The Little Cleo is a classic among the freshwater casting spoons. Dating back to 1953, the lure was originally created by the Seneca Lure Company of New York City and was designed for salmon and steelhead anglers in the Great Lakes region. Seneca lures was founded by Charlie Clark, a man with a very creative personality who began as a songwriter and publisher, only to later in his career get into selling fishing equipment.
As an avid fisherman in upstate New York, Charlie knew that if he could come up with some metal lure designs to take advantage of the growing demands, he could launch Seneca into a major player in the fishing industry. His most popular lure was designed with a concave, humpbacked shape that Charlie felt wiggled so enticingly that it would be irresistible to any predatory fish that came its way. Once he had tested the lure, he only needed to come up with a name.
As the story has been passed down over generations, it has been said that Charlie had become secretly enamored with an actress named Rhonda Fleming, the star of a 1951 film called Little Egypt. The film popularizes a form of dancing that is now widely referred to as “belly-dancing”. In Charlie’s head, he felt that the enticing, wiggling action of the lure would be as tantalizing to the fish as Ms. Fleming was to him. So, Charlie wanted to name the lure after the movie, and decided upon “Little Cleo”, which was short for “Little Cleopatra”. He even went so far as to imprint the image of a belly dancer on the packaging and on the inner concave of some of the Little Cleo’s themselves, his own personal joke. This practice continued for the next 45 or so years, until the image finally became a casualty of politcally correct sensibilities in the mid-1990’s.
Questions or comments? Contact me at David@FishingEnthusiast.com!
No comments:
Post a Comment