The search for the Luny Frog

You are welcome to share this post with your personal and professional networks, and I invite you to subscribe to this blog.

 As a kid I had a frog lure that I inherited from my grandfather. I included a story about it in my newest book, You Shoulda Been Here Last Week (Cornerstone Press). It appears as an excerpt on the Midwest Conservation Substack (created by Beckie Gaskill and well worth visiting and subscribing). Here are the first few paragraphs of the story. Follow the link above to read on. I hope you enjoy it.

I don’t collect antique lures, but there is one I covet, in the same way I once did the old Eddie Matthews and Hank Aaron baseball cards now framed on my office wall. I had those cards in fresh-from-the-package, bubble-gum-scented condition when I was a kid. I had that lure, too, a frog imitation that I got from my grandfather, by way of my dad. I barely knew my granddads. Mom’s father died well before I was born. My dad’s father passed when I was about four; my only memory is of a mostly bald, white-haired gentleman, wearing gold-rimmed glasses, seated in a rocker in his living room. I recall being surprised that day when my father called him Dad, and at how deferential and timid he was in the old man’s presence.

After Grandpa died, it might have been a few years after, my dad gave me his old hinged-top wooden tacklebox. I’m not sure why Dad didn’t give it to my older brother or keep it for himself. Grandpa was a carpenter; he probably built that box. In those days, the late 1950s, there were no Gander Mountain or Cabela’s stores with whole walls of plastic tackle boxes of every size and description. The box, pleasantly scented of dust and pine, held assorted hooks, sinkers and bobbers, and several lures, arranged in compartments. One lure was a red-and-white wooden plug. The only other one I remember is the frog. That’s the one I loved and actually used on the water.

It was an odd-looking thing, recognizable as a frog mainly by the pattern of leopard spots painted on its deep-green back. It had black-on-yellow eyes on bumps atop the flattened head. The stubby hind legs hind legs were bowed like those of a cowboy frozen in mounted-on-Old-Paint position. There were no front legs at all. A large and menacing hook protruded from the frog’s hind end, its point aiming forward. Read on…