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Lure collecting for only three years: My side of the story
by Michael Echols
1996
After all the issues of safe-keeping, owning, and guarding a high-grade Winchester rifle collection seven days a week, 24 hours a day...I decided to collect something safer and less interesting to thieves than guns. I wanted to collect something no one would break into my house to steal. What about something like antique fishing lures? Little did I suspect that in only three years this supposedly mundane antique lure �hobby� would become the best investment I ever made as of 2000.
What had gotten me to thinking about collecting old lures was that I had received a small tackle box with a lot of what I thought were early (1950�s) lures from my uncle�s house when he died in Okeechobee, Florida. I decided that might be an interesting area to collect that I would not have to guard around the clock and a lot less stress than dealing with guns.
I started researching antique lures and bought a few lures and early reels at local antique shows, but it seemed the dealers were even worse than those I had dealt with when buying guns.
After I started getting serious about the antique lures, I traveled to some national antique tackle shows around the country and was buying what I thought were expensive lures with some of the cash money I had received from the sale of the Winchester collection. Money was not an issue at this point because my orthodontic practice was doing great and I had no responsibilities whatever. I wasn't married and not dating anyone special at that time and I had no other bad habits, unlike the off-shore race boat, which I sold because it was soaking up my savings.
As I started buying more and more high-grade and more expensive lures, as well as Kentucky and vom Hofe saltwater reels (thousands of dollars each), the cost gradually became an issue because I was in danger of exceeding the money I had gotten from selling the Winchester collection.
Things got really serious when I started writing checks out of my savings. As prices for rare pieces climbed in late 1996, both lure and reel collecting was getting to be a major investment. The majority of the tackle collectors I met were blue-collar guys who like to hunt antiques or fished and collected only as a side interest. As I started buying and collecting up the food chain, the completion from more sophisticated buyers increased.
Generally, the people who were really into lure collecting had jobs or businesses that spun off cash which they buried in antiques as an investment. I was using after-tax money that I had earned in my orthodontic practice or had recovered from the sale of my Winchester rifle collection, so I was very aware of the cost. All this happened in a relatively short period of time, less than a year.
The vast majority of the collectors I ran into at lure shows did not have a college education that allowed them to make a lot of money, so finding a lure in the field that would bring them thousands of dollars at auction or in a private sale was too good to pass up. I was collecting just for fun and the thrill of the hunt, but I have to admit it was addictive when you picked up something rare for a relative low price.
At one point I had an ad running every week in the local paper in Ft. Myers, Floida, that I would buy old lures and I ended up driving around after work to various questionable neighborhoods to buy the tackle left behind by old men who had retired from up north and died.
I even wrote and published an article, my second year, on the addiction to lure collecting and how it could ruin your life as easily as alcohol or drugs. Unfortunately, not many people who should have listened took my advice. (Note: The truth for those who didn�t listen came to roost when the lure market crashed around 2000 after I had already quit.)
The �treasure� hunt for antique lures takes place at garage sales, flea markets, or simply going from house to house via newspaper ads. Making a �find� is a chance to make a killing from a cache of lures in an old tackle box a �picker� paid next to nothing to buy from an unknowledgeable seller at a garage sale. The pickers were collectors who �picked� in the field to find treasures they sold to other collectors like me. I have to admit I enjoyed making a �find� as much as the next collector, but I had to be careful because the �dealers� knew I was a serious buyer and as a �doctor�, an easy mark.
Don�t get me wrong, most of the lure collectors were really nice guys, who enjoyed the hobby as much as I did, but among those nice guys were a few sharks, who spent most of their time either trying to screw everyone else or making a living by selling to other collectors. The first year I was really heavy into buying lures at shows, like the Dayton Tackle Collectors show, from dealers and my home phone rang frequently with all my new lure �friends� across the country. As long as I was a buyer I was on their �friend� list, but the minute you said you didn�t want to buy, they were gone like early morning fog in the sun.
Early on, when I first started really getting into lure collecting, I decided I had to go to the major shows if I was going to avoid having to pay stupid-money to a couple of dealers I was buying from over the phone. One of the first major shows I attended was in Allentown, Pa. If you've never had the pleasure of visiting that area of the world, just avoid it like the plague.
The show was held in a terrible part of town in an old run-down single-story motel, most likely built in the 40's. I had flown in on a puddle-jumper airline out of an Atlanta, and immediately run into some of the heavyweight collectors I knew from Daytona. So, I figured I was in the right place. Lure collectors will stoop as low as you can go to put another rare or needed �piece� in their collection. Going to Allentown was the ultimate example of �stooping low� in my experience.
