Dear Boo and Bubble,
Here is the rest of the essay written by your great
Uncle Bryant about his quest to learn of antique fishing lures. In this
segment, he tells you about L.E. and Eva Lisk…two folks whose philosophy of
business is so simple, it might not seem possible that they could have been
successful. He conducted the interviews and composed this in 1999. I rather
doubt that L.E. and Eva are still alive. After searching on the internet, I can’t
find evidence that their company is still around either.
I hope you enjoy learning about them, though, because…who
knows…maybe you’ll have a knack for something when you grow up and you can make
it your life’s work.
How
Deciding What Antique Fishing Tackle to Acquire May Lead You to Experiences You’d
Never Expect:
Notes
from a Novice Lure Collector (Part 2)
By
S.
Bryant Kendrick
…After
a couple of days, my wait ended. I received a call from Mr. Leard Evander Lisk,
who quickly informed me that his friends call him “L.E.” I also learned that
L.E., now over 80 years old, was deep in the process of having his life story
completed by a biographer. In spite of a busy schedule, he agreed to my request
to meet him so that I could learn about the company. He graciously invited me
to his home where, on two occasions, I was fortunate enough to get to know this
remarkable man, meet his charming wife and business companion, Eva—who actually
owns the company, as L.E. is happy to point out—and learn the fascinating story
of List Lures, Inc.
The
story begins in 1954 with L.E. and Eva’s production of their first and all-time
best-selling lure, the Little Skunk. This lure consists of a gold main hook
(size 8) whose shank was hand-wrapped with lead to make the lure sink fast. A
trailer hook (size 12) tied with fluffy white hackle completes the Little
Skunk. It comes in five “fish catching” colors: white with black stripe; black
with white strip; yellow with black stripe; green with yellow stripe; and red
with white stripe. The lure is intended to be fished with a darting or jerking
motion and can be used with cane pole, fly, spinning, and/or spin-casting rods.
It is an ideal bait for bass, bream and crappie.
While
production and sale of the Little Skunk marked the “official” beginning of Lisk
Lures, Inc., as a commercial venture, the actual origins of lure making in the
Lisk family predates the beginning of the company. Eva herself had already been
working in the lure-making business, adding hackle to the bodies of cork-based
lures manufactured by the Frye Fly Company. Consequently, she was highly skilled
in a process that would be important in the development of her husband’s lures.
The
beginning of the Lisk Company overlaps the demise of the Frye Fly Company in
several ways. For his main source of income, L.E. drove a truck for Central
Motor Lines hauling freight from Greensboro to Clifton, New Jersey. But he only
made two runs a week which left him with several free days to travel with Mr.
Frye as he sold his lures at various bait and tackle shops all over the eastern
expanse of North Carolina. L.E. hoped to expand his role in the Frye Company,
as its aging owner was getting feeble and finding the life on the road to be
more and more difficult. Unfortunately, Mr. Frye’s enterprise came to a sudden
end when he suffered a fatal heart attack.
At
the time of his demise, Mr. Frye owed Eva a significant sum of money for back
wages. With no asset available to pay her, Mr. Frye’s daughter offered to give Eva
all the current inventory of corks, feathers, and hooks left in Mr. Frye’s
stock in order to settle the debt. Eva eagerly agreed to this, and she and L.E.
immediately began piecing together cork lures like those she had assembled for
Mr. Frye, with LE. distributing them around to Mr. Frye’s well-established
customer base.
During
this period, L.E. kept up his role as truck driver with Central Motor Lines,
but he strongly desired to improve his standard of living in order to better
provide for his growing family. It had to be something more lucrative and intuitively
he realized that the secret to reaching his goal lay within his own prodigious
creativity…a talent which first emerged in his childhood.
Out
of necessity, he had learned to be an independent and inventive person. Born
into a family of modest means, there was little extra money to spend on necessities,
much less a child’s whims. Through his ingenuity, he learned to not only make
his own entertainment but also equipment out things “at hand” that might be put
to a more practical use. In a foreshadowing of much that would happen later, he
began crafting fishing lures at a very young age.
