This is Amy Wagenaar from the Historical Society of Michigan with a Michigan history moment. Amazing new Fish killers, declared the advertisements. The Mackinen Tackle Company's colorful fishing lures made in Kalawa, Michigan, found a ready market among the nation's fishing enthusiasts. William Bill Mackinen, the son of Finnish immigrants to Michigan, was born in Kalawa in 1904. As a boy, he crafted wooden fishing lures and experimented with various shapes and colors to find which ones best attracted fish. As the Depression neared an end in the late 1930s, Mackinen turned his avocation into a business. In 1940, he and two or three employees began making fishing lures. He used his garage as a workshop to craft the lure bodies in his basement as a paint shop and assembly room. The business grew during World War II, and by early 1945 it kept 14 employees busy. That same year, the Mackinen Tackle Company moved into a 34 by 200 foot factory building in Kalava. The company offered a good selection of lures that came in a variety of colors and had imaginative names such as Merry Widow, Holy Comet, Wattlebug, and North Point Wobbler. Most Mackinen lures were fashioned from wood, while some others were produced in a thermoplastic. Mackinen Tackle boasted that its lures had new features that catch fish when others fail. The best selling example, Holy Comet, was jointed in the center and had a hole in its head that made it shimmy as it was pulled through the water, thereby tricking hungry bass into perceiving it as a small, injured fish. Another popular lure, the Waddle Bug, featured a spread wing metal nose that made it struggle like a wounded duckling or mouse. In the 1940s, MacKinnon tackle began making lures for its competitor, James Hedden and Son, located in Dowagiac, Michigan. Makinen finished more than 2 million lures for Hedden from 1947 to 1951. In 1951, Hedden bought Makinen Tackle. Lure production shifted to Dwagiac, but Mackinen continued making bamboo and fiberglass fishing rods for hedden into the 1950s. Today, visitors to the remarkable Bottle House Museum in Kalava can view a large assortment of Mackinen lures. John Mackinen built the house in the 1940s using 60,000 glass bottles from his bottling factory. In 2008, the museum acquired a lure collection of Bill Gregory of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for exhibit in its Mackinen Tackle Room. This Michigan history moment was brought to you by michiganhistorymagazine.org.