HOT SPRINGS — Gather ’round. Cotton Cordell’s going to tell you about one that got away.
“Had a friend of mine, Glen Owens. He’d had some regular customers. Well, it was him and one of his old customers who was a real good customer, and he wanted to take him fishing one time. Said, ‘You meet me up at Brady Mountain at 6 o’clock this evening, and we’ll catch some fish.’”
Cordell knows something about that. His lures have caught millions of fish. The Hot Spot, Red Fin, Gay Blade, Crazy Shad, Near Nuthin - proven fish magnets that began with an idea in his head and scratched onto a scrap of paper or sometimes sculpted with the edge of a whittling knife.
He revolutionized the spinner bait, then popularized the crank bait. He opened manufacturing facilities in Hot Springs and El Salvador that employed hundreds in both locations. In the parlance of standardized testing, Cordell is to fishing what salt is to the kitchen.
“So they got in the boat, took off, and it’d just got dark. Then Glen said, ‘Here, hand me your rig there, and I’ll tie the lure on there, and now, you throw that back of the boat and we’ll troll across here to that big island over there and start casting those points.’ Well, they’d not gotten hardly nowhere and that old boy said, ‘I got one! I got one!’”
At 82, Cotton Cordell is still a handsome man. His Nordic blue gaze has softened a bit as his lids have grown sleepy. A sweep of cotton-white hair - source of his nickname - looks less like cotton these days than fresh web beheld by moonlight. His complexion is uniformly tan, as only a man who has spent a lifetime hovering between clear sky and shimmering lake water can get.
“Glen said, ‘Hold on to it! Hold on to it!’He put his flashlight over on the reel and, boy, that thing was pulling some line off. It headed straight at that island. ‘So I turned the boat around, put a little gas on the motor so we could keep up with it.’ It started on this pocket in the island, and he said, ‘Oh, I’ll get it here. There ain’t no where to go, and it’s good clear water, at least we can have a look at him.’ That thing run right up in that pocket and whenever he hit the bank he never stopped.”
Cordell hasn’t stopped either, but he has slowed. He rises every day at 3 a.m., not for work but for the Good Book. This inductee to the state sportsman’s Hall of Fame and the national Fresh Water Fishing and Bass Fishing halls of fame says his proudest day was more than 50 years ago, when his Baptist church elected him deacon. Imagine, 2,000 congregants who think you’re a good Christian. That humbles him.
All you need in life is faith, family and fishing is his motto. He let go of his fishing tackle business in two phases, first in 1980 when he sold the rights to his Cotton Cordell line to Ebsco Industries Inc. (owner of Plastic Research and Development Corp.). More recently, the family packed up the last vestiges of the manufacturing of fishing equipment at their small Buena Vista Road facility in Hot Springs. C’est la free trade.
More painfully, in 1998, he lost his wife, Erma.
Erma, whose hand he first held in third grade. Erma, who made all the other sun-dipped dandelions wither to spores. There was B.E., or life before Erma, and then there was A.E.
After Erma, fishing was the only good chase in town.
“Glen said, ‘By gol’ he run up on the bank.’ He said, ‘I run up over there, and I put my light on and looked up, and he was climbing the tree.’ And he said, ‘When I got up to the tree and tried to put my light onit,’ he said, ‘He flew off!’”
“I think he just pulled your leg,” his son, Mike, tells me.
“Now, Mike, you know I wouldn’t do that,” he says.
But he would, and he did. It came from there, behind that good Christian grin.
‘JUNIE’
Cotton Cordell was the only child of Carl and Alice (Barnes) Cordell of Benton. Two things happened in his early youth that carved a narrow path for him to meet his destiny. One happens to kids of all stripes, across all generations; the other never happened before and can’t happen again.
The first was his grandmother, Emma Kay Barnes. An old Lutheran who detested alcohol and didn’t favor tobacco, she was the reason Cordell never took up either habit, though fishing lends itself to both. She also heaped inordinate praise on her grandson’s fishing and hunting efforts.
When he’d present her with a stringer of perch he had persuaded to leave Depot Creek, “she’d ooh and ahh like I was a big hero, and before I could get away she’d have them out at the woodpile, cleaning them.
“She’d fry them up for dinner. She was a big ol’ fat gal. She was super.”