“I
used to make any lure if I got any. We’d tie hair from a cow’s tail or horse or
mule to a hook to make a fly. We used to use Number 8 sewing thread to fish
with. And we had a hook we called a hair hook. It was real small and we’d catch
a lot of bream with it. The first fish I ever caught was on a straight pin. I
bent it and tied a string around the head of the pin, and when you catch them
like that there is no barb in it and you have to pull ‘em right on out and they’d
fall off on the bank, you know.”
This resourceful
and energetic streak has continued to play an important role in L.E.’s life,
usually expressing itself through his numerous inventions, some of which were
granted patents. His genius is not limited to the field of fishing lures,
either. A partial list of his inventions include: a machine gun which at one
time was the world’s fastest mechanism and whose prototype is currently housed
in the Greensboro Historical Museum; a home water purification system; the
world’s first electric trolling motor which is currently part of the collection
of the Fishing Museum in Orlando, FL; and automatic automobile seat belt unbuckling
device that activates after an accident; and a device to remove the picks from
double-knit polyester clothes.
In
retrospect, it is easy to see that when L.E,’s inventive genius combined with
Eva’s sound business skills and her experience in lure making, the prospect for
an interesting venture together emerged. Buttressed by his desire for a better financial
situation, the two of them embarked on a daring adventure that proved to bring
more success than they could have imagined.
As
L.E. tells the story, the idea for the company’s first lure was hatched between
2 and 3 AM one morning while he was on a run to Clifton, New Jersey. He had
finished his turn at the wheel and was stretched out in the sleeper section of
the long-haul truck. As the rig lumbered over the New Jersey highways, L.E.
mused over his destine. Soothed by the humming of the tires, his mind drifted
into that twilight zone where conscious awareness and unconscious processing
are known to coalesce. As the miles rolled away beneath him, ideas for lures
turned over and over in his mind until, like a flash of lightning suddenly illuminating
an entire landscape, the solution to his life’s problem lay before him.
“By
damn, I’ve got it!” L.E. exclaimed as he slapped the curtain separating the sleeping
section from the rest of the cab.
“What
you got, Lisk?” replied his startled companion at the wheel.
“I’m
gonna get off this truck. I ain’t gonna have to drive it no more. When I get
back—it won’t be long—and I’ll be off sellin’ fishing lures.”
What
lay at the source of this “eureka” was the idea for the lure that would soon
become known as the “Little Skunk.”
Upon
L.E.’s return from this fateful trip, he and Eva began assembling this first
lure of the new “Lisk line,” an invention which at this time had no formal
name. This problem was soon solved when L.E. was invited to join Gene Garner, a
friend and tackle shop owner, for a fishing trip at High Rock Lake. When L.E.
arrived at the lake, Gene was in the process of tying a brand new lure to his
own line and proudly opined, “This new lure of mine will out fish anything you’ve
got, I betcha.”
L.E.,
always amiable, but also confident in his own as yet untested and un-named
creation, replied, “Well, we’ll see about that.”
Pretty
soon L.E. had a strike on his lure and pulled in a nice bass. Maintaining a polite
silence, he placed his catch on the stringer and returned to casting his
no-name lure. Almost immediately another fish struck and was soon added to the
stringer. Again, L.E. said nothing. After he landed his third bass, and while Gene
had not even had a nibble with his fancy store-bought lure, Gene turned and
said, “Looks like you’re gonna skunk me with that lure of yours!”
And
that was the origin of the name of the lure which originated in the bunk of a
long-haul trick in the midst of the New Jersey night, the one that would go on
to become the mainstay and all time bestseller of Lisk Lures, Inc., for over 45
years. Since those early days, the Little Skunk has been joined by a group of “siblings,”
among them the Baby Spin Skunk, the Big Skunk, and the Jumbo Skunk.
The
first customers for the Little Skunk were the group of proprietors who had been
loyal customers of Mr. Frye. After Mr. Frye’s death and the invention of the
Little Skunk, L.E. began restocking the shelves of these store owners with his
own creation and eventually phased out most of Mr. Frye’s lures. The first year
of business L.E. and Eva actually lost money, primarily because L.E. replaced
unsold Frye lures for free with the Little Skunk, confident that his lure would
soon be a “hot” item.
Still
holding down a job with Central Motor Lines, he was not able to devote his full
time to the fledgling lure enterprise. But the business began to grow and when
he was away on a trip, Eva would create the next batch of Little Skunks and
have them ready for L.E. to sell when he returned. His early sales route took
him from Greensboro east to the Scuppernong River, almost to the coast of North
Carolina.
