In 1936, Lauri Rapala fashioned a fishing lure out of cork, tinfoil and photo negatives. Years later, he named it for himself.
This month, Rapala No. 150 million will be tank tested and hand tuned at the Rapala plant in Finland."I'd say 120 million of those were sold in the United States," said Ron Weber, president of Normark Corp. of Minneapolis, which imports the lures. Most lure companies keep their sales figures secret, but Weber and industry observers said that would make it one of the top-selling hard-bodied lures.
Rapalas are a mainstay of many recreational anglers. But Lauri Rapala designed them to feed his family.
He wanted to make a lure that imitated the erratic swimming action of an injured minnow, easy prey for big gamefish.
Rapala (pronounced RAP'-a-luh) is Finnish for mud.
The first Rapala lure, which still exists, is black on top, gold along the flanks and white on the bottom, just like the minnows of Lake Paijanne, where Rapala fished.
Rapala trolled that first lure on line tied to his thumb. As he made more, he would troll several at a time. His sons say he caught up to 600 pounds of fish a day. What the family didn't eat was sold at a stall in the market at Lahti.
As the thunder of World War II crashed over Europe, Rapala served six years in the Finnish army. Word of his lure spread among the troops.
After the war, anglers lined up to buy it. Soon, more than 25 people were whittling lures for him.
The first mechanization was an old spinning wheel, which was wrapped in sandpaper and used to smooth and polish the lures.
Despite increases in production, Rapala insisted every lure be hand-tested. In the summer they were tested in a lake, in the winter in a shed. Tests are done today in indoor tanks at the company's factory in Vaasky.
The lures initially were known as "wobblers," or just as "Lauri's lures."
American visitors discovered the lure during the 1952 Olympics, and a few vendors began to import them.
Weber, a fishing tackle sales representative, bought a Rapala from the Finnish consul in Duluth, Minn., in 1959. He ordered 500 more from the factory and, with Ray Ostrom, founded Normark Corp. to distribute them in the upper Midwest.
Three years later, Life magazine did a story on Rapala and his lure.
"We went national overnight," said Weber. "We were forced into national distribution without enough product."
Other companies jumped in to meet the demand.
"Our inability to deliver created some of the largest lure companies in the country," Weber said.
Lauri Rapala died in 1974. Today, his lure comes in a huge variety of colors and forms, including a diver, a jointed model and a jig to fish straight down in deep water, but they still mimic an injured minnow and are hand-tested, the way Rapala wanted it.