped the blades into a cardboard box on the floor, and the wire frames were created by bending a piece of wire around pegs on a small board. In 1968, Murski started selling them across the southern United States—he was one of Sam Walton’s original salesmen—and the rest really is history.

Murski was a huge supporter of bass fishing in general and of Ray Scott’s professional tournament idea specifically. He fished eleven of Scott’s events and earned a check in all of them; he not only knew how to fish, he knew what fishermen wanted, and they wanted spinnerbaits, as well as anything else that would fool a bass. In 1995, Murski bought Strike King from Spence and added additional tournament anglers to his Pro Staff. He didn’t just pay them to wear his logo at tournaments, however; the anglers played a very active role in designing Strike King’s lures and then winning with them. Today, Strike King is regarded as one of the world’s foremost lure manufacturers, with a lineup that includes dozens of baits in both hard and soft plastic designs

Although a spinnerbait blade design known as the willow leaf had been around for several years, it hit national prominence in 1984, when several anglers won national tournaments using it, including a Florida-based pro named Roland Martin, who had done his best to keep the long, narrow, pointed-end blade a secret. Once Martin’s secret lure was discovered, no one helped fishermen learn how to use it more than Martin himself, and today the willow leaf spinnerbait blade is the standard blade of choice among bass fishermen everywhere.

While many lure changes were small and incremental, others were sometimes monumental, such as what happened to crankbaits in 1972. Prior to that year, these types of lures, which had been around for half a century, looked remarkably similar. Most featured generally elongated bodies and a front diving lip, most often made of metal. There were other styles, but in 1972 a lure named the Big O changed everything.

The Big O was a hand-carved balsa diving plug, created by Fred Young of Maynardville, Tennessee, and named after his 6-foot, 6-inch football-playing brother Odis. The lure incorporated several features never before combined so successfully in a single plug: it dived quickly on retrieve and swam with a strong side-to-side wobble, then floated right to the surface if the retrieve was stopped. Until then, most crankbaits had a very slow, lazy action. The Big O also featured a short, squared-off bill, so it deflected off cover well, and instead of being long and skinny, it was short and squatty, almost fat. One writer of the time described it as a pregnant guppy.

NO SINGLE INDIVIDUAL HAS DESIGNED AND PRODUCED AS MANY BASS FISHING LURES AS COTTON CORDELL. AMONG HIS BEST-KNOWN CREATIONS ARE THE SPOT, A RATTLING, VIBRATING MINNOW IMITATION, WHICH HE CARVED FROM A PIECE OF PINE BARK WHILE SITTING ON A DEER STAND.

At the June 1972 Tennessee Invitational tournament conducted on Watts Bar Lake by the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, a professional fisherman named Billy Westmorland (who had been using the Big O secretly for months) accidentally let the lure be seen by his competition, and a virtual stampede to find Big O lures started. At that tournament, the lure rented for five dollars a day but cost twenty-five dollars if you lost it. A new one, if you could locate one, sold for as much as fifty dollars.

In Hot Springs, Arkansas, a leading lure manufacturer of the time, Cotton Cordell, secured the manufacturing rights to the Big O from Young and began producing them in plastic; during the next twelve months he sold more than a million of them. Helping the Big O’s reputation during this time was the fact that a tournament fisherman, Larry Hill, caught more than sixty pounds of bass in an hour with the lure en route to winning a national bass tournament competition in Florida.

That type of success led other manufacturers to bring out their own similar-looking lures, and practically overnight the age of the “alphabet plugs” was born. Companies like Bagley, Norman, and others called their creations the Balsa B, Big N, and similar names. The most important legacy the Big O created was that practically every crankbait made today includes some of that lure’s same original design and offers the same basic action Fred Young carved into his original lure. Many are thinner, and others will dive much deeper, but all have a distinct wobble.

Plastic worms, widely used today, have been around since the early 1950s. Imitation worms made of rubber and designed for fishing had been tried nearly a century earlier, and later models impregnated with special scents appeared in the 1930s. In the years immediately following World War II, however, as bass fishing continued to grow as a sport, a number of individuals developed worms from plastic. Among them were Dave DeLong, Nick Creme, and Charles Burke.

