Hooked

As a young boy, Rick Keating used to fish with his grandfather on the jetties of Venice, setting the hook for a lifelong interest in the sport. But his interest now isn’t so much in hooking fish as in the hook itself—or lure, rather.

Keating, a 47-year-old pharmaceutical rep for Schering-Plough, is a collector of antique fishing lures, and he travels from Sarasota to Naples appraising old-fashioned plugs for those who hope their tackle box is a gold mine.(On March 8, he’ll be appraising at the Clarion Hotel in Fort Myers.)

"I do like an Antiques Roadshow of fishing tackle," he says.

Keating started collecting almost as early as he started fishing. "My father had a bunch of friends that fished, and word got out that any kind of tackle that people didn’t want, I’d take," he says.

After graduating from the University of Central Florida, he took his collection from his parents’ house and got a book to identify all those lures, rods and reels. It re-invigorated his interest in collecting the gear.

"Before I knew it, I had, like, 3,000 [lures]," he says.

The oldest is from the late 1800s, but most of his collection is from the early 1900s to the 1960s, before mass-produced, more-durable plastic lures replaced the hand-crafted cedar plugs with many coats of primer and paint, glass eyes and exceptional attention to detail. They’re all kept in cases in his Fort Myers home, where he lives with his wife and their two children.

"I’ve been collecting and reading about [gear] for so long that if you had a tackle box, I could identify all the manufacturers," says Keating.