Today’s historical news photo is actually an ad, though it features a picture of our primary subject, Bill Plummer. The ad dates back to July 1961 and was featured in the Boston Globe. It was for a seminar being given by Bill, then labeled as a “Nationally famous black bass fisherman.”
Of course, Bill was famous for the lure he created a few years prior, the Bill Plummer SuperFrog. The idea came about in 1957, and a couple years later, Harrison-Hoge Industries offered to manufacture the frog, along with any other lure ideas Bill could come up with in exchange for a weekly commission check. With a little advertising, frog sales boomed, and so did Bill’s commission checks. It wasn’t long before he retired from his job as a flight instructor, now being a millionaire.
He would go on to fish 5 to 7 days a week for the next 40 years, catching thousands upon thousands of bass from the local lakes and ponds in the Northeast. He kept things simple, using the frog and two other baits he later developed, the Banshee (spinnerbait) and the Water Demon (bottom bumper), along with a jig and pork eel, probably his favorite, or at least most productive, bait.
He detested tournaments, fished out of a small wooden boat he built himself and was able to cartop around, and was an early proponent of catch and release. He was inducted into the National Freshwater Hall of Fame as a legendary angler in 2006 and passed away a year later in March 2007 at the age of 85.
