52 Trade Houses Part 52: Brintnall's of Boston

Over the course of the next year, we'll be detailing the history of 52 companies that sold branded fishing tackle. 52 trade houses in 52 weeks -- some obscure, some famous, and all available exclusively here on the Fishing for History Blog! If you have any items from the week's entry you'd like to share with us, please send it my way and I'll make sure it makes it on the blog.

For a discussion of what exactly trade tackle is, Click Here. Enjoy the 52 for 52!

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Trade House Tackle, Part 52:
Who Sold Your Tackle? The Fascinating Story of Brintnall's of Boston

Who sold your tackle? That's the driving question behind my year long series "52 for 52," which today celebrates its 52nd and final installment. If there has been one thing I want people to take away from this project, it is that it's as important to understand exactly who sold your fishing tackle as it is who made it.

Finding the retailer/wholesaler is largely a fruitless endeavor. Mostly what we're left with is a name, an address, and if we are lucky, a line spool, lure box, or fishing reel marked with a seller's trade name. We rarely get to know the individuals and their own unique stories behind the tackle which was sold to eager anglers, all in the hopes of catching a fish.

Sometimes, however, we catch a break--we learn a bit of history, a snapshot of time, and even a name and a face we can put to a piece of tackle. A man like J.H. Wiggers, tackle shop owner and the "Dean of Poughkeepsie Anglers," as his friends and clients called him, but largely forgotten today. Even someone as famous as Eddie Bauer, a name still widely recognized today, has been mainly forgotten as a trade dealer of tackle.

That's a shame. Many of these trade houses had fascinating histories that mirrored American history, and studying (and collecting) them can be a blast. They can lead us to both interesting and important facts, but most of all, they can help remind us that behind every name is a series of men and women who sought above all else to make that name mean something.

I was reminded of this point earlier last week when collector Kip Gomez put up an obscure snell marked "Brintnall's" on Joe's Board. I emailed Kip and asked him about it, and as a testament to his character as an all-around good guy, he emailed me back and said "send me your address, you can have it."

We are fortunate in this little community of ours. Random acts of kindness like this happen every day.


I was planning on finishing up my year long project with a bang, with a history of a trade house I'd been tracking for several years. But I knew fate had something in store for me. I had to find out who Brintnall was.

The first clue was the address, which to anyone familiar with Boston tackle, should ring an immediate bell. 374 Washington Street (opposite Bromfield Street) was the address of Bradford & Anthony, the famed Boston trade house that succeeded the legendary Martin L. Bradford's "Sign of the Angler" pre-Civil War trade house. Bradford & Anthony was itself succeeded by the firm of Dame, Stoddard & Kendall in 1883. DS&K became Dame, Stoddard & Co. in 1900, a name they utilized until around 1921. The store then became known as Stoddard's and continued at the 374 Washington address until the 1960s when the company moved to 48-50 Temple Place. This address was closed in 2004 but a branch operation of Stoddard's is still in business. Stoddard's continued to sell fishing tackle until the move to Temple Place, after which they concentrated on fine cutlery (for which they were noted).


The venerable 374 Washington Avenue address ca. 1890.
But what of Brintnall's? And why does it have the same address as Stoddard's? And why is the name Brintnall's overstamped? This snell was chock full of tackle mysteries.

After much research and thinking, I believe I have the answer. It's still not entirely clear, but I believe Brintnall's was a very short lived transition period name that came between Dame, Stoddard & Co. and Stoddard's, the name by which the firm was known since 1921 or early 1922.


