The kid opened the tackle box and made a face like he’d opened a container of leftovers that had been in the fridge too long.
“Yeah, fishing stuff.” He said. “We get these in all the time. Mostly junk. Most of it ends up in a garage sale box by the door for a dollar each.”
Pauline Whitmore stood on the other side of the counter, 79 years old, her gray hair pulled back with a clip, her reading glasses hanging on a chain over a cardigan she’d owned since 1996.
And watched the 24-year-old rummage through her husband’s old tackle box like he was looking for loose change in a couch cushion.
“Those were Ed’s.” She said. “He collected them for almost 50 years.” “Oh, sure, sentimental value.
I get it.” The kid pulled out a lure, a wooden fish with red and white paint mostly worn off, held it up, turned it over, and dropped it back into the box.
Dropped it. Back into the wooden compartments where Ed had kept his lures arranged by type for four decades.
“Tell you what.” The kid said. “Whole box, I could do 50 bucks. Some of these wooden ones might go to a garage sale guy for a couple dollars a piece, but honestly, it’s not worth my time to sort through it.”
$50. For 50 years of Ed Whitmore walking into bait shops and flea markets and estate sales across three states buying old wooden lures one at a time, bringing them home in paper bags, cleaning them with a soft toothbrush at the kitchen table, and arranging them in the tackle box Pauline had given him for their 10th anniversary.
$50 for all of it. Let me tell you about Pauline Whitmore and her husband’s tackle box.
Pauline was born in 1946 in Alpena, Michigan, a small town on the shore of Lake Huron up in the northeast part of the lower peninsula.
If [snorts] you don’t know where Alpena is, it’s about a 4-hour drive north of Detroit nestled between Thunder Bay and the Huron National Forest.
It’s the kind of town where half the people work at the cement plant and the other half work at jobs that exist because of the cement plant.
Pauline’s father worked at the plant for 31 years. Her mother kept the house and raised four kids on what her father brought home.
Pauline married Edward Ed Whitmore in 1968. She was 22. He was 25. Ed was a fisheries biologist for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
He’d gone to Michigan State, studied aquatic biology, and gotten a job with the DNR surveying fish populations in the lakes and rivers of northeastern Michigan.
It was a job that paid modestly, but suited Ed in every other way. He was a quiet man.
He liked water. He liked fish. He liked being outdoors in weather that most people would complain about.
He would have paid the state for the privilege of doing what the state paid him to do.
They had two daughters, Kathy in 1970 and Beth in 1973. They lived in a three-bedroom ranch house on Oxbow Drive in Alpena on a half-acre lot that backed up to a creek where Ed taught both girls to fish before they could read.
Kathy grew up and became a nurse in Traverse City. Beth became a high school English teacher in Petoskey.
Both of them were good daughters. Both of them called regularly. Both of them were too busy to notice that their mother was running out of money.
Ed Whitmore had a hobby that started as a professional interest and became something else entirely.
He collected old fishing lures. He started in the early 1970s when he found a wooden Heddon lure in the bottom of a drawer at a cabin his parents owned on Hubbard Lake.
The lure was old, older than Ed, maybe older than his parents. It had a red head and a white body with three treble hooks, and it was made of hand-carved wood with glass eyes.
Ed picked it up and turned it over and read the faint stamp on the belly, Heddon’s Dowagiac Minnow.
He had never seen anything like it. He showed it to the old man who owned the bait shop in Hubbard Lake Village, a man named Mel, who’d been selling tackle on Hubbard Lake since the 1940s.
“Oh, that’s a nice one.” Mel said. “Heddon started making those around 1905. That one’s probably from the teens, maybe 1915, 1918.
Hand-painted, glass eyes, good condition. Not rare, but not common. 10 bucks would be fair.”
10 bucks. Ed paid it. And something in Ed changed. From that point forward, Ed collected old fishing lures, not casually, seriously.
He read books. There weren’t many, but there were some. He subscribed to a newsletter put out by the National Fishing Lure Collectors Club after it was founded in 1976.
He went to antique shops and flea markets every weekend that the weather didn’t allow him to fish.