I had a room to myself, but when I got there, I just tossed my bag in the room and headed out to see what was available in the 'room trading' before it got dark. The way lure shows in a motel works, is that everyone leaves their doors open for buyers to randomly walk in and sample their lures in display cases.
Tons of terrific lures and boxes were to be had at great prices, as it was all old-time pickers selling in their rooms. I bought a few nice pieces and headed back to my room to unpack. My room was beyond terrible, I mean horrible, dirty, and all rundown like the Mexican War had been fought and lost in it.
I had a black light with me and pulled it out to check the paint on the lures, which glowed in the dark if newly painted I had brought it to make sure the lures I bought were not repainted fakes as new paint glows in the black light and old paint looks dull. All was fine with my lure purchases, but when I shone the light on the sheets of the bed, the stains stood out like it was a scene from the CSI TV show. Blood or semen lit up like a fire in the infrared light. I packed my bag and left for the airport right then. I spent the night at some motel chain near the airport and flew home the next morning.
That was my last trip to a lure show in Pa. or anywhere else that wasn't in a known hotel chain. I went to plenty of shows that first year or so before coming up with the website idea to display and buy lures online during my second year.
After I started buying online from my website, (more on this later), I never went to another show to buy or bought from another collector. I made it to Daytona a couple of times to show some of my collection, but even skipped that after it got old having to deal with the some of the con men who populated that show every year. Don�t get wrong, the vast majority of collectors are really nice, honest, people, but there is an �element� of con men who dominate the hobby and prey on unsuspecting new collectors. (Gun collecting suffers from the same con men.)
One of the lessons I learned in gun and lure collecting was that the good stuff follows the money trail and I was on that trail, so I was offered lots of really nice material, but at big prices, since prices were constantly increasing at the time. There were a lot of guys who would and could pay big bucks, I was just one among many at the time. The biggest difference between me and them was most of them had been in the game for many years. I was a greenhorn, as they say, at least that first year or two.
Despite being green, I was a little smarter outside of the lure collecting world than a lot of the other people who were collecting lures.
1997
It was about this time I started my first website, Braceface.com, for promoting my orthodontic practice, and got heavily into website design and programming to build an office website. Most programmers in the early days of the web were not college-trained programmers, but more hobbyists, who migrated into the field via hacking or playing with early computers.
I had already been working with and programming using Unix computer software to run my office for a number of years, so migrating to programming a website was not hard at all, just time-consuming. It was like learning any new language. You read and practice, then you implement that knowledge on the website to either sell yourself, your practice, or a product.
On a whim in 1997, after watching eBay.com grow through �selling� objects, I figured out a way I could reverse engineer a website to �buy� and build my lure collection. It was the reverse of what everyone else was doing on the internet at the time. While everyone else was selling stuff online, I turned it all around and started buying old, valuable lures online from the pubic/non-collectors.
First, I decided to just do a website to show off my lure collection. I called it �Echols Antique Lures.com�. It took a tremendous amount of time to create, but I found it to be fun and required a number of skills I had acquired over the years, namely photography, web design, software programming, and above all...marketing.
As my website became known and more collectors watched online as I added to my collection, the idea dawned on me to advertise on the site that I bought high-grade lures in the original box that people didn�t know how or where to sell. It was a �eureka� moment and I was the only person doing it at that time because I had created the first webstie with fishing lures as a topic online.
Using this theory of �trolling� for antique lures using the website, I gradually started getting offers from all over the country to buy some of the best-condition rare lures and boxes known and no one else in the world was doing it online. Just me. There seemed to be no end to the amount or quality I was offered from people who were not collectors and wanted to sell to someone who would pay them a fair price and appreciated their family heirlooms, which did not describe most lure dealers and some prominent collectors.
Many of the sellers were the widows or family of men who had fished and had extra boxed lures put away in the closet or children of those same people who had no interest in a bunch of old fishing lures from the early 1900 �s. They didn�t care about the lures and they needed the money. I�m sure I put more than a few kids through their first year of college with the purchases I made in just the two years I was buying lures off the website.
(Note: In any collecting field, the basis of the knowledge is either experience or research books.) With lures, there were only one or two reference books and none were technically oriented. Most just showed a photo of the lure and gave the name of the maker. With my website, I started giving in-depth details about the lures I wanted to buy and even the prices I would pay. Details were the key to buying what I collected.
I was getting so many offers for mint antique lures in the original boxes I literally could not afford to buy them all. I only did it for about two years, but during that period I completely stopped buying from lure dealers or going to lure shows where most lures traded hands among collectors and dealers for what became stupid-money.
The dealers �picked� communities all over the country and then sold what they picked to collectors at the lure shows. I was picking those same sources via the internet, but from the original owners rather than the middlemen. I was buying �wholesale�, not retail.
