Chapter 10

Pastika's Sport Shop: Ninety Years of Muskies and Minnows

Leon Pastika was a high school student in the fall of 1949, more interested in chasing girls than keeping track of the trophy fish that successful anglers frequently brought to his father Charlie's bait shop in downtown Hayward. The fishermen most likely had bought their bait at the shop, and when they caught big fish on the waters of the nearby Chippewa Flowage the shop was the natural place to do a little showing off.

However, in October of that year a local tavern owner and die-hard musky fisherman came into town with a catch from the flowage that no one could ignore, not even a distracted teenager. Louis Spray had landed the big one, a nearly seventy-pound national-record-breaking behemoth that immediately became known simply as the “Spray musky.”

“I remember when he caught the musky,” Leon told me. “He drug it all over town showing people, had it down at Stone Lake and weighed at the post office there.”1

The Spray musky really put the little northwoods town of Hayward on the map. Although the region had long been recognized in the Upper Midwest for the incredible fishing opportunities found on the Chippewa Flowage, or “Big Chip,” and surrounding lakes, the record-breaking fish brought national attention. Through the years the legend and lore of the Spray musky became a part of Hayward itself. Forever intertwined with the story of the fabled fish is the story of Pastika's Sport Shop.

The origins of Pastika's, perhaps the oldest continuously operating bait and tackle store in Wisconsin, go back to 1921.

“My dad moved up here from Rice Lake right after WWI in 1919 as a harness maker,” said Leon Pastika, now seventy-six years old. “The gentleman he worked for died and Dad took over the business, but shortly after the harness business went to hell! Cars replaced horses. So in 1921 my mother and father started a dry goods business, selling clothing and also souvenirs for the tourists. There was a very small fishing tackle supply, a few fish hooks and things.”2

The new shop did pretty well until the Great Depression found its way to northwest Wisconsin in the early 1930s. Pastika said:

When the Depression came along everything went to pot. Dad worked for WPA, but we had a bait shop, too, and Dad hung in there, moving to different locations around Hayward. Even during the Depression we did well on the bait business. The resort business was strong; people with money were still coming up north. They would come up for two or three weeks or even a month for vacation. Each resort had fishing guides hired. Most of the guides in the area were working out of the resorts, making about three to five dollars a week then. The guides would come in for bait, and sometimes the tourists came in to buy their own bait. We had the same group coming in every year from the Chicago Fishing Club out on Lac Courte Oreilles which began back in the 1920s.³

After WWII the economy got better and the bait store began to grow and we moved locations. By this time I was in high school and helped Dad out. My brother and I both worked at the shop.

I remember back in the 1940s we used to ship a lot of fish out. We'd put the tourists' fish on ice and ship them out of the Soo Line station at Stone Lake. They'd go to Milwaukee and Chicago and other places.⁴

Eventually the shop ended up at the corner currently occupied by the Kwik Trip convenience store:

We converted a tire store into a bait shop. This location was kitty-corner to the Moccasin Bar owned by Louis Spray, so Dad and Louie talked a lot. My dad knew Louis well. We were still mostly a bait shop, just live bait, minnows, and night crawlers. Our tackle supply was really just three or four muffin tins filled with hooks, minnow pails, and a few cane poles. Even up into the early 1950s all we'd carry was two types of flathead spoons, Dardevles, Pikie Minnows, Surf-Orenos, and Pflueger Globes—that covered about 90 percent of the tackle.⁵

In 1947 Pastika's moved to the location where the shop still stands, along Highway 27 a little south of downtown.

“Through the 1940s and 1950s people still came up to Hayward for two weeks or more,” said Pastika. “I remember when it began to drop down to a week, and then to three- or four-day weekends.”

In 1955 Charlie Pastika retired and Leon bought the shop. After running the store for more than four decades, Leon suffered a heart attack and decided it was time to retire. In 1998 he put the store up for sale. Fortunately for Pastika and Hayward, a buyer came along who would be just as committed to Pastika's Sport Shop as Leon had been.

Al and Sue Rosenquist had been going to Hayward for fishing vacations for many years and were in love with the area. The Rosenquists, originally from northern Illinois, had set a goal for themselves that after their wedding they would permanently move to Hayward within five years. Buying Pastika's was a perfect way to fulfill that goal.

“I had a friend who wanted to invest in a business in the area and asked me if I knew of anything. I didn't but then I noticed that Pastika's was for sale,” Al Rosenquist told me. “I told my friend about it, but he decided he wasn't interested in running a bait and tackle store. Then I realized that it was something we could do, so we bought it.”6

The Rosenquists immediately appreciated the shop's place in Hayward history, but they did decide to take some aspects of the business in new directions.

“The biggest move we made was to increase the musky end of things,” said Rosenquist. “That part of the store was a little light, and I'm a big musky fisherman. Through the years we've evolved into a musky store, but we do have everything else as well; we've increased the stock all around.”

Although a new direction for the shop, the expansion toward more musky gear is highly appropriate considering Pastika's Sport Shop's place in musky fishing lore.

Also, the specialization was actually just the thing to keep the seventy-five-year-old store competitive in a world of superstores and cheap imports. Sales have grown dramatically since the Rosenquists took over, primarily due to the development of the musky store with a mail-order component.

“We do an incredible amount of business through the catalog,” said Rosenquist. “The catalog just happened by accident. We started a Web site and people kept asking us when we would start a catalog—there weren't many musky catalogs out there, and people wanted another option. We said if we're going to do this we'll do it right and jumped right into it. It's been highly successful.”

When walk-in business is slow in the winter, it's the catalog business that gets them through, according to Rosenquist.

Despite catalogs and Web sites, the shop started by Charlie Pastika in 1921 is still a big draw for tourists in the area, a “must-stop” destination because of its history.

“Forty-five-year-old dads will look at the fish pool and tell me they have a picture of themselves in front of the pool when they were five years old,” said Rosenquist. “The history of the place draws people.”

To this day a photo of Louis Spray and the musky, inscribed to Charlie Pastika, hangs in the store, a reminder to all who enter of the long and rich history of Pastika's Sport Shop.