ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 29, 1996 TAG: 9612310056
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHILHOWIE
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG
If you ask Jim Gillenwater's wife, Wilma, about the biggest thing she ever caught fishing, she'll point to her husband and smile.
"I hooked the lobe of his ear," she said. "And he still married me."
If you ask Jim Gillenwater about the biggest thing he ever caught, he'll tell you it was a Toyota Celica.
"We were riding in a jeep, and the line came off the pole," he said. "I pulled to the side of the road and started to crank in the line, when this Toyota Celica came by."
His line hooked the car, stretched down the highway, then snapped, he said.
"See, truth is stranger than any story you could make up."
But people do make up stories, all the time, and Gillenwater, president of Fish Tales Inc., a live bait business in Smyth County, collects them all while counting out the worms and hooks and weights he sells in more than 400 stores, mostly in Virginia and North Carolina.
One of the best fish tales I ever heard was in the middle of Wal-Mart. This guy ... spent 45 minutes telling about how he caught this world-record carp, and he had more than 100 people just listening as he went into detail.
And when he ended the story, he said, "Do you know what I caught that carp with?"
And we said, "no."
And he said, "A 1-pound grasshopper."
I thought the guy was going to be killed before he got out of the Wal-Mart.
"All fish tales start out with the truth," explained Gillenwater, 43. "But where they start and where they finish are two different things. And therein lies the fish tale."
Gillenwater has no idea how many stories he knows; he's forgotten more than he remembers. But he's started writing some of them down.
This year, along with sponsoring worm races at the public library and donating bait for children's fishing tournaments, he plans to present a trophy to the Angler of the Year.
The prize isn't going to the person who landed the biggest fish, but to the person who almost landed the biggest fish.
It was opening day, and this man took his young son, a boy about 6, out with him. The whistle went off, and the daddy cast his line. The little boy wanted to imitate his daddy ... but when he cast, his line went plop, right at the bank.
Everyone was laughing and pointing, saying that guy should help his kid throw out a little farther.
Well, after a little while, the dad started reeling in, and the little boy started reeling in, too.
All of a sudden, that pole went double. The boy just yanked, and a 22-inch trout went flying over his head. You talk about making people shut up. That was anybody's catch of the day.
Gillenwater started his business 15 years ago after hurting his back in an industrial accident.
"I needed something easier to do," he said. "Little did I know."
The first man to stock Gillenwater's bait regularly was Coy Nunley, then-owner of Nunley's Grocery, an old country store a few miles southwest of Marion.
Gillenwater had "stopped in there a few times and heard us talking about fishing and hunting, people sitting around, just telling tales," Nunley recalled. "We were talking one day, and I told him if I didn't have that store, I believed the bait business would be a good business to get into. Then, later on, he said, 'I've decided to do that.'''
In 1982, with $10, Gillenwater bought himself 1,000 mealworms, which he divided into 83 cups. When he'd sold those, he took his earnings and bought 1,000 more.
Eventually, he started into night crawlers, importing them from Canada and storing them in a refrigerator in his basement. Then he moved up to a walk-in cooler.
In 1985, he moved the worms out of his home and into a residence of their own, a little white house on Packing House Road.
He posted a nylon "Fish Tales" sign out front, acquired a milk cooler for minnows (which he no longer carries) and a frozen-food truck for the night crawlers (which he still does). And he started moving worms. For the past few years, he's moved about a million a season, sending them off in little plastic foam cups with his logo stamped on the side. He offers a premium pack of 18 fat, juicy, gray Canadian night crawlers, and a 12-pack of night crawlers of varying sizes.
Gillenwater talks about his fattest worms as if they could slice, dice and make julienne fries. "The premium night crawlers are good for all types of fish, from muskie to bass to walleye," he said.
Here's one on Coy.
The story begins opening day, and Coy Nunley was fishing under a bridge. He hooks this brown trout so big it doesn't jump, just rolls around in the water. Some 60 people stopped along the bridge to watch him fight that fish.
One man looking over the edge would yell to everyone: "He'll never land that fish without a net."
And Coy would fight the fish, and that man would yell again: "He'll never catch that fish without a net."
Well, Coy reeled that fish in, and then he got out his collapsible net and it fanned out big and he scooped up that fish.
And you could hear the man say: "Now where did he get that net?"
I know that one's true. Coy still has that fish.
This is a seasonal business. During the summers, Gillenwater spends most of his time in ``the worm house,'' counting out hundreds of thousands of worms and catching shut-eye when he can on a roll-away cot.
During the winter, he packages his stock and uses a string cutter and a clamp and die to make "poly stringers" for transporting a good catch.
Year round, he is devoted to the care and feeding of worms - he gives them a mixture of "Purina Worm Chow" and a secret ingredient to help fatten them up.
The worms have to be fed at least once every four weeks. Those still sitting on store shelves (a winter phenomenon - during the summer they move quickly) have to be sent home to Gillenwater for supper.