During this time, as competition between manufacturers began to increase, worm designs started to change. Although the worm itself remained straight, body styles varied considerably. Bing McClellan of Burke introduced the Buckshot Worm that looked like just that, a string of beads or “buckshot” with a floppy tail. Others concentrated on color and length, with DeLong producing worms more than twelve inches in length.

In 1973, however, the plastic worm grew a new tail that changed the lure forever. This change started during the summer of 1973, when R. J. Benson, president of a Rockaway, New Jersey, firm named Generic Systems, showed a French lure named the Sosy Eel at the American Fishing Tackle Manufacturers Show in Chicago. The lure featured a thin, flat, curving tail that produced a dramatic swimming action when retrieved, and, cried Benson, several American firms were illegally copying it.

Indeed, the swimming tail concept was so revolutionary, it was quickly adopted by other manufacturers. The first to bring their own such worm to market was Carver Plastisols Co. (later to become Mister Twister, Inc.) of Minden, Louisiana, and after its introduction in early 1974, more than three million had been shipped by April. They re-tooled their manufacturing facility to be able to produce half a million worms a day.

The impact on the industry was so stunning that nearly all the major manufacturers had curly-tail or swimming-tail worms on the market within weeks. Included were Cordell’s Pigtail, Mann’s Jelly Twister, Burke’s Wig-Wag, Bagley’s Screw Tail, Lindy’s Swirltail, and Pico’s Streaker. A Cordell rep reportedly sold nine thousand dollars worth of their worms by demonstrating one in a toilet bowl.

Although several of these firms are no longer in business, this particular design continues to be one of the most popular and is offered by all of today’s manufacturers. The overall concept remains unchanged, though the design has been altered slightly over the years and is now incorporated in plastic lizards, grubs, minnows, and other creatures.

If the curled, swimming tails created a more realistic look for soft plastic lures, then colors and new paints did the same for hard plastic and wood lures. Realism was the catchword of the day, as manufacturers tried different techniques to make their lures appear as natural as possible. Photo-imprintation became popular for a short while, and others kept adding more and more coats of paint. In Bagley’s case, each lure received a total of seventeen coats as it moved down the assembly line.

Not all developments in the fledgling fishing industry were lures, of course. Realizing the growing legion of anglers also required rods, reels, and fishing lines in order to use their new lures, various firms entered this new arena specializing with those products. The first “multiplying” reel, a forerunner of today’s popular baitcasting reels, had been introduced as far back as 1770 by Onesimus Ustonson of Britain. It was not until 1896, when William Shakespeare Jr. of Kalamazoo, Michigan, created the first true level-wind reel, that these types of reels started to grow in popularity. Level-wind allows line to be wound back evenly on a reel after a cast, and is standard on all baitcasting reels today.

Shakespeare started his own reel-making company the following year, and by 1902, as James Heddon moved his young lure business from his home to a dedicated factory, Shakespeare’s company already had a dozen employees. For more than a century the firm, now headquartered in Columbia, South Carolina, has continued to introduce new and innovative reels as well as rods and fishing line. In 1947, Shakespeare introduced the first fiberglass rod, the Wonderod, revolutionizing the market and making bamboo and steel rods all but obsolete.

Shakespeare entered the fishing industry by design; others, like the little company that would eventually become a giant in the sport and one of Shakespeare’s strongest competitors, Zebco, moved into the fishing world completely by coincidence.

In 1948, still nearly twenty years before Dance caught that Beaver Lake bass, the Tulsa-based firm was known as the Zero Hour Bomb Company, making time-detonated bombs for use in oil exploration and drilling. By 1948, however, with their patent on bombs about to expire and new technology threatening to make their explosives obsolete, the company began looking for new products to manufacture.

They found it in fishing, when a West Texas angler/watch repairman/inventor named R. D. Hull walked in with something none of them had seen before—a reel that would not backlash. Actually, Hull didn’t show them a fishing reel because he hadn’t made one; what he did show his future bosses, Harold Binford and Marion Parry, was a Folger’s coffee can lid fastened to a piece of plywood. However crude it was, the concept—a fixed spool from which line came off on demand (casting) but was controlled, and could then be “reeled” back onto that spool—impressed Binford and Parry enough to invite Hull back with an actual prototype model.

