Joe Hinkle and His Traveling Lizard

The Kentucky Years

The Hinkle Lizard was created by Joseph Hinkle out of Louisville, Kentucky around 1949. He applied for a patent in 1949 and it was granted in 1952. The lure at the time was really unlike anything that fisherman had ever seen. The Hinkle Lizard is an early plastic jointed lizard fishing lure that was ahead of its time in design. It is double jointed and with an offset "outrigger" hook setup on one of the sets of hooks similar in design to a Helin Flatfish lure. Production of the Lizard began in 1949.

Word of mouth sales helped the Hinkle Lizard originally as Joe was known as a top local fisherman. In fact, I found Joe in one local newspaper article from 1951 which asked people to name the top three fishermen in the area. As you can see in the clipping Joe B. Hinkle came up first in one of the lists. Formal advertising was kept to a minimum, but I was able to find a 1954 ad showing the “New…Different Hinkle Lizard Lure”. As you can see from the ad the available colors at the time were red, black, yellow, and green. The colors remained the same throughout the life of the lure. The lures came in a yellow two-piece cardboard box and were priced at $1.00 each.

A Green Lizard with box.

A Yellow Lizard with box.

The Wisconsin Years

Sometime around 1954 a couple of lure makers in Wisconsin, Elmer Deuster and August "Augie" Machtig purchased the rights and all remaining stock of the Hinkle Lizard. Deuster and Machtig were more “famous” for their own “critter” fishing lure, The Gopher lure, a musky lure designed to look like a struggling gopher. The addition of a Lizard to the lure lineup must have seemed like a natural expansion.

They purchased the remaining stock and molds from Hinkle. Wisconsin distribution of this bait mainly focused on assembling the several thousand bait bodies they purchased and distributing in the same yellow boxes but now with a Milwaukee address imprinted on the side. Note this address was the bowling alley that Deuster ran, Deuster's Lanes, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Once they ran out of the original yellow boxes, they began to assemble them in bags with a cardboard topping and a Sheboygan address. Red, a rarer color in a marked box, is now much more common to find in this bagged version. In an attempt to later rebrand the lure, the bagged lizard was eventually renamed and marketed as Sally the Hooker Salamander lure and marketed under D-M Lures (Deuster-Machtig Lures).

Sales never really took off though and they experimented with different ideas with the excess inventory. They tried to turn the Lizard into a diving bait. To do this they included a collar around the neck joint and a diving lip. These are additions / improvements obviously made to try to improve the action and fishability of the lure. These two changes take what was once a surface lure and allow it to dive while holding the first two sections together.

Case of Hinkle Lizards including Special Colors

The Florida “Snow-Bird” Version

Even after the sale to Deuster-Machtig, Joe Hinkle was still somewhat involved. Hinkle was apparently a "snow-bird" and wintered in Florida. He had an agreement to keep selling some of the Lizards even after the sale as there are marketing pieces and Lizards with a Florida address and "picture" box. It is essentially a piece of their marketing material cut out and glued onto the yellow box. These are the rarest of the Hinkle Lizard boxes to find by far. I can also confirm that these were found mixed in with Deuster-Machtig inventory after they shut down so there must have been some Hinkle / Deuster-Machtig collaboration.

Three versions of boxes.

Eventually Deuster and Machtig would shut down their business in the early 1960's. In the late 1990’s the Gopher Bait Company was started anew and began producing the Gopher musky lure again, but the Lizard has been left to the history books.

I had the fortune to meet with a son of a good friend of the original owners who shared with me some of the last remaining inventory when the Lizard production was shut down in Sheboygan. They had experimented with different colors including some marbleized colors. These never saw commercialized production but as you can see from the photo, they are beautiful examples of Hinkle’s original lures. Standard colors of Hinkle Lizards in their original boxes sell today in excellent condition for $150-250 each. I think Joe would be proud of what became of his Lizards all these years later.