He drove to Ohio and Indiana and Wisconsin on long weekends to attend the first big lure shows in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
He bought lures one at a time, the way Ed did everything, slowly, carefully, and with a patience that most people didn’t have.
By 2010, Ed’s collection contained 412 old fishing lures. Most of them were from the major American lure companies, Heddon, Pflueger, Creek Chub, South Bend, Shakespeare, Paw Paw.
Most of them were wooden. Most of them dated from between 1905 and the early 1950s.
Ed kept them in a custom-made wooden tackle box that Pauline had given him for their 10th anniversary in 1978, a box with 18 lift-out compartments made by a woodworker in Hillman, Michigan from cherry and maple.
Ed had arranged the lures by manufacturer, then by model, then by year. It was the most organized thing in the house.
Pauline didn’t understand the lures. She didn’t fish. She didn’t collect anything herself except grandchildren’s drawings on the refrigerator.
But she understood Ed. And she understood that the lures made Ed happy, and she understood that a man who loved his work and loved his wife and loved his children and loved his hobby was a man living the right kind of life.
So, she let him have the lures. She asked about them sometimes. She listened to his stories about finding a rare Pflueger surprise at a yard sale in Rogers City for $2.
She pretended to understand when Ed explained the difference between an early Heddon expert and a later Heddon expert.
Ed passed away in 2022, heart failure. He was 77. They’d been married 54 years.
He’d been retired from the DNR for 12 years, and he’d spent most of those 12 years fishing, reading about fishing, or adding to the tackle box.
He died at home. Pauline found him in his recliner after a nap that went too long.
He looked peaceful. He still had a library book about Great Lakes fisheries history on his lap.
Pauline handled the funeral the way Michigan women handle funerals, practically, efficiently, without drama. She cried in the bathroom and nowhere else.
The girls came home. The girls left. The casseroles arrived and were eaten and the dishes were returned.
And then Pauline was alone in the house on Oxbow Drive with a creek in the backyard and nobody to fish in it.
Now Pauline was 79, and the money problem was the money problem that so many widows of modest income men face.
Ed’s DNR pension had a survivor’s benefit, but the benefit was 50% of what Ed had been getting, which meant Pauline’s monthly income had dropped from $3,200 to about $2,400 the day Ed died.
Social Security was $1,360 on top of that. Total, $3,760, which sounded like enough until you subtracted the property tax on the house, the homeowner’s insurance, the car insurance on the 2012 Subaru Outback, the utilities, the groceries, the prescriptions.
Pauline took four pills a day for blood pressure and cholesterol and thyroid and a water pill for her ankles, the Medicare supplement, and the internet that she kept because Beth insisted she needed it so they could video call.
After everything, Pauline had about $120 left over each month. Some months more, some months less.
The problem was the driveway. The asphalt driveway was the original one poured in 1974 when the house was built, and after nearly 50 years of Michigan freeze-thaw cycles, it had cracks running every direction like a broken windshield.
Weeds were growing up through the cracks. The mailman had told her last summer that he couldn’t keep parking on it because he was worried about the axle on his truck.
In October, the corner by the mailbox collapsed entirely, a sinkhole about 2 ft across where the asphalt had given way.
Pauline had stood on her porch and looked at it and known that winter would make it worse, and it had.
The estimate to replace the driveway was $7,800. A smaller patch job, just fixing the sinkhole and the worst cracks, was $2,400.
Pauline had $640 in savings. She couldn’t do either. She thought about calling Kathy or Beth.
She thought about it for 3 weeks. Every time she picked up the phone, she put it down again.
The girls had their own lives. Kathy was working 12-hour shifts at the hospital in Traverse City.
Beth was dealing with a kid who was struggling in high school. Pauline wasn’t going to be the old woman who called her daughters and said, “I need money for the driveway.”
She’d been the mother who made it work for 54 years. She’d figure it out.
She thought about what she could sell. The answer, she realized slowly, was Ed’s tackle box.
It was the only thing in the house that might be worth real money. She didn’t know how much old lures were actually worth.
Ed had talked about prices sometimes, but Pauline had never really paid attention because the prices Ed talked about were the prices of individual lures he was thinking about buying, not the value of his whole collection.
Maybe the whole box was worth a few hundred dollars, maybe a thousand. That would at least fix the sinkhole.