This 1906 letterhead, courtesy of J.K. Garrett and L.P. Brooks, shows the progression of the company: Samuel Bradford (1800), Martin L. Bradford (1845), Martin L. Bradford & Co. (1856), Bradford & Anthony (1867), Dame, Stoddard & Kendall (1883), Dame, Stoddard & Co. (1900). To which we might add Brintnall's (1921) and Stoddard Co. (1921).
Thus I believe this Brintnall's snelled packet dates from around 1921, in a very brief transitionary period when the firm was being renamed Stoddard's. Somehow this name did not last, and like many tackle companies, rather than throw out the snelled packets marked Brintnall's, they used a rubber stamp and stamped over it with the more familiar name Stoddard's


The famous Dame, Stoddard & Co. name.
All of this brings me back to my original question. Who sold your tackle?

In other words, who was Brintnall?

Not an easy question to answer, but after much digging, I discovered that the namesake was Robert R. Brintnall, listed in the 1925 Boston Directory as "Clerk, 374 Washington" with a home in Cambridge. It turns out that Brintnall was a long-time clerk for Dame Stoddard & Co. who, for a brief period of time, took over the store at 374 Washington and changed it to his name.

Why did it disappear so quickly? It is not known exactly, but one suspects it had something to do with the economy. Stoddard's was a name with a long history and tradition in Boston, and I believe the name change seriously hurt business (note that Brintnall even took the pains to put his connection to DS&Co. on his snell packets). We know that the tackle business for Stoddard's slowed considerable in the 1930s, and with the company concentrating more and more on cutlery and tackle competition becoming more intense, it makes sense he would revert to a name more people would recognize. Whether he had a change of heart, or was forced by economic circumstances, the firm did indeed revert back to the better known Stoddard moniker, and stayed at 374 Washington Street until the mid-1960s.

All of this gives us a bit of new history on an old company, but it doesn't fully answer the question: who sold your tackle?

Fortune sheds its light upon us today. A 1953 article in the Kingston Daily Freeman shows a smiling elderly couple -- likely in their late 60s or early 70s -- under the header "Happy at Losing $2,000,000 Headache." Underneath was Mr. and Mrs. Robert R. Brintnall.

It turns out that Mrs. Brintnall was set to receive a windfall of $2 million from the passing of a cousin and uncle in Toronto, but Canadian law prevented her from collecting the massive sum (the economic value of that amount is equal to $76.6 million in today's terms). The caption notes, "Mrs. Brintnall says she has had severe headaches and been bothered by strangers seeking money every day since she was notified she might inherit the estate. Now that she has been told she can't expect the money her headaches have gone and life is more peaceful."


Take a look at the photo. THIS is who sold your fishing tackle. A normal, everyday gentleman in a clean suit smiling with his wife because they avoided the headache of having too much money. A humble tackle clerk who's name, for at least one brief, shining moment, adorned the company for whom he worked for decades.

It's a fascinating story and one we would likely never know unless Kip Gomez posts a picture of an old snelled hook packet on the internet. Thank you, Kip, and everyone else who bothers to save this ephemera which is so easy to overlook. Thanks to Robert Brintnall for selling Bostonians fishing tackle for so many years. And most of all, thank you for reading my ramblings over the past year. I hope you enjoyed it, and learned a bit about trade tackle.

And with that, we close out 52 for 52, a year's worth of histories both short and long, all of them dealing with the tackle of the trade.

I thank everyone for coming along on this journey with me, and leave you with one final thought:

Who sold YOUR tackle?

-- Dr. Todd

52 Trade Houses Part 51: Siegel, Cooper & Co. of New York & Chicago

Over the course of the next year, we'll be detailing the history of 52 companies that sold branded fishing tackle. 52 trade houses in 52 weeks -- some obscure, some famous, and all available exclusively here on the Fishing for History Blog! If you have any items from the week's entry you'd like to share with us, please send it my way and I'll make sure it makes it on the blog.

For a discussion of what exactly trade tackle is, Click Here. Enjoy the 52 for 52!

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Trade House Tackle, Part 51:
Siegel, Cooper & Co. of New York & Chicago
I love Department Store tackle, and I wanted to profile at least one department store that is known to have sold tackle but that I have not seen any marked tackle for. The company in question is the popular but long forgotten Siegel, Cooper & Co. of New York and Chicago.


