It was pure coincidence that the same morning I read Terry Battisti’s article, “Creme Jawbreaker 1979,” I also happened to run across an old Creme Du-Dad hard bait surface lure. So I thought “What the heck!” and felt compelled to piggyback on Terry’s story. The Jawbreaker article talks about Creme veering from their soft plastic production and jumping on the spinnerbait bandwagon. They were justifiably hoping to capitalize on the hot lure of the late 1970s. Well, it looks like they did much the same thing a decade before. The Du-Dad lure I found before reading Terry’s article caught my attention because of its clear allusions to the Arbogast Jitterbug. In “Creme Jitterbug Look-Alike 1964” we’ll take a gander at the Du-Dad and one or two other Creme lures that fit the same mold.
I ended up going down several rabbit holes looking for other non-plastic Creme lures and old ads. I didn’t find a lot, but I found enough to make me even more curious. The Creme Du-Dad clearly pays homage to the Arbogast Jitterbug, with its body shape and Jitterbug-style lip. In 1964 it came in 5/8- and 1/4-ounce sizes and 8 colors. A single upturned hook sits at the tail end and it is dressed with a rubber skirt. A thin double wire weedguard protrudes from the front lip to straddle either side of the hook. I assume the Du-Dad acted very much like a Jitterbug in the water. The description is also interesting in that it says that the skirt is scented. Scented with what, I wonder.
I did also find an ad for the Du-Dad from the previous year, 1963. In this ad the double wire weedguard was reduced to a single, slightly wider metal strip that covered the hook point much like the weedguard on a Johnson’s Silver Minnow. Also, that ad indicated that the lure came in 5/8- and 1/8-ounce sizes, but I’m assuming the 1/8 was a misprint and was meant to be 1/4.
The second Jitterbug-style lure I found was an elongated, musky-size (?) bait called the Mad-Dad. This lure is nearly 4-inches long (about an inch longer than the Du-Dad) and also came in 5/8- and 1/4-ounce sizes. Looking at several versions of the Mad-Dad I noticed some variations in the lip. Most appeared to have a slightly more angular lip than the Jitterbug lip, but a couple I noticed had a lip that was practically an oval piece of metal. Which brings me to the Creme Lolly Pop. The Lolly Pop was built much like the Du-Dad but was more angular, almost like a small rectangle. It had the same indented eye grooves as the Mad-Dad and the same double wire weedguard as the Du-Dad. But the Lolly Pop was more of a popper-type lure, not a walker like the Du-Dad or Mad-Dad. Its lip was a simple oval, connected at a 90-degree angle to the lure body, whereas the lips on the Du-Dad and Mad-Dad were connected at an angle, like a Jitterbug, to facilitate walking the baits with a side-to-side, gurgling motion.
These three lures were obviously Creme’s attempt to cash in on the efficacy of topwater bass fishing, with noisy, agitated surface lures. That’s something they could not achieve with their soft plastic worms. Interestingly, once they discontinued these topwater hard baits, Creme kept the Mad-Dad name and currently uses it on a flexible minnow lure. They call it the Mad-Dad Minnow, and it runs like a lipless crankbait, but is made of a flexible plastic material. Creme also currently has a number of other hard baits in their catalog, but they all have boring, generic-sounding names like Small Crankbait, Lipless Crankbait and Diving Minnow.
As the ad above says in its header, “Dig this!” Well dig I did and as usually happens when you start digging, you come up with more questions than you did at the beginning. What was the decision-making process that went into producing the Du-Dad, Mad-Dad and Lolly Pop? Who came up with the names and why? Why the lip variations on the Mad-Dad and the weedguard evolution on the Du-Dad? How long were these lures produced? Did they run into any issues with Arbogast? How well did these lures sell during their tenure? What became of the production molds? Lots of questions…