She carried the box out to the Subaru, set it carefully on the passenger seat, and drove to Thunder Bay Pawn on US 23 south of downtown Alpena.
The kid behind the counter was named Jesse Marlow, 24, average height, short brown hair under a backwards hat with a camouflage pattern, wearing a tan work polo with the shop logo over a long-sleeve Henley, a name tag that said, “Jesse, associate.”
He had worked at Thunder Bay Pawn for 14 months. Before that, he’d worked at a gas station.
He had caught fish before. His dad took him bass fishing sometimes, but he’d caught them on cheap modern plastic lures from Walmart.
He had no idea that there was a market for old fishing lures. He had no idea that old fishing lures existed.
Pauline set the tackle box on the glass counter and unlatched the lid. Jesse looked inside.
The compartments were full of small wooden objects, painted, worn, with little metal hooks and glass eyes and wire loops.
They looked to Jesse like something you’d find at a yard sale priced at a dollar each.
He picked one up, turned it over, dropped it back. “50 bucks for the whole thing,” he said.
Pauline looked at the box, at Ed’s careful arrangement, at the wooden lure Jesse had just dropped, an old red and white Heddon that Ed had bought from Mel at the bait shop on Hubbard Lake in 1972.
She reached for the box to close it. Nobody in that shop knew what Pauline was really holding.
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The front door opened and a man walked in carrying a plastic tote bag from the IGA grocery store across the road.
He looked to be in his early 60s, medium height, stocky build, a gray ponytail, a full gray beard, round wire-rimmed glasses wearing a faded blue chamois shirt tucked into Carhartt work pants, leather hiking boots.
He looked like what he was, a guy who’d been a high school shop teacher for 30 years and had spent all of those 30 years also collecting things in his spare time because he couldn’t help himself.
His name was Martin Hodge. He was 62 years old, retired from teaching, and one of the most respected antique fishing lure collectors and appraisers in the Great Lakes region.
He was the current president of the Michigan chapter of the National Fishing Lure Collectors Club.
He had written articles for the club’s quarterly journal. He authenticated collections for auction houses, mostly Morphy Auctions in Pennsylvania, which handled major lure collections.
And he had been doing appraisal work in his retirement for the last 5 years.
He was in Alpena that day because he’d driven up from Traverse City for a lure show at the Knights of Columbus Hall that weekend and had stopped at Thunder Bay Pawn on a whim because he always checked pawn shops for lures.
He had found real treasures in pawn shops before. Most shops didn’t know what they had.
Martin set his IGA bag down. He saw the tackle box on the counter. He saw the lures inside.
He saw the pattern of arrangement, the careful compartments, the deliberate groupings, and he stopped walking.
“Excuse me,” he said to Pauline. “I don’t mean to intrude. Do you mind if I take a look at those?”
“Please,” Pauline said. Martin came to the counter. He set his bag on the floor.
He took out a pair of reading glasses, a second pair over the ones he was already wearing, and put them on.
He looked at the tackle box. He didn’t touch anything yet. He just looked. Then he picked up a lure from the top compartment carefully by the body, not by the hook.
It was a wooden lure about 3 in long, painted in a pattern of green and white with small black dots, with glass eyes and three treble hooks.
He turned it over. He went very still. He looked at the belly of the lure, then at the cup, the small metal hook attachment on the belly, then at the eyes.
>> [snorts] >> He turned it over again and studied the head. He tilted it to catch the light from different angles.
He set it back down in the compartment. He didn’t say anything yet. He picked up another lure and another and another.
“Ma’am,” he said after a few minutes, “whose collection is this?” “My husband’s,” Pauline said.
“Ed Whitmore. He collected lures for almost 50 years. He passed a couple years ago.”
“Ed Whitmore from Alpena?” “Yes.” Martin took off the reading glasses he’d put over his other glasses.
“Ed Whitmore was a member of the NFLCC for 38 years. I knew his name.
I never met him. He mostly kept to himself, but he was on the membership list and his name came up at shows sometimes because he was known for being particular about authentication.
He refused to buy anything that wasn’t documented. He only bought from collectors whose reputations he trusted.”
