doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com OT-Herter's

I just looked and I still have the 1974 copy* of their catalogue if anyone want's me to look something up. I'd also be willing to take pics. of some of the pages and email them to someone who can post pics. here.
*My wife says I never throw anything away. I guess she's got a point!
Jim

Whats the 401 powermag story?

A friend of mine, traveling from Detroit to the west on a hunting trip, stopped in Waseca to visit Herters. He asked directions at the local gas station, and was asked "Why do you want to know?" Seems that Herters had closed in the middle of the night, stiffing all employees and suppliers. Someone said that all the "stuffers" (taxidermy heads) ended up with Cabelas.

I dont know how it came about but in the mid to late 80s through the mid 90s a much smaller Herters was located in Beaver Dam Wisconsin...It was a Store Front with a decoy manufacturing operation in the rear....They published a much scaled down catalog as well as selling direct from the store....Every year they had a super summer tent sale with overstock merchandise and catalog returns...it was one heII of a sale...I miss it

I always heard they were a casualty of the Gun Control Act of 1968. That changed the way Americans could buy guns and it now required a dealer to recieve them. Have read that in several places. Maybe it is true, maybe not, just the only reason I ever heard.

They were before my time, but I do get a kick out of reading the old catalogs. Everything they had was made under a suoer secret patent, made of kryptonite, defied laws of physics, and all kind of things along those lines. Fertile minds in their advertising department, that's for sure!!!

I still have a Herter's World's Greatest Worm blower upper which made worms float off the lake bottom. Everything else was World's Greatest, too, including the world's softest hooks. I know they ran into problems with some of the fly tying materials they imported. I think that ran them afowl (forgive pun) of the gment.

Herters:

World's Finest
Tenacious for Quality


I had a tour of the Beaver Dam shop, including the decoy molding setup. Good stuff. I still have a passel of their "Magnum" sized burlap wrapped block cluttering up the place somewhere.

Glenn

We used to spend hours reading their catalogue and laughing at the generally outragous claims made for virtually anything & everything they sold. Thot their rotary fletcher was perhaps the funniest thing they listed. Many of those .401's, if not all, were made by Sauer. Still have one of their CF presses, big, heavy like a Bulldog truck and Panzer tank tough. George wrote a couple of books too. Don't recall the exact titles, but they were in your face funny titles. Was just too embaressed to order either .. I'da got a whipping for sure. Still fish with some of their lure making components, spoon bodies w/red glass beady eyes & such that I bought in quantity while in Jr. High [mid-school]. One of the guys that I worked with some years ago grew up down the road from Herter and he told some funny tales and spoke very well of them. I was reading their catalogs at the same time I was subscribing to Boy's Life & Scientific American and taking a correspondence course from the Northwestern School of Taxidermy and riding a Dootlebug scooter powered by a 5S Briggs & Stratton lawn mower engine .. all things from a somewhat now removed spent youth, but one I would never trade.

Might as well face it ... as adults some of us try & make enough money to do the things we did as kids for nothing. Others are trying to buy yuts(sic)they feel they were deprived of .. ,e.g. a GT40 in the Home Depot parking lot .. 'bout the same as a name gun being used in a turkey shoot ;-) ;-) [wink wink] Of course that 'RR' Purdey that got some discussion here a while back looked like it mighta done some Pat Brady jeep duty back down the line, but then why not? I still think that the sentiment of Dale singing Happy Trails is about as fine as it gets, even if all the rest of it was pure glitz, Bullywood and bunk. I digress.

Herter's catalogues fueled a lot of mirth and provided a lot of decent stuff to the average guy at reasonable prices .. 'Chalice wads' were pretty darn good plastic wads, 'wasp wasted' varmint bullets sounded like a good idea and were not particularly any less accurate than many of the other bullets of the time shot from a Savage 340 in .222, a gun where field accuracy ALWAYS exceeded bench accuracy. I still catch fish on those spoons and use some bucktails tied with Herters dyed deer hair. Good days and fond memories when those catalogues were fresh. Thanks for the reminder, Dave.

Sad tale of one man making a business and the kids not able or willing to keep it going. Once sold it soon dies out. Their catalog was the stuff of many a boys dream was made out of. Worlds famous, everlasting, worlds best, ect... were all fair descriptions of what we expected out of all our purchases back then. Their decoy paints were quite good and I must have used many a gallon over the years.

They had about the world's greatest black walnut blanks! I still have one grand deluxe feather crotch two piece set left,cost $17.50 and recently restocked a Sterlingworth with one of their beautiful crotch blanks. I still use the Millers Fall chisels i bought from them and have some steel wool and french red liquid left. Bobby