When he was just a kid first learning to fish, he’d spend hours in the musty old basement, peering through his grandfather’s timeworn fishing gear. Rusty old tackle boxes filled with huge lures, reels, and lines with strange-sounding names: Dowagiac, Creek Chub, Marathon, Ashway. The original Zara Gossa—not the newfangled version. Tubular steel True Temper rods hanging at attention next to the workbench, or stuffed high up in the rafters, either side of the single light bulb. His father’s first Mitchell spinning reel—one of the first imported into the United States from France. Antique duck decoys, rusting pipes, bolts, tools and fifty assorted years of odds and ends collecting in the basement-workshop-tackle repository of his grandparents’ lakeside home.
Though they fished together mostly for bass, his grandfather often told tales of fishing the northwoods when just getting there over miles of tire-puncturing gravel roads was still an adventure. Tales of muskies blasting noisy surface lures. Catching live frogs, baiting them on oversized hooks, and catching walleyes when no one else could. He never told anyone the secret, but reveled in the acclaim from other fishing camp visitors.
Reaching into the bottom of one ancient box, “Grandad” pulled out and fondled a weathered June Bug spinner—an odd-shaped blade that rotated on a steel shaft, just ahead of a huge hook to be dressed with a minnow. A faraway look appeared in his eye, recalling glory days past. The venerable June Bug, Prescott, and Strip-On were some of his secret lures back in the ‘30s, but like so many traditional favorites, they fell out of style as light-line refinements came into favor. Perhaps the fish became accustomed to it, or they simply preferred newfangled gadgets. More likely, the aggressive walleyes susceptible to being caught on the heavy hardware were thinned out by increasing pressure. A different approach was needed to re-enact the former glory days of the new secret lure.
The young fisherman’s great uncle was one of the first to jump on the bandwagon when the Rapala craze hit. Well, sort of . . . He didn’t want to pay big bucks for an actual Rapala, so he bought a cheap imitation called a Raposa. The lightweight balsa lure cast pretty well on spinning gear and monofilament line, and the shivering wobble was deadly. Slower moving and more subtle than June Bug Spinners, the fish hadn’t seen anything like it before. Bass, walleyes, pike—everything liked balsa minnows.
“Grandad” was a bit slower to pick up on the trend, since he, like his father before him, preferred traditional dacron line and ancient Pflueger Supreme casting reels, which couldn’t cast Rapalas worth a hoot. But eventually he came around. Rapalas were the hot lure for years, and in fact, they never went out of style. But other goodies moved into the limelight, particularly for walleyes.
Snelled spinners like the Little Joe came onto the market, shifting the focus back toward spinner-livebait combos. More subtle and refined than their heavy-hardware predecessors, Little Joes swept across the walleye market. Just add a weight ahead of the spinner to get it down, tip the hook with a crawler or minnow, drift along, and hang on tight. This was big news in the ‘50s—just about the time the young angler was busy being born. Still works today, though often in lighter-line more-refined versions.