“That sounds like Ed,” Pauline said. Martin turned to Jesse. “What did you offer her for this?”
“50 bucks,” Jesse said. Martin didn’t answer that. He turned back to Pauline. “mrs. Whitmore, I’m going to need to go through this whole box carefully.
But based on what I’m seeing in the top compartment alone, I can already tell you that your husband’s collection contains some exceptional pieces.
This first compartment alone, I’m looking at an early Heddon Dowagiac perfect casting minnow, an early Heddon expert, and what appears to be a very rare frog spot pattern Pflueger Monarch.
These are not yard sale lures. These are serious collector lures.” He took a deep breath.
“And one of them, the frog spot Pflueger, if it’s what I think it is, is one of the rarest production lures in American fishing history.”
Jesse’s mouth opened slightly. Pauline’s hand went to her chest. Martin spent the next 40 minutes going through the tackle box compartment by compartment.
He moved slowly, deliberately. He took out each lure. He examined it. He made small notes in a notebook he’d pulled from his back pocket.
He asked Pauline a few questions about where Ed had bought certain pieces. Pauline remembered the stories.
Ed had told her most of them at least once. When Martin finished, he set the last lure back in its compartment and closed the tackle box gently.
He took off his reading glasses. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
“mrs. Whitmore, I need to tell you what you have here. This is one of the most significant private collections of antique American wooden fishing lures I have examined in my career.
There are 412 lures in this box. Most of them are solid mid-range collector pieces, valuable, but not extraordinary.
A few of them are genuinely rare, and one of them, he reached back into the box and lifted out the frog spot Pflueger.
He held it carefully in his palm. “This one is extraordinary.” He took a breath.
“This is a Pflueger Monarch minnow in the frog spot pattern. The Monarch was produced by the Pflueger Company in Akron, Ohio, between approximately 1905 and 1915.
The frog spot pattern, this dark green with distinct yellow white spots, was a limited color variation that was only offered for approximately 2 years, and the production numbers were extremely small.
Most of the frog spot Monarchs that existed were fished hard and either lost in lakes or destroyed through use.
The number of surviving examples in good condition is estimated at fewer than 30 worldwide.
There may be fewer.” He pointed to the details. “Look at this lure. The glass eyes are intact and original.
The paint is exceptional. The spots are still clearly defined. The base green is still true.
The cups and hooks are original, not replacements. The body shows no fracturing or major wear.
Your husband clearly understood what he had because he never fished it. He preserved it.”
“Ed never fished his collection,” Pauline said. “He fished with cheap plastic lures from the bait shop.
He said the old ones were historical artifacts, not fishing tackle.” Martin closed his eyes briefly.
When he opened them, he looked at Pauline with something like gratitude. “Your husband was the exact kind of collector this hobby needs.
mrs. Whitmore, a frog spot Pflueger Monarch minnow in this condition, with this quality of paint preservation and original components, at a specialized auction, Lang’s Auction, which handles major lure collections, or Morphy Auctions, would sell for between $30,000 and $40,000.
He paused. $34,000 is a reasonable midpoint estimate for one lure. $34,000 for one lure.
Jesse made a small sound. Pauline didn’t make any sound at all. “And there’s more.”
Martin said. “The rest of the collection, particularly the early Heddon’s, the Creek Chubbs, the Shakespeare Revolutions, and a couple of the pre-1920 South Bends, those are also valuable pieces.
I would need to do a full written appraisal, but my initial estimate for the complete collection, including the Frog Spot Monarch, is approximately $170,000 to $220,000.”
Pauline sat down on a stool that Jesse had somehow found and pushed toward her without her noticing.
“One lure is worth $34,000.” She said slowly. “That one is.” Martin said. “But the whole collection together is worth considerably more than just the sum of its parts.
A well-documented, well-organized collection from a serious, long-term collector is more valuable to the market than the same lures sold individually.”
Pauline looked at the tackle box. She thought about Ed sitting at the kitchen table with a soft toothbrush cleaning a lure under the ceiling light.
She thought about the paper bags he’d bring home from flea markets. She thought about the long conversations he’d had on the phone with other collectors, conversations Pauline had half-listened to from the kitchen while making dinner, never understanding what any of it meant.
