Bagley Lures That New Black Magic

Bagley Lures That New Black Magic was the Company’s big break. Every company needs a little magic boost at the beginning to get them in the national fishing tackle limelight. While they only mention them as being from Winterhaven it didn’t take long for the public to catch on. I’m sure Jim would agree this article in the 1955 issue of Field and Stream was the spark needed to light the rocket that would eventually lead the Bagley Bait Company from Pork Rind (Pig Skin) to rubber and on to the Balsa Revolution.

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Bagley Lures That New Black Magic

SOME months ago I told you that there would be a revival in the art of pork chunking, I didn’t know at the time what form that revival would take, but this past summer a band of tightlipped sp’n casters invaded the Southland with one of the deadliest weapons since the scope-sighted crossbow. Jimmy Lynch pulled up in our driveway one morning and leaned out of his station wagon holding what looked like a midget black snake. This was the first time I ev.er saw or heai·d of what is now known as Black Magic. After unlocking my eyeballs I got Willie McKoosh on the phone, because Willie is an authority on hoghide baits. If you fished with Willie and turned in a bad performance using a chunk, you went down in his book as one of the enf ants perdu., living in the sinful contents of a posh tackle box. But the dictatorial Mr. McKoosh had been a victim of sawgrass censorship, a peculiar phenomenon which surrounds this whole story. He knew nothing about Black Magic, and declared that if there was such a thing it was a Yankee-type bait and therefore no more than a cheap publicity stunt. Brother McKoosh was due for a shock, as you shall see presently.I didn’t tell Willie about Jimmie Darr, and how he caught twenty-five bass one afternoon using Black Magic, and how the pond he fished had been written off a long time ago. They said there were no fish left in it. And I didn’t tell him about the snook fishermen who skulked around the tackle shop waiting for tourist customers to leave so they could buy the stuff unobserved. The bottled dynamite was delivered by a gent who acted like he was selling French post cards. As quick as the black jars came out of a carton they were snatched from his hands with impolite haste. I found that Darr had let the word slip to Lynch, but he couldn’t remember who told him originally. When a tackle-shop operator can sell hogback at ninety cents a strip, it’s understandable that minds will go blank. Steering me back to the broom closet, Darr closed the door and whispered how Black Magic is an overlong strip of pork rind, carved thick but tapered, between eight and nine inches in length, weighing about ¼ ounce, and dyed black. It is mounted with one hook, wiggles like an eel, and instead of being fished like an ordinary artificial, the angler casts and retrieves until a strike is felt. Then he lets his line go slack while the fish chews and swallows the sh-ip. Brother Darr concluded by saying that the bait was so murderous it had to be kept a secret.Orange Lake is in north-central Florida. It’s about sixteen miles long, or 14,000 acres of turbid water full of floating plant islands, depending on which way you measw·e a lake. The sandy clay and limestone bottom is covered with layers of silt and plant detritus, a composition that spells big bass in Willie’s country. There are two species of shad, crayfish, fresh-water shrimp, crappies, and bream for the bigmouths to feed on, so it’s no surprise to come up with an 8- or 10-pounder now and then. We used to have a guide there by the name of Sweet Richard, who was a tongue-tied Lothario but a real talker with the surface plug. His mute wisdom was in knowing that endurance is everything. When Sweet Richard operated on the marshes he just worried the bass into striking, a theme that paid off in several pot-gutted 15-pounders one spring. But stubborn dignity was no match for the McKoosh method of skittering a pork chunk, and that’s the way Willie elected to pin my ears back that morning.Willie is a sneak caste1·. He aims the bow of our skiff broadside to where the bass are feeding, then just before cutting the motor he makes a hairpin turn and snaps a cast off. His sense of timing is so keen that I always find myself looking at Willie’s back while he tells me about the fish that is following his lure. Anyway, we started out that day probing the hayfields and me facing miles of open lake, an uncommon advantage for working pigskin voodoo, although neither of us knew it at the time. The first thing I discovered about Black Magic is that it casts easily. I have a constitutional weakness for baits that sail through the air without flapping or holding back. Using a light spin stick and a 5-pound-test line, the hogskin doesn’t need a split-shot assist, although I have used shot since when fishing very deep water and casting on wide rivers. Drifting with the breeze, Willie told me how black pork is no good, because the bass can’t see it in thick water, and how chunks have to kick up a fuss, not crawl around on the bottom. We continued

