Other Stories - John N. Felsher's Outdoors Adventures

      In 1948, a French watchmaker named Maurice Jacquemin
revolutionized light tackle fishing. At that time, most people fished with
bulky, difficult reels requiring some skill. An inexperienced angler, and
even some old pros, could easily create a mass of tangled line that might
ruin a day on the water.
      Jacquemin, an engineer for the French industrial firm of Carpano and
Pons, dangled an open-faced reel underneath a fishing rod and designed a
system to wrap line around a central spool. Thus, the spinning reel burst
upon a post-World War II world hungry for recreation and consumer
products after six years of bloodshed, rationing and deprivation.
      Easy to use by even a novice caster, Jacquemin’s contraption could
fling lures long distances with precision and recover line without tangling –
most of the time! He presented the device to Mr. Pons, who named it after
his brother, Mitchel. Thus, the spinning reel, named Mitchell 300, burst
upon the fishing world.
      It opened a new era in light tackle fishing with a reliable product that
nearly everyone could afford and understand how to use. By 1970, the
company produced 12,000 reels a day and sold more than 25 million
copies, making the Mitchell 300 the most popular spinning reel in history.
      In the early 1970s, owning a Mitchell 300, became the neighborhood
status symbol among my pack of fanatical fishing friends near my home in
Slidell, La. Every spring, we would cut just enough grass to buy a new
“300” to show off to our friends that we were “grown up.” After buying our
300s, the neighborhood yards grew thick as we disappeared to various
fishing holes.
      We took the venerable metal reels to every ditch, pond, canal and
bayou within biking distance. In our honey holes, we sat patiently drowning
worms in our attempt to entice small mudcats, bream and sometimes even a
rare largemouth bass into biting. We caught everything from minnows to
monsters with our trusty blue friends.
      We dropped our Mitchells in the mud until they sounded like stones
grinding wheat into flour. We waded across canals, often falling in, by
accident, several times, repeatedly, and thus “cleaning” the goo from our
reels. Nothing stopped them, except one thing.
      We used those Navy blue to black reels almost every day of the
summer until the bail spring inevitable broke. Then, we went back to cutting
grass again, but just long enough to earn money to buy another Mitchell
300.
      By the time we hit our late teens, we “graduated” to other more
complicated reels, but never forgot our 300s. We also never forgot the
tradition of dodging grass cutting by disappearing to some secluded fishing
hole, a tradition I maintain to this day -- but that’s another story!
      Unfortunately, bad economic times in the late 1970s and strong
international competition hurt the company. In 1981, Mitchell declared
bankruptcy. It appeared that the “grandfather of spinning reels” would fade
into memory.
      After Mitchell filed for bankruptcy, Philippe Blime bought the company
in 1982. He tried to rejuvenate the product line and reduce costs while
respecting the brand traditions. To cut costs, the company subcontracted
manufacturing to Asia, but designing remained in French hands. In
January 1990, Johnson Worldwide Associates, makers of another
legendary reel, the Johnson spin-caster, bought Mitchell. By then, people
bought more than 30 million Mitchell 300s since the early 1950s. My
friends and I certainly helped up the numbers! Today, spinning reels
comprise two in every three fishing reels sold in the United States, thanks
largely to the popularity and success of the legendary Mitchell 300.
      In 2000, Mitchell came to America. Headquartered in Spirit Lake, Iowa,
Pure Fishing bought JWA and obtained the rights to the legendary spinning
reel. The Mitchell line joined such other renowned brands as Berkley, Abu
Garcia and Fenwick among others.
      In 2001, Pure Fishing redesigned the legendary blue spinning reel as
the Mitchell 300X, a lighter, smoother and stronger progeny of the original.
Dubbed “the New Legend,” the modern version incorporated many new
technologies into original designs that made the reel so popular among
light-tackle enthusiasts. Graphite replaced the metal body. A worm gear
winds the line around the spool. A “PosiClick” bail wire replaced the old bail
springs.
      Calling it “the New Legend” may sound a bit presumptuous; time will tell
if the new reel lives up to the legendary billing of the original. Even with
improvements and modern technology on the new version, I still long for the
old blue and chrome metal model, even with a broken bail spring and often
caked with mud. Not only a fishing reel, it represented an era that we will
never see again. It wove a new memory every time I turned the handle.
      As I recall, I never lost a small fish with it in my life, but the ones that did
hit the stringer always tended to shrink by the time I brought them home!
Of course, after more than three decades in a fertile memory,     they’ve
again grown to their original size, plus some! Perhaps, three decades from
now, another writer will fondly recall this new version. We’ll see.
      For more information, call (877) 502-6482 or see www.purefishing.com.