All of it had meant this. “Ed would have Pauline started to say. She didn’t finish the sentence.
She didn’t need to. Martin handed her his business card. “I’d like to help you place this collection properly, not as a pawn shop purchase.
That would be a tragedy. Through Lang’s or Morphy’s, with the full provenance of Ed Whitmore, NFLCC member, 38 years of documented collecting, the collector community will pay premium prices for a collection assembled by someone with a reputation for authentication.
Your husband had that reputation.” Jesse cleared his throat. “Ma’am, I’m really sorry. I had no idea.
I shouldn’t have said I was just Pauline looked at him. She wasn’t an angry woman.
She was a school secretary’s wife and a fisheries biologist’s wife, and she had spent her whole life being kind to young people who didn’t know any better.
“Honey.” She said. “My husband spent 50 years building that collection, and you called it junk in a garage sale box.”
Jesse nodded. He didn’t say anything else. Pauline closed the tackle box. She picked it up with both hands the way Ed used to pick it up.
She nodded to Martin. She walked out to the Subaru and drove home. Let me tell you what happened.
Pauline called Martin Hodge the following morning. Martin drove from Traverse City to Alpena that weekend and spent an entire Saturday at the kitchen table on Oxbow Drive examining the collection, photographing every lure, and building the written appraisal.
He also dug through Ed’s files and found what Pauline didn’t know was there. Ed had kept detailed purchase records.
Every lure was documented, where Ed bought it, when, from whom, and what he paid.
The Frog Spot Pflueger Monarch had been purchased in 1984 at an estate sale in Sandusky, Ohio for $22.
Ed had written a note next to the entry, “Maybe the find of my life.”
It was. Martin consigned the collection to Lang’s auction in Waterville, New York, the premier auction house for antique fishing lures.
The collection was cataloged as the Edward Whitmore Collection, a lifetime of Great Lakes lure collecting.
The catalog was 56 pages long. It included photographs of every lure, Ed’s purchase records, a photograph of Ed fishing at Hubbard Lake in 1975, and a two-page essay Martin wrote about Ed’s reputation in the NFLCC community.
The auction was held in the spring. Bidders came from across North America. The Frog Spot Pflueger Monarch opened at $18,000 and sold for $36,500 to a private collector in Ohio.
The rest of the collection sold lot by lot, some lots going for more than expected, others for less, but the majority exceeding their pre-sale estimates.
The total sale, after Lang’s commission, brought Pauline $196,300. She sat in her kitchen and looked at the deposit confirmation from her credit union and cried the only way she’d cried since Ed died, quietly, briefly, and then she went back to making herself lunch.
The driveway was replaced the following month, full replacement done right, $7,800. She had the roof inspected and reshingled the sections that needed it, $4,200.
She had the furnace replaced. She’d been nursing the old one along with a repairman named Dale who’d been coming to her house since 1998, $5,400.
She put $40,000 into a savings account she hadn’t touched in years. She set up $25,000 college trust funds for each of her four grandchildren.
She sent Kathy $10,000 and Beth $10,000 with a note that said, “From your father.
He was saving it in a tackle box and didn’t know.” She called both girls to tell them the story.
They came home the next weekend, the first time they’d both been home together since Ed’s funeral.
Pauline made the pot roast Ed used to love. They sat around the kitchen table, and Pauline told them about the Frog Spot Pflueger Monarch and the estate sale in Sandusky in 1984, and the $22 Ed had paid for it, and the note he’d written, “Maybe the find of my life.”
The girls cried. Pauline didn’t, because she’d already done her crying. The tackle box is empty now.
Pauline keeps it on the dresser in the bedroom where Ed used to set it down when he came home from a lure show.
She doesn’t open it anymore. There’s nothing to open it for. But sometimes on summer evenings, she sits on the back porch and looks at the creek Ed taught the girls to fish in, and she thinks about a man who walked into a bait shop on Hubbard Lake in 1972 and bought a wooden fish for $10 because he liked the way it looked.
That’s where it started. One lure. A quiet man. A bait shop owner named Mel who knew the answer to a question Ed hadn’t quite asked yet.
And a kid in a pawn shop 50 years later offered 50 bucks for the whole box.
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