Bagley Lures That New Black Magic

casting and Willie went into his early history of dyeing chunks yellow, red, green, and with polka dots. He told me how cracker boys soaked chunks in Mercurochrome and wiped them in shoe polish on the Altamaha, the big spread that pours from the Ocmulgee, and how the striped bass would ram a 12-inch strip of red rind but ignore any other color. What he said about dyes fit in with what I had learned from two leading rind manufacturers- that most dyes won’t stay on pigskin. Unlike other materials, rind has to be dyed cold. While Willie was talking I was discovering the second thing about Black Magic. It doesn’t stay black but turns a dull blue as it gets wet. I was about lo tell McKoosh when a bass with a mouth big enough to hold a minnow bucket stuck his head in the air. He had swallowed the rind right up to the hook.Some things about Southern bass fishing are grossl:1, exaggerated. The publicity mills make it sound easy, which it ls not, and while there are plenty of big fish to be had, you have to work for them. But the fighting ability of a Florida bigmouth needn’t be questioned. He is a scrapper regardless of his warm- water environment. I have had 10- and even 12-pounders dance like their pants were full of ‘gator fleas, and the best one I’ve caught so far, a IS-pounder, made nine headshaking jumps before coming to boat. This first bass to hit my Blacli. Magic put on an aerial display that raged for ten minutes. Sometimes he came up as though shot from a cannon, with water grasses hanging across the line, and he’d pause in midair to kick, with his full belly shining white in the sun. Then he’d come up gently, pausing just before his gills rattled him into a movement no faster than the clouds that came across in the wind. It’s these slow-motion jumps of a big bass that you have to watch. It may be the last time you see him. I kept my drag loose and worked the spool with my forefinger, putting the pressure on when the bass turned close. Willie never said a word until the bass was flopping in the bottom of the boat. Then he asked me the same question I was asking myself. How do they dye hog skin black?The rest of the day was something special for me. I have no idea how many bass I caught and released, but there were more big ones among them than we ordinarily

Bagley Lures That New Black Magic

see. Willie stuck with his white chunkand made up for the defection with aprocession of young mossbacks thattrotted obediently behind his bait atregular intervals. It was clear to bothof us that the guy who invented BlackMagic was destined to become a personof great importance. The bait literallyseparates boy bass from men bass.Although Black Magic is very similar to an ordinary pork-chunk lure, it isn’t fished the same way. In fact, artful chunk procedure is epitomized by holding the rod high and literally keeping your line dry. Willie, for instance, reels fast enough to keep his bait splashing and breaking water. The black art is exactly opposite in performance. You must keep your tip down and retrieve very slowly, twitching the tip but not jerking it the way you would with a surface bait. There’s been so much talk in years past about short striking fish on pork rind that you will probably be tempted to add a treble hook in the tail of the bait. This isn’t the least bit necessary. When you geta strike; just pause and let the fish swallow your rind before striking back. If you hit him instantly, as though using a plug, the chances are he’ll have only half the pork skin in his choppers. Nothing will make the fish drop it ,because the bait has a natural texture. Some of our local bass experts, like Homer Large and Peaslee Streets ,twitch their Black Magic directly on the pond bottom and let the bass pick it up and swim off before setting the hook. Peaslee said his bass come up with mud in their mouths when he’s working the rind correctly.Black Magic isn’t always effective this way. One morning below Wilson Dam, on the Tennessee River, Ed Bussey and I found that the smallmouths, all fish over two pounds in weight, hit the strip so hard that they had to be hooked on the strike. On the Mississippi, near Prairie du Chien, we fished below the dams for white bass and saugers as well as bigmouths, and here we found it was better to slack off after a strike if we wanted to hook whites. I haven’t as yet used the bait for northern pike, but presumably old Esox would swallow the rind whole. Brown and rainbow trout will grab and swallow, so the strike must be delayed .On the Saluda River in South Carolina we tallied a half-dozen big browns one afternoon, all of them taking the lure so slow and easy that you’d think a catfish had the bait.It may be that a good percentage of the fish coming to Black Magic hit across the head of the rind and are hooked instantly. I was casting on a peppergrass flat in Clearwater Lake one day when the sun was at just ther1ght angle to light up the weed bed. I could see my lure fluttering in  S-shaped curves when a bass popped up behind it. He was an old bull of a bass with a huge head and belly to match. He swayed as he leaned forward with the pig eyes of his kind unblinking, glassy, and rooted on the thing he was about !o eat. Coming directly behind the rind, he wet his lips once or twice, then sidled past the bait turned, and smacked it head on. I didn’t hit back, but let the fish run a few feet before tightening up on him. He was hooked solid, wearing the black strip like a mustache when he came up.I’m not certain what Black Magic imitates. It could certainly pass for an eel or a water snake. I do know that this overlong cut has a fantastic action in the water, a movement that you don’t find in ordinary baits. Although it works well on the surface, the real advantage of the lure is in providing maximum action in deep fishing on open water. Furthermore, the lure is, attractive to all game fish, both in saltwater and fresh. The boys in Winterhaven originally designed this cut for eel happy snook, but the possibilities of the bait are unlimited. One day soon you will be startled and possibly knocked over by a stooping creature, scuttling behind rod racks from one tackle shop to another as one pursued. Fear not. He is a victim of Black Magic renewing his vision of paradise in the search for bottled pigskin.