Store logo ca. 1899.
Founded in 1887 by Henry Siegel and Frank Cooper, according to History of German Immigration in the United States by George von Skal (1908):

This has been said to have been the first real modern department store, and whether this is correct or not, the fact remains that the new firm introduced methods heretofore unknown, and rapidly became one of the great retail trading centers of the country. The business grew to such large proportions that the firm soon needed more commodious quarters and erected the "Big Store" at State and Van Buren Streets, which was occupied in 1889. While this would have been sufficient for an ordinary man, Mr. Siegel's tremendous activity needed larger fields and in 1896 another "Big Store" was erected in New York, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street, which revolutionized the retail business of the metropolis and forced other long-established concerns to change their methods completely.


The Big Store ca. 1905.
The firm also launched a Chicago branch of the story by 1890, and it made a splash as well, being a major promoter of the World's Fair in 1893.


The Chicago store ca. 1920.
The "Big Store" mentioned above was the largest department store in the world when finished, surpassed around ten years later by Macy's (which was built by Delomes & Cordes, the same firm that designed and built Siegel, Cooper & Co.'s stores). It covered an astounding 18 acres of goods, covering everything from fine art to books to fishing tackle.

For around 25 years the store was world famous. The main floor featured a fountain made from a copy of Daniel Chester French's statue The Republic. So famous was this landmark that the phrase "Meet me at the fountain" came into popular use, and was utilized by the store as a slogan.

When Henry Siegel left the firm in 1902 (he purchased and revitalized the Simpson, Crawford & Co. stores and launched his own Henry Siegel & Co. chain in 1905), the company began a slow downhill slide. Even the intervention of the legendary J.P. Morgan, who merged the failing firm with others in 1913, could not halt the bankruptcy which finally hit in 1915. The New York store closed in 1917, although the Chicago branch survived until the early 1930s.


The fountain at the Siegel Cooper & Co. store.
At its height, the company employed 4500 people and published elegant yearly catalogs, some of which contain fishing tackle. The fishing tackle I've seen advertised appears to be fairly standard fair, although the following ad, printed in the May 1908 The Theatre magazine, shows a nifty all-in-one Siegel, Cooper & Co. fishing tackle kit. I would dearly love to see one of these that survived the century since it was first sold…


1922 tackle ad from Siegel, Cooper & Co.
An advertisement ca. 1908 read as follows: [The fishing tackle] department makes a man think of deep, cool pools, with the slippery trout flashing, tempting you to fish. We have baited all the goods with the very low prices for to-morrow." Another advertisement from the March 10, 1906 Princetonian declared the firm the end all of sporting goods destinations.


Princeton Univ. students were entreated to shop for tackle at Siegel, Cooper & Co.
It's easy to forget, but Siegel, Cooper & Co. was so large a book called A Bird's eye View of Greater New York and Its Most Magnificent Store was published in 1898. It was a 200 page guide to getting around the store! Today, the Cooper, Siegel & Co. building has been renovated and is home to a number of popular stores including T.J. Maxx and Marshall's. The Chicago store was taken over by Sears in 1932 and became their headquarters until 1986.


Company catalogs were wonderful depictions of the art nouveau of the era.

So let's all raise a glass to the glory days of the Big Store, and I'll meet you at the Fountain. But only if you're bringing some Siegel, Cooper & Co. tackle with you!

-- Dr. Todd

52 Trade Houses Part 50: Katz Drug Co. of Kansas City

Over the course of the next year, we'll be detailing the history of 52 companies that sold branded fishing tackle. 52 trade houses in 52 weeks -- some obscure, some famous, and all available exclusively here on the Fishing for History Blog! If you have any items from the week's entry you'd like to share with us, please send it my way and I'll make sure it makes it on the blog.

For a discussion of what exactly trade tackle is, Click Here. Enjoy the 52 for 52!

