The first time I met Bobby Dennis, he told me that plastic worms the color of a Dreamsicle ice cream were what I needed to catch bass. It was 1974, and we were fishing Lake Ouachita in Arkansas. Back then, much of the lake’s shoreline was wrapped in gnarly stands of crooked brush, and bass fanned and tended their nests around the flooded shrubbery. The water was a milky green, which somehow made the orange color that Dennis had recommended irresistible to the fish. In the days before people called it “pitching,” we lobbed underhand casts with lightly weighted Texas rigs up under the brush canopies and caught lots of bass.
Dennis knew how to pick bass lures then, and no doubt he still does. Next spring, the Arkansas native will partner with Missouri-based Luck “E” Strike to market a new line of lures called American Originals. Eventually the series will consist of about a dozen variations of hard-plastic lures that will sell for around $5 each.
Don’t expect the new lures to be radical in design or action. Dennis isn’t going for anything out of the box. Rather, he wants to instill some value back into a segment of the fishing industry that has gone bonkers in recent years with high-dollar lures.
“There’s no reason why good fishing lures have to cost as much as they do,” says Dennis. “I think that there’s a market for lures that catch bass but don’t cost a fisherman an arm and a leg, and we’re going to return to that thinking with American-made lures.”
Dennis has done it before. He worked for Cotton Cordell from 1972 to 1980 as an idea guy and marketing staffer. After the company was purchased by current owner PRADCO, Dennis spent the next 10 years working with some of the best lure designers in the business. He switched over to Bill Norman Lures in 1990, and stayed there for another seven years before retiring. It was Dennis’ idea to jazz up the venerable DD22 with a “Professional Edge” series. These featured Gamakatsu treble hooks and a gel-coat finish for tournament anglers and others who were willing to pay the “exorbitant” price of $4.99 for a lure whose plain-Jane version sold for $2.99.
Dennis isn’t revealing a lot of details about the American Originals series yet, but says the lures will be conspicuous by retro finishes that hearken back to the days when certain colors worked tournament magic. For whatever reason, manufacturers phased out many popular colors, but Dennis has polled a number of pros to see what finishes they would like to have back in their tackle boxes.
“Not to give too much away, but some of the colors we’ve already got in the pipeline are khaki green back with orange belly, copper, and chartreuse with silver ribs and silver back,” notes Dennis. “Some of the models will have glass-bead rattles, some won’t. The point we’re going to prove is that some of the classic colors and designs will still produce strikes, and you don’t have to pay $15 or $20 for a lure that will catch bass.”
Hey, after watching Dennis whack `em and stack `em on Lake Ouachita with that orange worm years ago, far be it from me to doubt him now.