While everyone else had to buy from dealers or other collectors, I had my own private source of lures. I was buying primo material right out of the field from the owners, no middlemen, no big markups on the price. In two years, I amassed one of the best early antique lure collections in the country. I was spending after-tax savings doing this, but it was fun and I loved the challenge. I posted detailed photos of what I had bought on www.Echols Antique Lures.com.
During the first year or so before the website period, friends Tom Greene and Bobby Nicholson, and I used to go to a two-day Lang�s tackle auction at a remote resort outside of Boston once or twice a year. We flew up commercially and Tom hired a limo to drive us sixty miles out to the resort where they held the auction. It was non-stop fun from the time we walked into the hotel. Lang�s held a walk-around tackle flea-market sale outside on the resort grounds the day before the auction. We would find more stuff for our collections on tables of the local scroungers and pickers than we could believe. Sometimes it was almost more than we could carry back on the plane.
Lang�s Auction was what you typically see on TV; an auctioneer at the front of the room and hundreds of bidders in the audience. There were literally thousands of items up for sale, which we had previewed in the auction catalog. The auctions went on all day for two days.
At night we would sit in the bar after dinner and tell stories to each other and meet all the other collectors and dealers who would show up. One guy in particular really got our attention because we would see him in the flea-market setting outside before the show and then at the indoor auction. He would often have some of the rarest and most sought-after artifacts in the auction. He was kind of scruffy looking, had a big beard, wore a ball cap and was in his late twenties. After a number of conversations over drinks, we found out the guy was from a wealthy family in the Northeast, who spent his free time looking in peoples� attics for the old tackle.
The way he got into the attics to look for the tackle was to ask if the owner had any old picture frames. Apparently, most people in the New England area had attics with old stuff and he would buy anything of value, and in particular, old tackle. He told us one time he found what he thought was a European painting, bought it on speculation, and it turned out it was something rare and worth a quarter million dollars! Of course, we thought it was just bar talk, but it turned out the guy was for real. He was one of the heirs to the cotton swab fortune and had family homes in Maine, Florida, and Hawaii. You just never knew who you were talking to at one of those tackle shows.
After we got to know the guy better, he disclosed a funny story about his family�s cotton swab business, in Maine. His dad died, and when the children had to inspect his office in the company headquarters, they found a big two-door bank-style safe that had a lower drawer that could not be opened. After wedging a crow-bar into the side of the drawer they cracked it open enough to peer inside. What they found was hundreds of gold coins stored in the drawer. We asked what they did about the �find� and he said they just reclosed the drawer and left the coins where they were at that time. Nice when you are so rich you don�t get excited about finding gold coins or rare paintings.
Some people who collected what I collected or wanted to learn what I had learned, pretty much read the website daily. I ran a blog discussing various aspects of collecting lures and also published many articles in lure publications like the National Fishing Lure Collectors Club. I shared what I learned with other collectors.
In some of the �Lucky�s Old Lures� books, I was the main contributor for articles and some of the Heddon lure photos. It was through the websites and publications that both the collection and I became well known in a very short period of time. I bring up the time factor, because most of the serious collectors had literally been collecting for decades, and here I was publishing all the secret details to the public after collecting only for a couple of years. Heresy, to be sure, in the eyes of the old timers in the hobby.
Now that I was a source of high grade and rare material, my phone rang non-stop because everyone wanted to buy or trade for something I had. All my new �friends� were constantly trying to wheel or deal something out of my collection because they could see what I had added each day right on the internet. No waiting for a lure show or auction. Just click on Echols Antique Lures.com each day and see if Echols had anything new. No stress, no thieves, and no problems. What was not to like?
1999
The economy and especially the stock market, was looking like it was heading for serious trouble in late 1999, and I was getting worried because I had some of my disposable savings tied up in lures. I served on a local bank�s board of directors and everything I was reading and hearing from the banking industry was negative. So, being a worry wart, I decided to sell a part of the lure collection to cover my initial investments in the lures.
I knew that very few individuals who collected lures were knowledgeable about the stock market or investing, much less paid any attention to the economy, so they had no idea what was coming down the track. The people I tried to tell about what I saw didn�t pay attention to what I said. With that knowledge and a gut hunch, I decided to stop buying lures.
I quietly started to trade out my antique fishing reel collection, which was not that large, but contained some seriously valuable early reels. One collector from England wanted all the antique vom Hofe saltwater reels in one swoop and after I traded out of the freshwater Kentucky reels to a few known buyers, I was out of that area quickly.
