IN MEMORY OF: THE FORMER EARL SMITH COLLECTION.
Earl Smith was a member of the NFLCC. In 2001 he passed away. I never knew Earl but I met his wife and arranged for the purchase of his entire collection. I purchased the collection on 12/01/01. Earl had collected for over 20 years and as you can imagine had amassed quite a large array of antique lures, reels and literature. As I've gone through some of this collection I wish I would have gotten the chance to meet him. His collection was absolutely huge, numbering around 800-1100 lures, 100+ reels and lots of miscellaneous catalogs, notes and so on. One of the more interesting pieces were the lures he bought in London an Paris in 1943 and 1944 while serving in WWII. From his meticulous notes of each lure it is obvious that he was a very knowledgable collector. Unfortunately I will not be able to keep his entire collection intact. I will keep a very substantial piece of it though as it is added to my collection. I wanted to create this page so that his collection could be viewed in it's entirity and to show some of his various newspaper clippings, etc of his collection. This is dedicated to Earl with a special thanks to Luella for allowing me to be the next care taker of his collection.
Here is a picture of Earl displaying some of his collection at the local library in 1989.
Here is another photo of some of his lures on display.
Here are two articles written in local papers about Earl and his collection.
Here are some of the reels.
In the future I will be adding more pictures of some of the many baits from Earl Smith. If you have any questions please email me here.