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Trade House Tackle, Part 50:
Katz Drug Co. of Kansas City, MO

Drug stores have a long and important connection to the fishing tackle trade. We've already covered Eckerd Drugs, a popular drug store chain from Florida.

Today we'll cover a popular Midwestern drug store chain known as Katz Drug Co., founded in Kansas City, Missouri. It was founded by the Katz Brothers--Isaac and Mike Katz--who were a pair of Ukrainian immigrants. In the early 1910s, they moved from Chicago (and the large Ukrainian community there--remember Jurgis Rudkis from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle?)--to Kansas City and opened a series of fruit stands.


Isaac Katz, founder of Katz Drug Co.
By 1915 the Katz Brothers left the fruit stand business and opened a pair of cigar stores. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, Katz wanted to stay open past the 6 p.m. mandated national curfew, and the only way to evade it was to sell drugs. He immediately hired a pharmacist and stocked medicine, and business boomed.


Very early Katz cigar shop matchcover dating from the 1910s.
By the mid-1920s, Katz Drug Co. had expanded into a chain of stores that now included a wide variety of goods ranging from "groceries and household supplies" to "pet alligators and monkeys." In 1929, Isaac paid $100,000 in ransom to kidnappers who had taken his brother Mike.

In 1934 the Katz Bros. opened the largest drug store in the world, a 20,000 square foot monster located at Main and Westport in downtown Kansas City. By this time, the firm's famous logo, a black cat, was widely known in the region.


1934 Katz Drug Store--the largest in the world at the time.
In the 1940s and 1950s the firm expanded out from its Kansas City home, until gy 1970 it had 65 stores throughout the Midwest and had surpassed $100 million in sales.


The firm sold a lot of discount fishing tackle. The most prominent are the lures packaged in special cards marked with their trade name "Super Star Lures." These lures were knock offs of popular lures ranging from the Eppinger Dardevle to the Arbogast Jitterbug. These cards are marked "Packaged Exclusively for Katz Drug Co. Sport Centers." The Sport Center was similar to Eckard Drug's version, which was a self-service aisle in their stores devoted to fishing tackle and other sporting goods.



Note the "Made in U.S.A." mark on the card. This would have likely been manufactured by a company such as Atlantic Lures of Providence, R.I.

Isaac Katz passed away in 1957, although his son Earl Katz had taken over management of the firm a decade before. In 1971, Katz merged with Skaggs Drug Co. and the name disappeared. In 1985, Skaggs was bought out by Osco Drug, which in turn was purchased by CVS Pharmacies in 2006. So in a sense, the legendary Katz Drug Co. is still with us today.

-- Dr. Todd

52 Trade Houses Part 49: Spiro's of San Francisco

Over the course of the next year, we'll be detailing the history of 52 companies that sold branded fishing tackle. 52 trade houses in 52 weeks -- some obscure, some famous, and all available exclusively here on the Fishing for History Blog! If you have any items from the week's entry you'd like to share with us, please send it my way and I'll make sure it makes it on the blog.

For a discussion of what exactly trade tackle is, Click Here. Enjoy the 52 for 52!

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Trade House Tackle, Part 49:
Spiro's of San Francisco

As I am headed to San Francisco in two weeks, I thought I would write up one of that great city's old time trade houses -- The Spiro Company of 301 Market Street.

The company was founded around 1887, but the earliest notice I have of the firm is a 1910 ad in the magazine Our Navy for Spiro's Harness Company at 309 Market Street.

I believe the firm expanded into sporting goods in 1912 (the 1927 catalog was denoted "No. 15"). This is further evidenced by a 1912 notice in Motor Body magazine declaring the Spiro Harness & Carriage Co. was "enlarging their place of business on Market Street. The addition gives them a frontage of sixty feet and a building five stories high. Besides harness and carriages, this company handles all kinds of leather, camp goods, fishing tackle, and a full line of sporting goods."