And she and Alice called him “Junie,” as would his future wife, Erma. But “Junie” didn’t sit well with Junior because he thought himself a big boy, so when the boys at school began calling him Cotton for his towheaded mane he took a shine to it, and it stuck.
The second was the damming of the Ouachita River. Cordell’s 1928 birth was sandwiched between completion of the Remmel Dam in 1924 that formed Lake Catherine, and Carpenter Dam, which followed in 1931 and produced Lake Hamilton. (A third, Blakely Mountain Dam, went up in 1953 and resulted in Lake Ouachita.)
Carl Cordell Sr. left his job at Alcoa in the mid-1940s and bought a bait shop on the first lake, and this was the son’s entry into the world of commercial outdoorsmanship - fishing for a living.
JIG
Cordell made money by catching white bass and selling them straightaway to residents and vacationers.
He also sold guided fishing tours, often to high-rollers, sometimes to visiting vice lords like Frank Costello and their attendant muscle. He bolstered business by making bold guarantees - if his clients didn’t land a 5-pound bass, their $25 fee would be returned. It worked.
When he was a boy, freshwater fishing poles were cut from the riverbank (canes); monofilament - “cat gut,” Cordell calls it - was too thick and stiff for freshwater fishing, so his father’s generation used finely braided nylon line instead. Reels were hard to come by - it took Carl Cordell Sr. months of saving to buy a Pflueger, “and then you’d have thought he owned the town,” his son recalls. Fish were caught on minnows and worms, notrubber and spoons.
The first lure he came across was a Bill Upperman jig festooned with whitetail deer fur. When it wasn’t snagging the bottom it was snagging largemouths, but when it was - snagging bottoms, that is - it was gone, and a replacement was $2 or $3 then. So Cordell began making his own jigs using a lead head, a handmade plaster mold, a trotline hook and hair from his English setter, Spark Plug.
From there he added a spinner - a silvery spoon or set of spoons that flutter in the water - to his jigs, and the spinnerbait was born. The ripple effects of this concept cannot be understated. For one thing, the“safety pin” spinnerbait Cordell made is to this day a mainstay of the most Spartan tackle box. For another, it’s a professional bass fisherman’s favorite.
It also showed the sportfishing world that lures didn’t have to look like fish food. They could, in fact, look like earrings. That is, fish will hit something that to our eyes doesn’t look like normal fish fare.
The spinnerbait launched Cotton Cordell Inc.
Cordell himself was just 24.
“Dog hair,” Cordell said years later, reflecting on Spark Plug, “will catch just as many fish as deer hair.”
FOLK WISDOM
In 1994 Folk-Life Books published Cotton Cordell’s Sportsman’s Quotes of Wisdom, a thin paperback of the fisherman’s sayings, many recorded by his wife.
“As long as you are a green banana you got a future. It’s when you turn yellow you get eat up,” and “Remember, God can do anything the Bible ever said he done ... AGAIN.”
Some are puckish: “Behind every successful man, there is a woman screamin’ ‘It won’t work! It won’t work!’”
Some read very much like considerations that Cordell has had to make in his career as a fishing guide. “‘Why can’t I keep a diary, and on the days I catch fish this year, go back next year, fish the same way, with the same lures, and catch the same fish?’ It’s easy, you already ate those fish that were biting that way last year, dummy.”
“He has a winsome little boyishness about him [but] is a serious thinker,” says Ben Elrod, chancellor of Ouachita Baptist University, “and is one of the absolutely best personsI have ever known.”
Cordell is an abiding Christian in every sense - reverent, faithful to his family, patriotic (served in the Air Force), charitable (made an endowment to Ouachita Baptist University), teetotaler. But the “country” runs deep in him, too, and it makes for a jocund mix of provincialism and candor that occasionally alarms his son.
When asked if he would be a different man had he grown up, say, in Michigan, the Great Lakes State, his response is quick.
“I think I’d of went out to that big ol’ tall bridge they got up there, and I think I’d of bailed off it when I was about 10 years old.”
“Pop!” Mike said.
“What’s another profession you might have succeeded at? Firefighter?”
“Nah. Anybody can put a fire out.”
“Be careful,” Mike says.
“And what’s one word to sum you up?”
“Moron.”
“No,” Mike says. “You’re not a moron.”
“As good a moron as anybody else.”