Hull built his prototype in less than a month and returned to Zebco to show his new creation. Hull’s reel was not the first fixed-spool “spinning” reel; British angler Alfred Holden received a patent for one in 1905, and others had been imported and even built in the United States since the 1930s. While certainly easier for the casual fisherman to use than the revolving-spool baitcasting reels of the day, these early spinning reels still had problems, namely line spilling freely off the spool. That’s what Hull’s coffee lid stopped; he put a cap over the spool and controlled line flow by use of a pin located inside that cap.

BILL DANCE, FISHING HERE WITH DR. LOREN HILL, HAS OFTEN BEEN DESCRIBED AS “AMERICA’S FAVORITE FISHERMAN,” DUE TO HIS LONG CAREER AS A SUCCESSFUL TOURNAMENT ANGLER AND TELEVISION PERSONALITY. HE HAS TAUGHT LITERALLY MILLIONS OF PEOPLE HOW TO FISH THROUGH HIS TELEVISION SHOWS, VIDEOS, AND MAGAZINE ARTICLES.

Hull was hired on the spot, and on May 7, 1949, the Zero Hour Bomb Company’s first closed-face reel, the Standard, came off the production line. The firm soon shortened its name to Zebco as improvements in their new product, which became known as a spincast reel, continued. In 1954, Zebco introduced the Model 33, featuring a push-button spool control, and during the next thirty-two years more than 185 million had been sold, and the reels continue to be sold today. This decision by Harold Binford and Marion Parry, neither of whom knew anything about fishing, has to be considered one of the most fortuitous in the entire history of sport fishing, because Hull’s plywood board and coffee can lid literally opened up the world of fishing to the masses.

His invention offered an alternative to the revolving spool reel, which had been around in various forms for well over a century. A Kentucky fisherman named George Snyder invented what is considered the first reel that actually paid out line during a cast; the term “baitcaster,” still in use today, arose because virtually all fishing at that time was done with live bait, since there were no artificial lures.

At Beaver Lake in 1967, Dance fished with a baitcaster made by the Swedish firm of Abu, which by that time pretty much controlled the revolving spool reel market. Their signature reel was painted red and designated the 5000. By today’s standards, the 5000 would be considered primitive, since it was fairly big and heavy, featured a 5:1 gear ratio, and had no adjustable spool braking system. Once tournament fishing truly became the moving force spurring tackle development, changes in reels came quickly.

Today, baitcasters continue to evolve as bass fishing continues to grow and thrive. Braking systems, usually with a set of tiny internal magnets, have all but made these reels backlash-proof. Gearing varies from 4.7:1 to higher than 7:1, a range that allows a great deal of variation in lure retrieve speed that was never available in Dance’s red 5000. The gears are stronger, too; the overall size is smaller and more streamlined; and numerous companies like Shimano, Shakespeare, Pure Fishing, and Ardent compete for angler dollars. Abu reels themselves have changed dramatically as well and are part of the Pure Fishing Company lineup.

Another reel, the open-face, fixed spool spinning reel, had been introduced from Europe into the United States in 1935 but had not gained a following until the years following World War II. This particular design permitted the weight of the lure to pull line off the stationary spool, a feature that allowed the use of extremely light lures. Changes in these reels were also gradual, until 1963 when the Japanese company, Matsui Manufacturing, under its American umbrella, Daiwa Corporation, began importing its first fishing reels.

In 1970, just three years after Dance’s tournament on Beaver Lake, Daiwa imported an open-face spinning reel with a skirted spool, a feature that provided far greater line control than previous models, and by 1971 virtually every company making these types of reels offered this feature, which continues to be the standard design of today.

Most of the anglers in that first Beaver Lake event also used 5 ½-foot, hollow fiberglass rods with short pistol-grip handles, but practically no one offers models like this today. The first pistol grip had been whittled out of wood by Cotton Cordell and taken to Japan by Cordell and another rod maker friend from Alabama, Lew Childre. The Japanese produced a handle for them overnight, which Childre then began using on his own rods, known as Speed Sticks, and which quickly became the most popular handle style in America.