The company was popularly referred to as Spiro's, the "Greatest Sporting and Outing Goods Store in the West." As their catalog declared, "we operate our own factory for the manufacture of tents and canvas goods, repairing and remodeling fishing tackle, firearms…" By 1917, the firm had a branch at 1127 Broadway in Oakland. It was run by J.H. Spiro and Laurence J. Spiro.


A 1917 advertisement for Oakland Spiro's.

A photo of Laurence J. Spiro, Right, from the Nov. 1945 Rotarian Magazine.
The company sold perhaps the most extensive line of fishing tackle in the 1920s and 1930s on the West Coast. They were purveyors of the best fly rods in the world, including being a distributor for Eustis W. Edwards in the 1920s, as well as Leonard, Hardy, Thomas, Heddon and others. They also sold a full line of saltwater rods as well.


A nice late 1930s era Spiro's trade rod made by Heddon.

A Spiro's Striper bamboo surf rod.
They also sold a lot of other marked tackle, including terminal tackle ranging from carded snelled hooks, to flies, to fishing lines. The Spiro's name was branded on a great deal of tackle.


Wooden line spool from the late 1910s.

Envelope of flies from the 1930s.
The company was in business until at least the 1950s, and even branded a few early fiberglass fly rods. It was a classy outfit from start to finish and sold a lot of high end fishing tackle.

It's good to remember it's history, especially as I get ready to embark on a trip to the city of the Golden Gate!

-- Dr. Todd

52 Trade Houses Part 48: John Cotter & Co. of Chicago

Over the course of the next year, we'll be detailing the history of 52 companies that sold branded fishing tackle. 52 trade houses in 52 weeks -- some obscure, some famous, and all available exclusively here on the Fishing for History Blog! If you have any items from the week's entry you'd like to share with us, please send it my way and I'll make sure it makes it on the blog.

For a discussion of what exactly trade tackle is, Click Here. Enjoy the 52 for 52!

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Trade House Tackle, Part 48:
John Cotter & Co. of Chicago

My love of wholesale hardware history is deep and abiding. Of all the firms that sold tackle, I would have to say that it is hardware companies I enjoy the most. Which is why I like John Cotter -- the man who found a way to make hardware in America work in an era when most everyone else failed.

He was clearly one of the most important people in the history of 20th century American hardware, and he got his start in a familiar place (to me): Duluth, Minnesota. Kelley-Howe-Thomson, which we profiled about three months ago, was always overshadowed by its larger Duluth cousin Marshall-Wells.

But it was K-H-T where John Cotter cut his teeth. A native of St. Paul, he began working at a local hardware store in grade school and moved up in the 1920s to become a traveling salesman (or "drummer" as they were known) and later department manager for K-H-T. Edward R. Kantowicz's biography of Cotter shows clearly how much this time influenced him; Cotter credited his time in Duluth as teaching him the skills necessary to strike out on his own. In 1942, he left K-H-T for Oakes & Co. in Chicago, a hardware distributor.

In 1947, working with Bill Stout (general manager of American Hardware), he began to plan the launch of a new hardware cooperative. In January 1948, Cotter & Co. opened its doors with 12 hardware dealers in Chicago, Illinois. Each hardware owner paid $1500 to join.

The idea was not new but it was a good one. The firm grew slowly and surely in the 1950s until a golden opportunity arose--the sale of Hibbard, Spencer & Bartlett's expansive True Value network of hardware stores. He ended up purchasing them in 1962 for $2.5 million, and brought on board 400 stores. He abandoned the Cotter & Co. name and took on the moniker True Value Hardware. The rest is history; sales topped a billion dollars in 1979.

But before True Value (which was used on fishing tackle back in the 1930s by Hibbard) became the name of the company, the firm sold tackle under the proprietary name Westpoint for a number of years.

Westpoint (one word) can be found on a variety of fishing tackle, ranging from snelled hook envelopes to sinker tins to line spools and fishing rods. Below are a pair of neat 1950s line spools.



