It’s impossible to know who invented the frog lure. If one thinks about all the baits that have been designed over the years to imitate bass prey, the lowly frog is awful close to the top of the heap. Every tackle company over the course of time has played with a frog imitation and there are some companies that only produced lures that imitated a frog. In today’s post, Frog Baits from 1949, we’re going to look at two of these companies and their amphibious offerings.
Both of the ads you’re seeing here came out of the May 1949 issue of Sports Afield. The ads sizes were small, at 1.5-inch by 1.5-inch for the Halik ad and 1.5-inch by 3-inches for the Steel ad. Small ads with small font that have been blown up here to make them easier to read.
I did a search on both companies in the reference books I have an was only able to find the Halik Frog in one of my resources, Carl F. Luckey’s, Old Fishing Lures and Tackle No. 4. A search on the National Fishing Lure Collector’s Club (NFLCC) website proved futile. This led me to believe that these baits are rare and not much would be known about them.
The I let my fingers do the walking on the keyboard and did a Google search. Low-and-behold, I hit paydirt. So, let’s go a little deeper into these two frog imitations and see what we can find out.
Halik Frogs
Halik Frogs were the brainchild of Harold Peterson, Alvin Sach-Rowitz and Ike Boekenoogen of Moose Lake, Wisconsin. Taking the underlined letter(s) from each of their first names you get the name Halik.
The concept of the frog with articulating legs came about around 1946 and by the end of 1947 Halik was ready for production. Orders came in and in early 1948 they started shipping. Unfortunately, orders didn’t meet the expected demand and within five years, Halik quit selling the frogs.
From the ad shown at the start of this post, Halik made three sizes of their frog, a fly-rod size, and Senior and Junior sizes. The ad also states “They’re All Alive with Action!”
The frog was said to have lifelike action due to the articulating legs, they floated, and they were weedless.
Hooks were placed in the upright position in each leg, and a third hook was placed between the two legs, also in the upright position. The black and white ad left a lot to be desired, so a Google search for the Halik frog was in order.
Several links to auctions selling the frogs were found as was a link to Retired Lures. It was on this site I found all the information on the Halik Frog and Halik Company. Check the link out if you’d like to see some of the Halik Frog boxes and if you’d like to see the frog itself, do a search and I’m sure you’ll find several for sale.
Steel’s Wigglefrog Frog Baits from 1949
This was another frog lure I had problems locating in all my reference books. I fact, none of the more than dozen books I have made any reference to the bait. So again, Google came to my rescue.
Keith Bell’s Lure Lore site was one of the sites I found information pertaining to the Wigglefrog. The frog itself had a plastic diving lip and the bait itself was also made of soft plastic, most likely a heavy polyvinyl chloride plastic much like the hollow body frogs of today are made from.
The bait itself looks a lot like Halik’s frog, minus the diving lip and has two articulating legs with hooks.
Instead of a box, the bait came in a plastic tube with a screw top. Nice examples of this bait can also be seen on the Fin & Flame website.
An added bonus from the Steel’s Wigglefrog ad was another Steel ad featuring his Steel’s Fish Finder. This pocket-sized thermometer came with six fish-finding charts. Evidently you dropped the thermometer into the water, figured out the temperature and then consulted the charts for Frank’s tips on where to find fish and what to use. I wish it were that easy.
Frank Steel, at the time, had authored a couple books and touted himself as a “World’s Record” fisherman. His book, Bait Casting with a Thermometer was too hard to pass up so I order it and when I get it, I’ll write a review to let you know what it’s all about.
That does it for today’s post. I hope you enjoyed taking a look back into the long history of frog imitations, and two frogs that have been lost to time. If anyone out there has anymore information on these baits, please leave a comment below. It’s always great to add more to the story of our sport.