One of Childre’s employees at the time was a former football player named Shag Shahid, who had traded in his pads for fishing gear. He designed Childre’s Speed Stick rods, and as early as 1960 had made a V-shaped spool for baitcasting reels, a design to help reduce backlashes as the line speed slowed automatically during each cast. Childre introduced the reel in the mid–1970s, and while it did not become an overnight success, it led to the emergence of one of today’s industry giants, Shimano, the world’s largest bicycle component manufacturer. They were the company who did the original manufacturing of Shahid’s reel, the Speed Spool.

In 1976, Shimano introduced its own reel, the Bantam 100, which was the first true, small, lightweight baitcaster. Additional baitcasters, spinning reels, and rods followed—all of it starting just nine years after Dance and Sloan had fished that first major tournament and basically shown the world new ways to catch largemouth bass. Today Shimano is one of the foremost rod and reel manufacturing companies in the world.

Cordell had also been experimenting with a lighter, stronger, more sensitive material with which to build his rods, and by 1971 he’d found it: graphite. He wanted to enter that Beaver Lake tournament, but wasn’t allowed to, since he’d been making fishing tackle for more than 20 years at that time and was considered a “pro.”

During the mid–1970s, Cordell decided to get out of the rod business so he could concentrate on lures, so he called another rod-making friend in Washington state to come get all his equipment if he wanted it. That friend was a man named Gary Loomis, who accepted Cordell’s offer and hauled everything back to Woodlands. There he established the G. Loomis rod company, which today is one of the most highly respected rod companies in the world and is now owned by the aforementioned Shimano Corporation.

Another West Coast company, Fenwick, introduced their own graphite rods in 1972, and through their highly successful marketing program, quickly established themselves as a leader in the field. Graphite is available in many different grades, often measured in a modulus, or strength, and during the next two decades Fenwick, G. Loomis, and other rod companies raced each other to see who could create rods with the highest modulus rating. This type of research and development cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but by then demand from the nation’s bass fishermen for lighter, stronger, more sensitive rods could support it.

Another segment of the rapidly growing bass fishing industry—electronics—was, at the same time, growing nearly as fast as the rod, reel, and lure businesses. Fishermen had been using sonar-type equipment prior to 1967, much of it produced by Carl Lowrance, who was using his Navy electronics experience now in fresh water. In 1957, Lowrance introduced what is generally called his “blue box” unit, since most of his equipment was fairly boxy looking and all was painted blue. A year later he produced the “gray box.” Basically, these units told fishermen how deep the water was, but not much more.

In 1959, Lowrance introduced his “green box,” and suddenly anglers could begin to see not only the bottom but also a clearer view of the bottom contour as well as objects on the bottom. Thus, the concepts of fishing “cover” (those objects) and “structure” (the contour) became realities. The tournament anglers had already figured out the rudiments of both concepts, but now they began to refine them in an ever-growing circle of knowledge. In 1972, tournament pro and lure maker Tom Mann, who had also started his own depth finder company, Allied Sports (later to become Techsonic Industries), did a quick survey of twenty-five top tournament anglers to determine what they regarded as their most important tool for catching bass; nineteen said it was a depth finder.

By 1973, Lowrance had introduced paper chart recorders that literally graphed the bottom, and after a decade they introduced the first computerized model, the X-15. Two years later, paper units were already on the way out, replaced by liquid crystal recorders. Today, bass fishermen can look at objects in the water and on the bottom far to either side of their boats, not just in a small area underneath them, and they can tell exactly how far away it is so they can fish it that much more efficiently.

The overall concept—showing water depth, bottom contour and cover, and fish above it—is still the same. The visual information is simply being presented in new and more exciting ways, and Dance, still an active fisherman and teacher, admits amazement at all that has happened not only in electronics but also rods, reels, and lures since that remarkable morning on Beaver Lake.

He did not originate the sport of bass fishing when he caught that little 2 ½-pounder. What he, Sloan, and the others did was far more important. Symbolically speaking, they opened the curtain on a brand new world. They were like explorers seeing another continent for the very first time; everything they did was new and fresh and exciting, and the fishing public embraced them because they could feel and experience that very same excitement.

This chapter was excerpted from the soon-to-be-released book, The Fish That Changed America, by Steve Price. To order a copy of this new book, which traces the history of bass fishing in America from the past to 2014, go to www.skyhorsepublishing.com.