Like I said before, most lure collectors were just good old boys, who like to fish and collected lures as a hobby. There were also people like a car dealer and a building contractor I knew who were spending hundreds of thousands a year on their lure collections. Also, there was a friend, Tom Greene, for whom I built an antique reel webite, and he was buying every rare antique reel he found.
As I mentioned before, I deeply believed in sharing what I knew and learned, unlike most of the secretive dealers, I constantly wrote and published articles on lure collecting and posted my research and opinions on my website. Most of the serious collectors around the country knew me via the website, and knew exactly what I had in my collection. There were thousands of photos on the site, not to mention hundreds of pages of what I called �Lure Knowledge� for anyone to read.
(Note: Doctors don�t generally keep their knowledge that would help someone else a secret. If they discover or invent a new and better treatment, they share for the betterment of everyone.) Trust me, this is not the case in dealing with any kind of antiques. Antique dealers of any ilk are cut-throat about divulging even the most mundane information they use to get ahead of the other guy. In lure dealing, it was considered stupid, if not criminal, to share knowledge. I knowingly broke that rule at every opportunity.
In the 1990�s, I was extremely busy in my orthodontic practice, but I really worried about the stock market; even though I did not really participate in it. I knew that once that market went down, everything else would follow that trend. Almost overnight, I decided to quit collecting and sell out to avoid a financial bullet. I married my college sweertheart, Jane, and all of a sudden a lot of my free time disappeared, much to my benefit.
Over a period of one or two weeks, I reorganized all the website marketing to �selling� instead of �buying�. I listed all the lures and boxes with the exact price during a period of one week. Once I had made the shift to selling on the website, I put out the word to a few individuals and on various lure-collecting chat boards that I was going to sell some of my collection.
Of course, a lot of guys immediately wanted to know why I was quitting and I just told them I had other responsibilities and needed to spend more of my free time not buying lures. Some individuals openly said on one of the lure chat boards, that they thought I was sick and perhaps dying, but the bottom line is they came in droves to buy everything I owned.
It was like vultures jumping on road kill and a feeding frenzy ensued. One guy from Tennessee flew his private plane down to Ft. Myers, had lunch here at the house, and left with cardboard boxes full of expensive lures.
I got rid of the whole collection of about eight hundred lures and boxes in just two weeks, with most of the high-end material going in the first three days. The phone and email stream was like trying to drink from a fire hose. I packed and shipped lures daily for weeks.
Some of the heavy buyers flew into Ft. Myers commercially. Joe Stagnitti, from New York, flew down to pick up a part of the collection and walked out with two suitcases full of rare lures and boxes�which I later found out he had already promised to other collectors. And then after a wild ride, it was over. Jane and I left home for a well-deserved long vacation.
I was out of the lure-collecting game after only three years. I got all my money back, not to mention all the fun I had doing it.
It was months before the stock market tanked in mid-2000, and the economy was circling the drain. I had once again dodged a bullet when I liquidated the last of my lure collection after only three years.
A lot of lure collectors later blamed me for driving the prices of lures sky high via my website because I had the unheard of audacity to actually put the asking price on what I had for sale for everyone to see. Unlike the dealers who hid all the inside information, I put it out there for God and the squirrels to see and use.
When lure prices totally tanked during the next couple of years, some said that it was my fault for having raised the bar too high, but the truth was it was their greed, the stock market, and a bad economy that killed off lure collecting and I just happened to step in and then out of it at the right time.
Again, being born ahead of the baby boomer demographic �wave� and observing the economy like a hawk left me watching the train wreck from the sidelines again. Other guys tried to sell their collections too, but it was too late by 2001.
Strangely, all my �new friends� from lure collecting quickly evaporated and my phone bill went down drastically. Funny how when I no longer had something those �friends� from around the country wanted from me, they just disappeared, and I never heard from most of them again.
After three years, it was a relief to not be called around the clock by �users� or the occasional drug-addled idiot at 2 o�clock in the morning. I also basically gave the lure collecting website to a buddy in California, which was the icing on the cake, as ten years later there are dozens of antique tackle sites on the internet.
Nope, I don't miss lure collecting, and that is why I don't talk about it much.
As of 2016, lure collecting is still in the dumps and has never come back anywhere near the highs when I quit. Demographics are contributing to the demise of all antique collecting because the younger generation simply does not have the disposable income to spend on something as frivolous as �lures� nor do they care about antiques. They fish, but don�t collect lures like we did when times were better and money was more plentiful. I was there at the right time and the right place.
Most collectors just put their lure collections away when the tackle market crashed after 2001 and went back to doing other things. Unfortunately, many of the older collectors who thought their collections were going to be a source of income in retirement were sadly wrong and suffered greatly as prices have been down for over a decade and show no indication of returning to the highs of 1999.
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