Frank Worden and Jacob Kuntz — the bait company

Worden's lures from the 1890s · the South Bend Bait Company from January 1909

The founding act: Frank G. Worden made bucktail fly lures at home in South Bend in the 1890s, on several accounts, and appears in the city directory for the first time as proprietor of the Worden Bait Company in 1901. The National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame credits Worden with putting propellers fore and aft on wooden lures, an innovation other makers adopted in 1907. Financed by J. Willard Shidler of Shidler Brothers Hardware, his Worden Bucktail Manufacturing Company was working by 1905 on the second floor of the hardware store at 131 South Michigan Street.

The buyer, and a conflict in the record: The Businesses section's account names Jacob Kuntz as the buyer who renamed the company the South Bend Bait Company in January 1909; The History Museum's compiled history names Hennings, who bought out the owners in 1915. The two accounts stand unreconciled in this record — the Inventors section prints the museum's name with the variance stated — and the company's decisive act follows under either: in 1916 the company acquired the rights to James Olds of Benton Harbor's patent for the lure that became the Bass-Oreno, the most popular lure it ever made. The plant settled at 1108 South High Street, in a building first raised for a wagon company, employed about 50 people — most of them women — and kept some 25,000 deer tails on hand for the bucktail line. Through the interwar decades the South Bend name on a lure box was one of the five or so great names of the American tackle trade; the making on High Street ended in the 1960s.

Sources:

1. Businesses — "South Bend Bait Company — the Bass-Oreno" (Worden's home production and the 1901 directory listing; the Hall of Fame propeller credit; the Shidler financing and the 1905 company; Kuntz's purchase and the January 1909 renaming; the 1916 Bass-Oreno rights; the High Street plant, the workforce and the deer tails; the 1960s end of the making).
2. Inventors & Inventions and EXPAND-INVENTORS-NOTE — the acquirer conflict: Businesses names Kuntz; The History Museum's compiled history names Hennings (1915), printed there with the variance stated.