The
big break for the company came unexpectedly. Back from one of his long hauls to
New Jersey, L.E. filled his car with Little Skunks in preparation for his usual
run down to the Scuppernong River, but on this particular trip, he never
reached his destination.
“I
had a load of them and I was going to go to the coast and sell down at the
Scuppernong River, and I stopped at G.I. 1200, and the fella’s name—the buyer
for G.I. 1200—his name was Mr. Mateer, and I went in and he says, they had
seven stores…and he says ‘Give me nine dozen of this and nine of that”…kept on
and give me such a big order there I turned around and went back home. It took
us two weeks to fill that order, and I said then…I said, ‘Man, I ain’t working
for Central no more.’ But I did work the notice, I’ve got my logbook in there
and my last trip was to Philadelphia. And I quit and started selling lures and
that was just it.”
Mr.
Mateer’s order was soon followed by gigger orders from even larger chains who
wanted Lisk Lures for their customers. One of the most prominent members of
their growing client base was Western Auto. With its customers, the Little
Skunk quickly moved from a regional to a national market.
Over
the years, L.E. and Eva have continued to develop new types of lures and add
them to the company line—among them the Pole Kat, Pole Kat Wiggleworm, Wampus
Kat, Santee Special, Little Cub, Torky, and the Lisk Sputnik. The Little Skunk,
Pole Kat and Wampus Kat have been the most popular and remain in production to
this day.
Before
a new lure could be added to the Lisk line, ti had to go through a two-stage
testing process. After Eva fashioned the prototype for the new lure, L.E. would
fill up the tub in their bathroom and pull the lure through the water by had to
analyze its action. After making any needed adjustments, he then took the lure
to a favorite pond and fish with it. Each lure had to unmistakably prove its
ability to catch fish in L.E.’s hands or it never made it back to Eva’s
assembly line.
Ideas
for new lures would come from several sources. Initially, L.E. himself would
pass the hours driving to restock his customers’ shelves by thinking about better
ways to attract fish. Later, during their many hours of making lures together,
he and Eva would discuss fresh approaches. “I would think of something, or she
and I would come up with a new idea, and she’d put it together,” L.E. recounted.
He
also listened to his customers who would from time to time make a suggestion
about a color change or some other minor alteration of a lure’s design. If L.E.
liked the idea, he discussed the changes with Eva and if she could figure out a
way to do it, they would make the modifications and test the prototype. If the
lure passed the “tub test” and the “pond test,” a small number would then be
produced and presented to the store owner who, beaming with pride, would become
a strong advocate for this new Lisk lure. If the lure caught fish (and it usually
did), other store owners in the area would soon be hearing about the “new one’
from their customers and would have to start placing orders just to keep up
with the competition.
As is
true in the design of their lures, the manufacturing process used by the Lisks
reflects several values important to them. For example, much of the equipment
used to mechanize part of the production process was designed by L.E. and bears
his distinctive stamp. Pulling a picture from a large collection of photographs
of company activities and point to one of the employees making lures, he says, “See,
this bicycle wheel with chain, with the lures clipped on it? That’s how we’d
dip the body of the lure into the paint. But we still had to ‘eye’ them by
hand.”
Eva remembers
that although she and L.E. enjoyed making the lures together, there would come
times when the repetition of painting the exact same color scheme over and over
on each lure became burdensome. To break the monotony, she would from time to
time mischievously paint a few “cross-eyed” Skunks or Wampus Kats just for fun.
“I don’t reckon it hurt the fishing any,” she chuckles. “If a fish is that persnickety,
probably don’t want to catch it anyway!”
While
Lisk Lures, Inc., certainly has a past deep in innovation and accomplishment,
today the future of the company looks a bit uncertain. L.E. and Eva are now
ready to “wind things down” and, although they have had many offers to buy the
company, they have never really seriously considered doing so. “You can’t sell
you name,” Eva declares. They are hopeful, however, that their children and
grandchildren will keep the company going somehow so that the Little Skunk,
Wampus Kat and Pole Kat can continue to “put fish on the table” for hungry
anglers well into the 21st century.
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