IT’S ALL ABOUT ALLURE
It may take a good moron to make a success of himself selling artificial bait to humans. Consider the cross-purposes of a lure manufacturer - he has to stimulate the senses of fish and his fellow man at the same time but for entirely different reasons, and be better at it than the next guy.
Cordell learned this lesson over a bunch of orders of Hot Spots, vanguard of the crankbait revolution and forerunner of the Rat-L-Trap. Many early shipments were returned.
Originally, it had a lead weight in the bow that kept its nose pointed down. If that ballast set snug in the nose as it should, customers shook it, heard no rattle, and set it back on the shelf. If, during shipping, the little ball had sprung free, customers heard the rattle and bought it.
“I shipped a bunch to a guy in Mississippi and he called me one Friday morning - I remember it was Friday - and said, ‘I’m going to have to send these baits back.’
“I said, ‘Why?’
“He said, ‘They don’t rattle!’
“I said, ‘They’re not supposed to.’
“He said, ‘They do if I sell them.’”
The rattle he intended is the motion the lure makes in the water, a kind of shimmyshake. The rattle we hear today is a modification Cordell made, not to snag fish so much as customers.
Over six decades Cordell has learned a lot about the vagaries of the industry. At its height, the name Cotton Cordell was stamped on many of the industry’s top-sellers, and the operation opened a factory in El Salvador partly to keep up with demand, partly because of an eager work force that worked longer hours for less pay.
After selling Cotton Cordell Inc. in 1980, Cordell continued making outdoor gear with Ripplin’ Water Outdoors Inc., expanding into camouflage clothing and custom-madefishing rods. His Goin’ Jessie boats were, along with a Ranger line, the earliest fiberglass dinghies.
Throughout, Cordell traveled, selling his brand and sport fishing. This promoting got results, so much so that even rivals understood that he was great for the industry.
“Bill Norman, Tom Mann, Lew Childress, all those guys were in competition with Dad,” Mike says, “but at the same time, they all knew that they were going to get their part of the pie only if they keep promoting it to get it.”
Over the past two decades, the Cordells’ operation has lost ground to competitors who manufacture in China. For a time, Chinese factories churned out goods for American suppliers who sold to Wal-Mart. It didn’t take long for Wal-Mart and China to cut out the middlemen.
Meanwhile, young people, whom the Game and Fish Commission encouraged to get Hooked on Fishing - Not on Drugs, got hooked on electronics.
To Cotton Cordell, it seems as if this youngest generation is interested in anything but fishing. It’s not his business he’s worried about, but his own notion of permanence.
“I just don’t know what anyone’s thinking that don’t fish a lot.”SELF PORTRAIT Cotton Cordell
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH Dec. 9, 1928, Benton.
FAMILY Son Michael, daughter Tracie Morrow, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
IN FISHING, WHAT’S MORE IMPORTANT, LOCATION OR BAIT? Location.
IF YOU HAD A REFRIGERATOR BIG ENOUGH FOR JUST ONE THING Watermelon.
WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC? I like them ol’ guitars.
FAVORITE BREAKFAST? Two scrambled eggs, two crisp slices of bacon, and two fresh biscuits.
ARE YOU JUST ONE LUCKY FISHERMAN? Don’t believe in luck. Ain’t no such thing. You’re either blessed or you ain’t.
FAVORITE CAR OF ALL TIME? Chevrolet. I used to buy one every year.
THE BEST PRESIDENT IN MY LIFETIME WAS Roosevelt, Franklin Delano.
MY FITNESS ROUTINE IS ... Say again?
A MODERN CONVENIENCE I’D LIVE WITHOUT Air conditioning.
DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE JUNK FOOD? I can’t think of one I don’t like. You know what I had for supper couple nights ago? Can of Vienna sausages. I have cereal most every night.
MY FAVORITE COMEDIAN IS Tim Conway.
MY FAVORITE AUTHOR IS Mark Twain.
IS THERE A TREE YOU’RE PARTICULARLY FOND OF? I like them ol’ pin oaks pretty good. Shot many a squirrel out of them.
FAVORITE INDOOR SPORT? Snooker.
FAVORITE PLACE IN THE WORLD? I been all over the world fishing, and if I was in Africa and had to catch a 5-pound bass you know where I’d go? I’d come back to Lake Hamilton.
ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP Persistent.
High Profile, Pages 43 on 10/30/2011