James "Dick" Murphy retired in 1997 after 18 years as head janitor at Sun Valley Elementary School due to lingering pain from a back surgery. A former fishing guide, Murphy began hand-crafting lures to fish for Kokanee salmon at nearby Stampede Reservoir and Donner Lake.
Started as a hobby, Fishing With Father Murphy dominates much of Murphy's fishing time. Murphy, 66, makes his products in his Sun Valley home, and his wife of two years, Michelle, packages and labels the finished products.
Murphy has never advertised, but word-of-mouth has increased his business to annual sales of roughly 4,000 Kokanee bugs and about 2,000 Pyramid Lake spoons, a type of wobbling lure. Both retail for about $3-$4. He also makes other fishing tackle.
In 1999 Mark, Fore and Strike, an outdoors retailer on Kietzke Lane in Reno, took on Murphy's products; today they can be found in stores from Susanville to Fallon, and from Sacramento to Fresno.
Murphy has two wholesalers, one based in Fallon, the other in Oakdale, Calif. He says the majority of his mail-order business comes from California, while Nevadans typically buy from local stores such as Sportsman's Warehouse. Murphy says he queried store management for placement, and the outdoors retailer sells a great deal of his Pyramid Lake spoons.
To make Kokanee bugs, Murphy uses a standard two-bend hook and some proprietary materials, and he hand-decorates them with T-shirt paint. Murphy paints a group with a base color, and then paints another group while the first set dries. Returning to the original group, he applies colors straight from small tubes of paint, dots an eye, and the bugs are finished.
It's fairly simple, but the job requires a steady hand and ample patience.
"I am the kind of guy who just can't sit around," Murphy says amidst his cluttered work area. "There are a lot of people who try to copy my bugs because they are so popular. But they don't have the patience to do it and just give up and buy them from me."
Murphy produces about 12 dozen bugs a day, and on one recent afternoon Michelle packaged more than 500, he says.
Four years ago Murphy expanded operations by offering hand-painted Pyramid Lake lures. However he found that Pyramid Lake fish were hitting the lures so hard that they were chipping off the paint, so he switched to radical designs of highly reflective tape.
"All my colors have been tried and work out at Pyramid," he says. "They are designed specifically for Pyramid."
The operation keeps both busy, and Murphy is again expanding his presence via the Web with a new site, fishingwithfathermurphy.com.
"I've gotten too big," he says. "It started out as a hobby, it's grown into a job."