It was also used for a short time by True Value and V&S stores, which were owned by Cotter & Co. Below are a spinner and leader packet bearing the Westpoint name.



When Cotter died in 1989, one out of four hardware companies in America were part of the True Value chain -- 8000 of them taking in over $2 billion in revenue. He left an amazing legacy; author Bill Dieruf, Jr. called Cotter "the only true genius I have ever met" in his book The Successful Management of Independent Business (2009).

In 1997, Cotter & Co. merged with TruServ Corporation and is still in business today with $4.5 billion in sales. It's a testament to one Minnesota boy's vision.

-- Dr. Todd

52 Trade Houses Part 47: Four Seasons Fishing Tackle of Chicago

Over the course of the next year, we'll be detailing the history of 52 companies that sold branded fishing tackle. 52 trade houses in 52 weeks -- some obscure, some famous, and all available exclusively here on the Fishing for History Blog! If you have any items from the week's entry you'd like to share with us, please send it my way and I'll make sure it makes it on the blog.

For a discussion of what exactly trade tackle is, Click Here. Enjoy the 52 for 52!

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Trade House Tackle, Part 47:
Four Seasons Fishing Tackle of Chicago
Voedisch Bros. was a veritable Chicago institution for over seven decades. They were a prominent sporting goods wholesaler and retailer responsible for marketing some iconic lures, ranging from the Edgren Minnow in the 1910s to Winter's Weedless Surface Bait in the 1920s.


We won't get into too much of their early history, because I want to use this rather obscure company--best remembered today for their 1930s-1950s trade tackle marked "Vee Bee"--as an example of how a company with an already established name, and an additional established trade name, could launch a second trade name aimed at a completely different market.

I'm referencing the Voedisch Bros. heretofore unknown "Four Seasons" Brand of fishing tackle.

The company itself was founded in Chicago in 1904 by a pair of German immigrant brothers named Voedisch, and the firm was a wholesale dealer from the beginning, and although they did dabble in direct market sales, they stuck to the wholesale market until the very end. As far as I know they never had a retail store.

The question dominating so many tackle companies in the late 1950s was how to deal with the increasing flood of Japanese-made fishing tackle that began in earnest around 1955. Some companies fought against this trend tooth and nail (such as Bronson) and lost spectacularly. Others updated, streamlined, and modernized and survived. Some, however, tried to maintain a delicate balance between their traditional line of tackle and the new imports. Voedisch was one of these companies.

As noted, as early as the 1920s Voedisch Bros. had already launched a successful line of trade tackle marked with their own name--the Vee Bee line of tackle, found on rods, reels, and lures (especially Creek Chub Shur Strike baits). They were unsure of how their line of dealers would react to cheap Japanese tackle branded with their venerable name. Would putting cheap (and cheaply made) tackle under their venerable name, already a half century old, diminish the respect many had for their company?


Vee Bee was used on a variety of fishing tackle.
Sometime in the late 1950s (around 1957 or 1958) they decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to launch an entirely new line of fishing tackle, inexpensive and imported, to compete with the big importers like TAICO and L.M. Dickinson. They disassociated the Voedisch and Vee Bee names from this division of their tackle company.

In this way, the Four Seasons brand of fishing tackle was born. Referenced in The Printer's Ink for 1960 as "a division of Voedisch Bros., Chicago, manufacturer of fishing tackle…," Four Seasons was branded on all kinds of imported tackle, ranging from hooks and sinkers to fishing rods and reels.


The following two ads show the kinds of places Voedisch was targeting for their Four Seasons brand of tackle.


This June 8, 1960 ad from the Wisconsin Daily Tribune shows Four Seasons tackle hawked at the local variety store chain (Schroeder Stores).

In this Hamburg, Iowa paper ad from June 22, 1969, Four Seasons tackle was hawked at the local B&E Variety Store.

