By JOHN EBY
Dowagiac Daily News

Fourteen Model A Fords from the Great Country club ate lunch at Wood Fire Saturday after enjoying a tour of Mayor Don and Joan Lyons’ National Heddon Museum, opened in May 1996.

Between 1902 and 1984 Heddon’s made approximately 410 different catalog lures. They lack but four.

The Dowagiac detour came as part of a scenic circuit that carried the caravan from Lawton through Decatur to the Little House on the Prairie and Penn in the center of Cass County before returning to the Van Buren County community.

As they clambered out of their Model A’s — top speed 35 mph — car owners gathered around the mayor’s bright yellow Lamborghini — or sat inside to pose for photos.
Lyons’ car collection, which grew with 25 years of restoring Indianapolis race cars, was diminished with their sale last summer.

The Heddon museum occupies part of the James Heddon’s Sons fishing tackle company’s old home on West Street until July 1984, when it moved to Fort Smith, Ark.
They admired Lyons’ restored 1925 Dodge panel truck on a car chassis with Heddon graphics.

Also remaining is the 1932 seven-passenger Packard sedan that was the last vehicle Don remade with his late father, Dale. He was just 14 when they started restoring vehicles together. His current project is a 1910 Stoddard-Dayton touring car.

Standing before the wall-sized Heddon family tree which Joan dubs her “cast of characters,” she gives car collectors a rundown on the family that founded the Daily News in addition to introducing modern fishing lures.

Heddons first came to New York around 1832. James was born in 1845. Sometime around 1855 to 1860, the family came to Dowagiac.

In 1869, James followed in his father’s footsteps and became a professional beekeeper, or apiarist.

“He started putting out a mail-order catalog for ordering bee-keeping supplies until about 1889,” Joan said. “In 1885, he wrote his own book on beekeeping. He patented his very own style of hive, which is pretty much what they use today.”

Heddon was a diminutive man, but a “live wire,” Joan said. “One of the bee-keeping journals of the time described him as having a 20-horsepower personality in a 10-horsepower body.”

In each of those magazines there either appeared an article by Heddon or his rebuttal to an article by another.

In 1887, he purchased the Dowagiac Times, a weekly newspaper.

“Now he could really write about what he wanted,” she said. “He also started something called the Beekeeper’s Quarterly, from about 1894 to about 1897. He had a beekeeping school where people came from all over the country.”

Heddon gave up that pursuit because he developed an allergy to bees. but he had been “one of the largest honey producers in the country. We have newspaper articles that say in the 1890s he sent approximately 10,000 pounds of honey” as far as Cincinnati and Detroit.

The museum displays Heddon’s four-pound and two-pound honey jars.

In 1902, James patented his first lure and went into business with his eldest son, Will, “your consummate outdoorsman,” Mrs. Lyons said. “All Will really wanted to do was to be outside,” although he worked for the first electric company and started the first telephone company in Dowagiac.

“One of the things Will liked to do in the 1890s was go up in a hot air balloon, grab his parachute and jump out,” Joan related. “As far as we know, he only broke his leg once because papa wrote about it in the newspaper.”

Will Heddon and his first wife divorced, but his second wife, Laura, shared his passion for hunting and fishing.

Will sold his phone company in 1900.

Two years later, he put in $1,000 with his father to start the James Heddon and Son fishing tackle company.

In 1903, Will concluded Michigan is too cold and moved to Florida. James also wintered in the South.

James’ second son, Charles, then 20, started the Daily News on Feb. 6, 1897.

“He put out a daily paper, his father put out a weekly paper. They used the same presses, the same offices. We have letters showing Charles was working for the fishing tackle company. In 1903, Will and James are in Florida, so who’s up here running James’ newspaper and Will’s and James’ fishing tackle company but Charles. He’s heavily involved. We know in 1904 he’s doing so much work he tries to get his name over the door, but his brother won’t let him because he still doesn’t have enough money to put in to match his $1,000 because all of Charles’ money is in his newspaper business.”
That, Joan said, “created a bit of a rift between the brothers that never really healed. They were never really close. In 1908, the Heddon company built a new three-story factory about where your cars are right now” along W. Telegraph Street. “The name was changed to James Heddon and Sons and they started producing rods as well as lures. They weren’t into reels yet.”

James died in 1911, so Charles ran the fishing tackle company. Charles bought controlling interest in the 1920s so he didn’t have to run every decision through Florida.
“You had your truly Type A (Charles) and Type C (Will) personalities,” Mrs. Lyons said. “Charles has a son, John (1899-1981), who, even though he is closest to us in era, we know the least about. We don’t find him going to high school in Dowagiac. I found him by a fluke going to a special academy in Niles. Then I find him in the ’20s in California in a Lincoln dealership. Charles liked warm weather, too, but because Florida was taken, he picked California for his place to vacation. We find John in the 1935 census back in Dowagiac, living with his father, so he’s here when his father (Charles) unexpectedly dies in 1941. John inherits the business, runs it, gets it through the war years. In 1951, he gets an offer he can’t refuse and sells the business to the Murchison brothers out of Texas” — yes, the same family which owned the Dallas Cowboys NFL team.