Gillenwater also takes on other work during the winter months - over the past 15 years, he's held 28 jobs, ranging from stocking shelves to putting together vacuum cleaners.
This year, he's taken a job with a networking company called Geo International, selling environmentally safe cleaning products. He may sell them year-round, too, he said, but promises, "Fish Tales will always be around for the loyal worm customer."
Actually, Gillenwater's planning a slight expansion - more mail-order business in the months ahead. He reads from one of the note cards he uses to help him organize his thoughts: "Fish Tales is now offering a strategic solution to customers with service problems."
Some of his independent distributors are reliable, he said, but some aren't. So, he plans to mail coolers of night crawlers directly to the businesses that need them.
"Any customer, big or small, all they have to do is give us a call."
When Gillenwater talks about business, he also talks about the bait market, about research, about the future.
Often he quotes Mike Tentnowski, a Radford University professor who teaches a course on setting up new businesses: "Things are always changing, and you need to change with the changes."
A certificate from Tentnowski's course is framed on Gillenwater's wall, next to inspirational posters (``The ABCs of Happiness," "The Ladder of Achievement'') and a calendar he has color-coded so he can look back over the fishing season.
Green marks a good fishing day, blue marks rain, yellow means the temperature was over 90 degrees, "and the fish don't bite when it's that hot."
Gillenwater's only employee is his wife, Wilma, who teaches third grade during the school year and wears gloves as she counts out worms during the summer.
According to her husband, she counts them like this: "One cent, two cents, three cents."
Gillenwater says if he makes a penny per night crawler, he's doing well.
When I was younger, I took a friend of mine fishing. I had a rod and reel and would just zing my line across the river. He had a little pole he'd cast and it might go 15 feet.
He decided to show me he was going to cast to the other side of the river, so he put the awfullest gob of night crawlers on you've ever seen in your life. He reared back and zzzinnnng! Those worms looked like a rocket ship going into the air, and they plopped down 6 inches from the other side. He said, "I told you I'd get it over there," but he had all this line out, so he started reeling it in.
He felt a pull and said, "I got a fish," and I said, "you got a rock fish - you caught the bottom of the river." But he had caught a fish, a redeye that weighed over a pound. It could have been a state citation, but we took it home, and my father-in-law ate it.
There are a few things Gillenwater does to ensure quality worms.
He sorts them carefully, by weight, putting the juiciest ones in his premium containers.
His cups are printed upside down, and that's how he stores them, too.
"A worm will always crawl to the bottom," he said.
If the bottom is really the top, that makes it easy for the customer to lift the lid and check out the bait.
Quality is important, Gillenwater said, especially in a shrinking market. Artificial bait has improved, and some people are using that instead of live worms.
There's also more to do these days than there used to be.
Years ago for recreation, Gillenwater said, people would go fishing or play "Cow Pasture Softball" (when the ball landed in a cow pie, you knew you had a double or a triple).
Now, "instead of 10 things to choose from, there are thousands of things," he said. That's why he has to be smart to stay ahead.
Billions of dollars are still being spent in the fishing industry, he said. All he wants is a small piece of that.
He holds out a Styrofoam worm cup - filled with Tootsie Rolls and hard candy.
"I've always wanted to go on Johnny Carson or David Letterman with a cup of those jelly worms and just eat them," he said. "Everyone would go wild."
Or he could tell Jay Leno a fish story, perhaps the one about the world-record bass his friend saw down in Florida.
And you know how those canals are in Florida - the trees out over the water. Well, this squirrel would run down the tree and pick up a nut and bring it back up to his nest. And he'd do it again, then back up the tree. All of a sudden, a world-record bass jumped out of the water, took that squirrel in its mouth and disappeared.
Well, my friend started fishing harder than anyone had fished before. Then, about 45 minutes later, that bass poked his head out of the water and spit a nut up into that tree.
Now, who was fishing?
LENGTH: Long : 209 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ALAN KIM/Staff 1. Gillenwater offers a premium pack ofby CNB18, fat, juicy, gray Canadian nightcrawlers, and a 12-pack of
nightcrawlers of various sizes.
2. Gillenwater claims his is one of two companies in the U.S.
that produces fish stringers. He uses a heated string cutter and a
dye press to assemble them one at a time.
3. Fish Tales operates out of two trailers connected to a little
white house on Chilhowie's Packing House Road.
4. At Fish Tales, Canadian nightcrawlers (right) are fed a
mixture of worm chow and a secret ingredient to help fatten them up.
5. Because the worms tend to settle on the bottom of the upside-down
cups (above), it's easy to examine the merchandise when the lids are
removed.|
6. Jim Gillenwater, president of Fish Tales Inc., a live bait
business in Smyth County, loves a good fish tale.|
7. Gillenwater will award this trophy to the Angler of the Year -
the person who almost lands the biggest fish. color.