I know many of you fishermen have spent many restless nights wondering about who invented Zebco Reels and how the Zebco name came about.
I posted this in another Forum about a year ago and thought it might also be of interest here. You could title it How a Small Town Boy did well.
"After WWII veterans were coming home. In 1946 fellows we had not seen for 4 or 5 years were appearing in their home towns looking for a place to fit in and restart their lives. Jobs were scarce so finding or making a niche required a great deal of resourcefulness, otherwise they just had to move along to find work. One such fellow was R. D. Hull, a Rotan boy, who took stock of his talents and decided the only business he might succeed at was watch repair. I first met him at Roby in a cubby hole of a shop in 1946.
Now let me tell you about the prevalence of watches in Roby and Rotan. Few people had them and if they had one they rarely wore it because of the eternal sand blowing. Also, watches in that day were not automatic wind so you had to manually wind them every eight hours or so; forget that and you had a watch but not a timepiece. Now if you tried to force a few more minutes of life into it you broke the main spring. And if you handled it roughly you risked breaking the hair spring. That spring, the thickness of a hair, operated a sprocket that gave the watch its tick. So for the most part folks did not bother with watches and just relied on clocks located in the home or business. A watch repair man was a lonely occupation.
But R.D. Hull was resourceful and spent his idle time working on various inventions. One of his interests was a baitcasting reel that would not backlash. One attempt called the "Lashmaster" was unsuccessful and ended up costing his investors about $50,000. But R.D., facing the dilemma of forging ahead or going back to the farm, went to work on a revised version of his reel. The prototype of the new idea was a Folgers coffee can with a hole in both ends. But investors, aware of the previous project, were not to be found. It was desparate times for R.D. and he expanded his search far and wide for some backers.
In 1948, his travels led him to Tulsa, Oklahoma and to a business named the Zero Hour Bomb Company. That company had been in business for about 13 years and the patent for its sole product, a time bomb for fraccing oil wells had run out. That small company needed a product to manufacture ... and took a chance on the gizmo demonstrated to them by the fellow from Rotan, Texas.
And that gizmo, my friends was the Zebco Fishing Reel. It revolutionized the art of fishing ... so simple to use even small kids could use it with no fear of backlash. And the company got its name from the Zero Hour Bomb Company."
True story. His mama and my mama were next door neighbors.
I posted this in another Forum about a year ago and thought it might also be of interest here. You could title it How a Small Town Boy did well.
"After WWII veterans were coming home. In 1946 fellows we had not seen for 4 or 5 years were appearing in their home towns looking for a place to fit in and restart their lives. Jobs were scarce so finding or making a niche required a great deal of resourcefulness, otherwise they just had to move along to find work. One such fellow was R. D. Hull, a Rotan boy, who took stock of his talents and decided the only business he might succeed at was watch repair. I first met him at Roby in a cubby hole of a shop in 1946.
Now let me tell you about the prevalence of watches in Roby and Rotan. Few people had them and if they had one they rarely wore it because of the eternal sand blowing. Also, watches in that day were not automatic wind so you had to manually wind them every eight hours or so; forget that and you had a watch but not a timepiece. Now if you tried to force a few more minutes of life into it you broke the main spring. And if you handled it roughly you risked breaking the hair spring. That spring, the thickness of a hair, operated a sprocket that gave the watch its tick. So for the most part folks did not bother with watches and just relied on clocks located in the home or business. A watch repair man was a lonely occupation.
But R.D. Hull was resourceful and spent his idle time working on various inventions. One of his interests was a baitcasting reel that would not backlash. One attempt called the "Lashmaster" was unsuccessful and ended up costing his investors about $50,000. But R.D., facing the dilemma of forging ahead or going back to the farm, went to work on a revised version of his reel. The prototype of the new idea was a Folgers coffee can with a hole in both ends. But investors, aware of the previous project, were not to be found. It was desparate times for R.D. and he expanded his search far and wide for some backers.
In 1948, his travels led him to Tulsa, Oklahoma and to a business named the Zero Hour Bomb Company. That company had been in business for about 13 years and the patent for its sole product, a time bomb for fraccing oil wells had run out. That small company needed a product to manufacture ... and took a chance on the gizmo demonstrated to them by the fellow from Rotan, Texas.
And that gizmo, my friends was the Zebco Fishing Reel. It revolutionized the art of fishing ... so simple to use even small kids could use it with no fear of backlash. And the company got its name from the Zero Hour Bomb Company."
True story. His mama and my mama were next door neighbors.
