Grateful for a rich past, and keeping an eye on fishing's next big thing

I am a very fortunate human being.

I have been around long enough to have witnessed some great things in the world of fresh- and saltwater angling. And in my opinion some of the most innovative advances caused average fishermen to become much better anglers.

Sport fishermen became enamored with the then-silly boxes of jumbled wires and bulbs called fish-finders. Lowrance and Vexilar piqued the interest of those paying attention when they arrived on the scene. We invested some green stuff for the hodge-podge green boxes, the battleship grey of Vexilar. We called them fish-finders, when in reality they were scaled-down sonar devices designed not to break the piggy banks. That accessory explosion happened in the early and mid-1960s.

Artificial lures were just plain old lures or plugs, as we used to call them, until Lauri Rapala came along from his native Finland and presented to America a balsa crafted minnow that swam like nothing we had ever seen. It was simply named Rapala, after its inventor.

A sharp cookie named Ron Weber, a Duluth, Minn., native, saw the future unfold before his eager eyes and subsequently made his fortune by introducing mass numbers of Rapala fishing lures to America. The first models not only hooked hungry fishermen but also captured the attention of millions of game fish as well.

And then along came Nick Creme, the man who is said to have invented the plastic worm most commonly used for largemouth bass fishing. But Nick's nightcrawler designs were quickly adapted and slightly changed by other plastics companies that saw room for their products on dealer's shelves.

In the mid-1960s, Chicago-born Al and Ron Lindner became noted live bait fishermen after several years of learning how to fish "structure" with Buck Perry's Spoonplugs, and reportedly tapping into some influence from the late Bill Binkelman. Bill was a tackle buyer for the Boston Store in Milwaukee, and he saw the Lindners as diamonds in the rough.

Ron Lindner was a surveyor, while brother Al went off to war in Southeast Asia. But the story took a huge leap forward when Ron went to work designing the Lindy Rig. Once home, Al started fishing bass tournaments, and won a few.

Long story shortened. In a beat-up station wagon, the brothers took Ron's live-bait invention (the Lindy Rig) to bait shops throughout Wisconsin. They asked shop owners about specific lakes and how fishing was at the time. Many of the answers were not encouraging. After a couple hours of fishing the rig, they returned to the shop with stringers of huge bass, walleye and pike. Seeing was believing. Word got out and sales slowly started to take off.

The rest of the story, for all of those companies I mentioned, is angling history.

I studied live-bait fishing directly under the tutelage of Binkelman. He was responsible for introducing me to Ron and Al in 1966, thereby taking my angling education to the post-graduate level.

And then there was the total, overall picture, and the changes in the fishing industry.

Rapala-USA became Normark, and the balsa minnow spawned dozens of new models that sank, floated, and continued to swim like what game fish had been used to seeing in their waters.

Lowrance and Vexilar continued sending out underwater signals, and Creme lures can still tempt bass. The Lindners built a communications empire while bringing younger generations of family members into the picture.

Now we are in a new year and I personally wonder if there are any fresh, new geniuses with the next great angling and tackle ideas.

Like in horse racing, there always seems to be a winner on the horizon.

• Contact Mike Jackson at angler88@comcast.net, catch his radio show 7-9 a.m. Sundays on WGCO 1590-AM (live-streamed at www.1590WCGO.com) and get more content at mikejacksonoutdoors.com.