Inexpensive lures are commonly found on Four Seasons cards, as are marked line spools and snelled hook packets. Here is a selection of Four Seasons baits, including a worm rig and their "Faithful Four" spin cast assortment.




What are harder to find are the marked Four Season reels. I was fortunate enough to pick up three Four Season reels in original packaging dating from around 1960. They include a baitcaster, spincast reel, and a fly reel. I have heard there is a spinning reel marked Four Seasons but haven't seen it. Only the spincast reel is marked "Four Seasons" on the actual reel. All of them were made in Japan, as was all the Four Seasons tackle I've seen.


All three reels came from the same estate and were purchased at Fanaro Bros., which was a small hardware company in Collegeville, Pennsylvania founded by Ernest Fanaro (1929-2011) and his brother in the 1950s. Fanaro was exactly the kind of place Voedisch Bros. hoped their economy line of tackle would take hold. This makes these three reels my favorite category of trade reel--the "dual" trade reel attached to both wholesaler and retailer. Interestingly, none of the three reels were ever used.

For those keeping track, to unravel this particular chain, we discover that a Four Seasons tackle representative sold these reels--manufactured in Japan and imported by Voedisch Bros., Inc.--to a small hardware store named Fanaro Bros., who then sold it to the customer (who apparently never used them).


In 1973, Voedisch Bros. was still trading as Four Seasons Sporting Goods but seems to have disappeared soon after. The very fact they survived the sporting goods blood bath of the 1960s means that the Four Seasons line was successful. That they didn't survive the 1970s implies they did not update this line to accommodate the much higher quality Japanese imports like Ryobi and Daiwa.

A fascinating story all the way around that shows just how much Japanese imported tackle changed things, and how complicated the American tackle trade became after World War II.

Four Seasons tackle is not rare but certain items (especially reels) can be tough to find. They are a fun addition to a post-war trade tackle collection.

-- Dr. Todd

52 Trade Houses Part 45: Johnson Smith & Co.

Over the course of the next year, we'll be detailing the history of 52 companies that sold branded fishing tackle. 52 trade houses in 52 weeks -- some obscure, some famous, and all available exclusively here on the Fishing for History Blog! If you have any items from the week's entry you'd like to share with us, please send it my way and I'll make sure it makes it on the blog.

For a discussion of what exactly trade tackle is, Click Here. Enjoy the 52 for 52!

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Trade House Tackle, Part 46:
Johnson Smith & Co.
Sometimes you run across a piece of tackle that causes you to re-evaluate what you think you know about fishing tackle trade houses.

As some of you may know, I've been helping out on Field & Stream's fishing blog run by John Merwin and Joe Cermele with their Vintage Tackle Contest. We just celebrated out first year last week! It's been a ton of fun and a few of the entries have been surprising and taught me some new things about the tackle field.

What hasn't happened until this week was a new trade house arriving via the entries in the contest. This week's entry, in fact, caused a bit of a ripple in our understanding of trade houses and the tackle they sold.

As you can see, it is a Greer Patent Lever Hook -- a nifty auto striking hook covered in both Mierzwa and Blauser's fine book as well as Jeff Kieny's Patented Hooks, Harnesses & Bait-Holders. The Greer has always been one of my favorite hooks, but this particular hook came with the onion skin paper noting it was sold by Johnson Smith & Co. of 6615 E. Jefferson Ave, Detroit, Mich.


Who was Johnson Smith & Co.? It was a wildly popular mail order house founded in 1914 in Detroit, Michigan and that gained legendary status as a purveyor of novelty goods ranging from ventriloquism goods to magic supplies.

A British-born merchant, Alfred Johnson Smith actually founded his company in Sydney, Australia in 1906 before moving to America in 1914. By 1923, the company's catalog grew to 576 pages -- meaning it was one of the largest of its kind in the world.


What has not been known until now is that they sold fishing tackle. Well, we can conclusively note that this massive company (based out Chicago, Racine and Detroit) sold the Greer Patent Lever Hook. This hook dates to the 1910s or 1920s, so tackle was a part of their stock from the earliest days.


