Posted on 11/12/2003 8:57:31 AM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
A South Carolina construction worker and his family paid more than $100,000 for what he called "the Holy Grail" of fishing lures last weekend, setting a world record for the highest price paid for a fishing collectible at an auction. Tracey Shirey and seven other bidders -- including several bidding by telephone -- parried back and forth before the price of the rare 10-inch copper Haskell Minnow topped out at $92,000 during Lang's Sporting Collectables' fall auction at the Boxborough Holiday Inn. With the 10 percent buyer's premium added, the lure, made by Riley Haskell of Painesville, Ohio, in the 1850s, cost Shirey $101,200. "I'm on top of the world," Shirey said in a telephone interview yesterday from South Carolina. "That's the Holy Grail of fishing lures, I do believe. That's the best piece of tackle known to man. I've had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of lures and none of those adds up to what that one piece means to me." Shirey, a lure collector for just seven years, and whose wife, Connie, son Blake, and daughter Carley share the passion for lure collecting, also won the bidding for a smaller version of the minnow-shaped lure for $19,000. Of the larger minnow, which came in a sliding top wooden box and is believed to be one of a kind, Shirey said, "I was willing to go about $150,000. I expected not to get it." The final six-figure winning bid set a world record for a piece of fishing tackle, but John and Debbie Ganung, who own Lang's Sporting Collectables in Waterville, N.Y., said the high price shouldn't come as a surprise. "Was this a fair price? Absolutely," the Ganungs said in a statement posted online. "Not only is this Haskell Minnow an important American first in several ways and 150 years old, but in the world of sporting collectibles of this rarity, quality and caliber, this seems actually cheap. "John and I have always felt that American fishing tackle was way undervalued," Debbie Ganung said. "If this had been a duck decoy or a gun of the same (rarity), it would have realized 10 times that price....If tackle collecting becomes mainstream, these prices will seem cheap in a decade." In a telephone interview late yesterday, John Ganung said he was pleased that Shirey won the bidding to add the large and small Haskell Minnows to the family collection. "He is a very serious collector, as you can tell," Ganung said. "Not just anybody could spend that kind of money." The top-dollar minnow is the only one of its size, in a box stamped "R. Haskell" on one end. About a dozen Haskell Minnows in smaller sizes have turned up in recent years. In 1988, one sold at Lang's auction for $22,000 setting the world-record lure price at that time. Tracey Shirey said his next goal is to add Haskell Minnows in three other sizes to his collection, which would make the quintet of copper fishing lures as rare and unique as paintings by van Gogh, which often command far higher auction prices. Debbie Ganung said she and her husband believe the Haskell Minnow "certainly has the potential to be sold for much more in the future," if it again comes to auction. They also believe the record won't stand forever, since tackle collections started decades ago will eventually come up for auction, possibly yielding some equally rare and valuable lures. Lang's auction catalog had put a $35,000 to $45,000 pre-sale estimate on the Haskell Minnow, but the "hammer price" of $92,000 underscored the interest tackle collectors had in the lure. Record-setting auction prices aren't new for Lang's. Under founder Bob Lang of Maine, who sold the business to the Ganungs last spring, a world record was set in the late 1990s for an American made fishing reel. The reel, made of brass around 1820 by George Snyder, a Paris, Ky., jeweler and watchmaker, sold for $31,350 at auction in 1997. Saturday's auction grossed about $340,000, including buyers' premiums, John Ganung said. Lang's Sporting Collectables has another auction of fine fly fishing rods scheduled in January, and generally runs auctions of rods, reels, lures and sporting artwork in the spring and fall at the Boxborough Holiday Inn.
Right, it'll never leave the lure display case.
Sports memorabilia is an excellent example
I guess I can add that to the list of phrases I never thought I would hear.
Well, I know one story: it begins with a guy named Joe Kennedy, a rum runner during Prohibition, and ends with the most infamous crime family of them all, laundrering their wealth through politics....
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