Hackney gave fishing world one sweet idea

Gene Hackney, who died Wednesday at the age of 86, will always have a sweet spot in the fishing lore of the Inland Northwest.

Countless anglers enjoyed his services as the former owner of resorts at Silver, North Silver and West Medical lakes. But his interest in the sport went beyond the cash register and into the realm of innovation.

His most lasting discovery has probably produced more trout per hour than any lure, and the key to its success can be purchased for a pittance at a grocery store.

“Marshmallows,” he recalled in an interview several years ago. “Who’d have ever thought?”

In 1963, soon after he had built the floating Hackney’s Boat House at West Medical Lake, Gene was having fun with some gulls by tossing them miniature marshmallows.

“A few marshmallows fell in the water, and I noticed that trout were rising up to take them,” he said.

Lights flashed immediately in the large corner of Hackney’s cranium devoted to outsmarting trout. Wheels were turning like the gears of a well-oiled reel cranking in something big.

He sank his hunches through the trap door behind the West Medical Lake Resort lunch counter.

“I had more damned fun with that trap door,” Hackney digressed. “I used to feed the fish there, so there’d always be a few around. Occasionally, when somebody came in saying they couldn’t catch any fish, I’d drop a line in the water from behind the counter, hook one and hand it to them.”

Hackney didn’t have to experiment long before he sensed the sweet smell of success.

He took advantage of the mini-marshmallow’s buoyancy by putting it on a hook linked by a leader to a sinker, dropping it through the trap door and letting the marshmallow float the hook up above the weeds on the bottom.

When trout started taking it, he refined the rig to the perfect trout-taking formula: a No. 8 short-shanked hook with 15 inches of 4-pound-test leader tied to a ring just big enough to keep it from going back through a slip sinker threaded onto the main line.

“My gosh, we couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Every cast off the dock, we caught a fish. We let the fish have a slack line, and they would take that marshmallow away and swallow it.”

The setup was even deadlier when the marshmallow was threaded up onto the hook eye so the point could be baited with a worm.

“We called that a chocolate sundae,” he said.

Or a salmon egg. “We called that a strawberry sundae.”

Hackney tied up the rigs and sold them like crazy as marshmallows became the latest essential in the trout angler’s tackle box.

Soon lights were flashing in the other large portion of Hackney’s cranium dedicated to extracting cash from anglers’ wallets.

White mini-marshmallows worked well and were cheap by the bagful at the supermarket. But Hackney sensed there might be some green in colored marshmallows packaged especially for fishing.

He made a deal with the Los Angeles-based Dumack Co., which perfected the extrusion method of making marshmallows, to custom make mini-mallows in pink and orange.

In 1966, with 60,000 cases of the marshmallows in angler-catching colors, Gene’s Tackle & Distributing Co. was in business. He even hired kids from Lakeland Village to tie his leaders. The two products spread like a feeding frenzy across the country in stores such as Sears and Kmart.

The second year, however, Dumack officials stunned Hackney by saying changes in production made it impossible for them to continue making the colored marshmallows.

“They said it would be like Ford stopping their assembly line for a day and tooling up to make one different car,” he recalled.

“I had to cancel orders I already had for 80,000 cases of marshmallows,” he said, noting that Kraft Foods turned him down, too.

The resort owner’s character already had been tested by several disasters, including a 1962 die-off that left West Medical fishless followed by the burning of his original boat house.

Hackney built a new boat house, and the lake was restocked, although the window of opportunity for his tackle business was gone. Eventually, he sold his interest in the resorts and went on to teaching golf, selling security locks and other things.

But the marshmallow magic was out of the bag, and anglers still use the technique more than 40 years later to take trout.

It was the inspiration for PowerBait, the buoyant scented product that improved on the marshmallow tactic in every way except that you can’t eat it for a snack.

In recent years, Gene made the most of life with his companion, Hetty Fowler of St. John, one of the few people who could match and exceed his zest for everything from bridge and snowbirding to fishing and mushrooming.

Even as his hearing dimmed and his pace slowed, he called to share his concern over the drought and its effect on trout. He’d track down any lead on a better salmon smoking recipe. He invited me to go pheasant hunting, not so much to shoot something, but simply as an excuse to get into the field and see a good dog work a bird.

That fire that never burns out is the mark of a real sportsman.