A ca. 1930 Johnson Smith & Co. catalog featuring the Greer Hook (Courtesy Jim Garrett and Skip Brooks).

But what else did they sell? Did they hawk tackle marked "Johnson Smith" or "Johnson" or "JS&Co.?" I own several reels marked "The Johnson Casting Reel" I long felt were products of J.S. Johnson & Co. of Baltimore--a sporting goods trade house known to have sold a lot of fishing tackle. But are these reels actually Johnson Smith products?

We know that Johnson Smith sold guns (see the catalog scan below from 1938). But how much, and what kind of tackle, did they sell? The 1938 catalog, which I've looked through, has no tackle in it.


There are absolutely legions of Johnson Smith & Co. fans out there and thousands of web pages dedicated to their crazy stuff. But this, I believe, is the first mention of their fishing tackle.

It's funny how a company this big and popular--and still in business today--can have escaped our attention for so many years…but now we proudly add the name Johnson Smith & Co. to the long list of fishing tackle trade houses.

How much tackle they trafficked in--and what kinds--still remains to be seen.

-- Dr. Todd

52 Trade Houses Part 45: The Danielson Co. of Washington

Over the course of the next year, we'll be detailing the history of 52 companies that sold branded fishing tackle. 52 trade houses in 52 weeks -- some obscure, some famous, and all available exclusively here on the Fishing for History Blog! If you have any items from the week's entry you'd like to share with us, please send it my way and I'll make sure it makes it on the blog.

For a discussion of what exactly trade tackle is, Click Here. Enjoy the 52 for 52!

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Trade House Tackle, Part 45:
The Danielson Co. of Washington

One of the great success stories in trade tackle was the Danielson Company of Washington State. Another trade house that sold tackle for over five decades, this firm adapted and changed with the times and sold a ton of tackle over the years.

It had its genesis in Lillian Danielson's fly tying business, which was founded in 1943 in Seattle, where she tied out of the famed Eddie Bauer Sporting Goods store. She developed a number of patterns and tied flies for an exclusive clientele that included the Marx Bros., the Hill Bros., Clark Gable, Zane Grey, and Bing Crosby. The Coho Salmon fly was co-developed by Bill Boening and Lillian Danielson.

Joined by her husband Gus, the company soon expanded to include other items such as snells and terminal tackle. Gus was a prominent member of the American Fishing Tackle Manufacturer's Association (AFTMA) and testified before Congress in 1956. The pair lived at 4700 Sixth Avenue NE and Gus declared himself to be "a manufacturer of fishing tackle and sporting goods."


The Danielson Fly Manufacturing Co. eventually relocated to Mercer Island, Washington. It expanded in the 1960s to include a fuller line of tackle, including rods and reels it sold marked with its own name and that were manufactured in Japan.

As they were involved in the fly tackle trade, it is not surprising that the firm sold some interesting fly reels, which I believe were made to their specifications in Japan as they don't resemble other Japanese imports. One of these was the Danielson Model #72 "Dandy" fly reel, shown below in the box.


I believe the reel pictured below--marked Danielson 71 and a Patent Date which I can't quite make out (I think #2648174 but it doesn't register to any reel related patent--help on this please!). I am fairly confident this is another Danielson fly reel.



They also sold spinning reels. Below is a Danielson Model 41 Spinning Reel. Ben Wright writes it is the same as the Kamann Model 41.


They sold other reels -- a 1970 advertisement I have shows a Danielson Single Action Fly Reel for $3.97 -- helping pin down these reels as sold in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

They also sold a lot of other tackle, including rods such as the pack rod shown below.


Of great interest for us is that the company is still in business today, selling a ton of new terminal tackle and triumphantly entering a new century of tackle selling. The Danielson Co., as it is now known, is based out of Kent, Washington.


I love a good old American success story, don't you?

-- Dr. Todd