John Heddon remains on the board, but “quickly” moves to California, Mrs. Lyons said.
“The Murchison brothers buy the Daisy BB gun company, which is also a family-owned Michigan business. They merge the two and it becomes Daisy-Heddon. He puts Daisy in charge of management. Daisy doesn’t want to sell lures, they want to sell guns. We’ve heard so many stories from old employees how frustrated they were going on sales calls with the Daisy people, who were brusque and not into fishing. A lot of the management left at that time. The Murchison brothers had a huge conglomerate of businesses. Heddon’s was with them for about 10 years and they sold to an adding machine company. That was what we call the era of business diversification. People were afraid of a downturn and wanted a fallback of little satellite companies that were like second cousins. They got hand-me-downs and not much allowance. The main mother company got all the smart business people. This happened to Heddon through three different owners.

“Finally, in 1979, the Dowagiac management team was able to raise enough money to buy Heddon back into Dowagiac — right about the time the Japanese came in and flooded the market with inexpensive lures. Between poor management over the years losing some of their market sales, they and others in the business were not able to make a go. Heddon’s was purchased by PRADCO, an acronym for Plastic Research and Development Corp., which was owned by another company. They bought a bunch of the little fishing tackle companies like Rebel.”

The plant in the residential neighborhood which grew up around it received little maintenance through the latter years of its life. PRADCO gave it to the city.
Don passed it every day driving to work.

“He was very concerned it would have to be torn down as a health hazard,” she said of her husband. “The pipes had burst, the roof was leaking, bricks were falling out. We as a family needed more room for our manufacturing business outside of town, so we bought the building in 1991, restored it and tore down the ugly out buildings that were falling down. We put in a new truck dock because (Lyons Industries) needed warehouse space. We knew at some point in time Don would need a place to store his cars, which had been at his father’s house.”

In 1994, family friend Stan Hamper approached the couple about preserving pieces of Heddon history owned by longtime vice president Trygve “Trig” Lund, then 83.
Hamper, who founded The Museum at Southwestern Michigan College, donated his time to create the National Heddon Museum in a 750-square-foot corner of the factory if Lyons landed Lund’s collection.

“We talked about it and looked at each other,” she said. “We live in an old house, Don restores old cars, we both grew up fishing, we both like history, we own the factory. Why not?”

What they bought to get started represents but 5 percent of the collection.

They quickly learned “you don’t show things in drawers and boxes, they have to be spread out. It took us a year to negotiate because (Lund) wanted to get rid of it, but he couldn’t let it go. We got it one box at a time.”

Given the volume of lure collectors which contacted the museum, they joined a national fishing lure collectors club. For $2, they could get a black-and-white copy of any catalog it had.

“We literally tore the wall out, tore the displays apart and started over,” Mrs. Lyons said. “Along that wall is one of every catalog lure Heddon ever made with the date it started and the date it stopped. When we started, we didn’t have a lot of the lures, so we took a color copy, put it up with contact cement until we found the lure. Then we’d take the picture out and we’d stick the lure in.

“Between 1902 and 1984 they made approximately 410 different catalog lures. We say approximately because Don and I had quite a bit of conversation about a lure that stopped one year and started 10 years later. Is that a new lure or an old lure? We never did come to an agreement. As of this point, of that 410, we are missing four.

“Heddon was an extremely early user of plastic. Turns out it was unstable. If you see some that make you wonder why one so ratty is in a museum, that’s all there is. They melt before your eyes. Two with very short runs, we’ve never seen one. We don’t actually know of anybody that’s got one. One we’re missing is a lead-headed jig. Everybody made them and it’s too small to put your name on and they were sold in little plastic bags” which anglers immediately discarded after dumping them in their tackle boxes.

“There’s no way to know a Heddon jig from anybody else’s,” Joan said. “We have two of the four from a policeman who swore on a stack of Bibles that they’re Heddon’s. The fourth lure we’re missing was made in 1980. There was an artist’s rendering in the catalog. We found an inter-office newspaper from September 1979, well after the catalog came out in August, that said they had not yet finished making it. We don’t think they liked it because we’ve never seen one, although we found the prototype. They never produced them.

“Reels are also in chronological order. We did not do that with rods because they made too darn many and there’s not as much interest in rods as there is in lures and reels. We’re redoing the rod displays.”

Dangling overhead are box kites like Heddon’s made for the World War II effort.
Their metal extrusion process for rods and golf clubs was pressed into service for antennas.

A kit assembles into an antenna 25 feet long, but Heddon’s only made one piece.
Another, at an angle with a broomstick on the end, Don found in an antique shop. Lund explained that at the end of the war the company put three-foot sections together with the broom handles and gave away the government surplus to kids as fishing poles.
Mrs. Lyons also told the car club about the Heddon Aviation Co. and its famous flying fish planes.

Charles and John loved aviation.

“We believe it is the first company ever started to deliver your own product by air with your own plane,” she said. “There is one (of the Canadian planes) known in the U.S. at the Henry Ford Museum” in Dearborn.