Baited, hooked and lured

The Bayou Boogie, the Wee Gee and the Spinning-hell-diver will be swapped, bought and sold Saturday in Columbia.

Members of the National Fishing Lure Collectors Club are hosting the Tom Yonke Mid-Missouri Tackle Show at the Quality Inn, 1612 N. Providence Road.

Collectors like Annette Sanders will have the chance to visit with old friends, share stories and add to their collections.

“They call me the Hawk lady,” said Sanders, 60, who owns Sanders Public Relations Co. in Columbia. “I probably have the largest collection of Bass Hawk lures in the world.”

Sanders began collecting in the early 1990s after a friend gave her husband, Charles Sanders, some old lures — artificial bait used in fishing. He then asked Tom Yonke, an MU entomology professor, to help him identify them. Yonke became a mentor to the Sanders, who are avid anglers.

“We got hooked on collecting,” Annette Sanders said.

Today, the couple are two of more than 5,000 people worldwide who have joined the NFLCC since it was established in 1976 in Springfield. At NFLCC shows, collectors sell their lures by displaying them on tables or toting them in tackle boxes. Some just come to the show to look or buy. This is the tenth time a show will be held in Columbia and the sixth time a Columbia show has been named after Yonke, who died in 1994.

Sanders said Yonke was a mentor to many lure collectors.

People typically become collectors after somehow acquiring old tackle from a family member or friend.

As a child, Dean Murphy, 84, of Hartsburg, spent weekends fishing with his father Curtis in the Blue River in Nebraska. When his father couldn’t go, Murphy said, one of his mother’s five brothers accompanied him instead. Murphy helped his father and uncles run 20-hook trotlines, which each consist of one long fishing line with several shorter lines attached. At night, he waded through the muddy river to check the hooks for fish. When Murphy’s father died in 1982, he left his son a tackle box.

In the box, Murphy found lures made by Pflueger Co. in Akron, Ohio. Murphy read as much as he could about the lures and joined the NFLCC, whose members served as an additional source of information. He began collecting Pflueger lures because few collectors were searching for the small company’s lures.

Lures can cost between $2 and $200. Some are worth thousands of dollars depending on their rarity, condition, age and popularity. After three years, Murphy had collected most of the lower-priced Pflueger lures, leaving the more expensive ones for later.

“It became more fun looking up people and the history than collecting the individual lures,” Murphy said. “Now I’m a tackle historian.”

He wrote the 1993 book, “Fishing Tackle Made in Missouri: History and Identification.”

“My wife, Bette, lets me keep (the lures) in a corner of our basement,” Murphy said. “She is an antique collector and gets the rest of the basement.”

Visitors to Saturday’s tackle show might even spot a Raider lure, produced from the 1950s to the 1990s by Columbia residents Dabney Doty, Joe Jonakin and George Brake. Doty, 87, said a friendly spin-fishing competition in the early 1950s led him to create a lure that would help him win. Doty’s brother Duane Doty, who was an Air Force pilot in England, where spin fishing was popular, sent lures back to the United States. Doty inspected and tested them to see what worked the best.

The three friends turned home production of their lure into a family business. As president, Doty bought all the materials and his wife, Elizabeth Doty, was the company’s secretary. The wives and children helped assemble parts. They took the lures to National Fishing Lure shows in Chicago in the early 1950s, gained some recognition and began selling the lures for 65 cents each.

Doty said the company’s best advertising was to load up his station wagon and travel throughout the country fishing and giving away and selling lures. When people saw the group catch fish, they wanted to know what kind of lure they were using.

“Eventually, I got tired of people bothering me while I fished,” Doty said. “I would leave a sign up that said, ‘Take one and leave the money.’”