HULL: REEL DEAL : TINKERER'S CONTRAPTION REVOLUTIONIZED FISHING.

Byline: Ken Schultz New York Times News Service

In the fall of 1947, R.D. Hull arrived at the headquarters of Zero Hour Bomb Co. on Easton Street in Tulsa, Okla., with a prototype of what was to become America's most popular fishing reel. It was made from the metal lid of a can of Folgers Mountain Grown Drip Grind coffee, an 11-inch-long piece of wire, a wooden sewing-thread spool and braided nylon line.

Hull, a West Texas watchmaker and habitual tinkerer, nailed his contraption to a board and showed it to the general manager and legal counsel of Zero Hour, which manufactured timed explosives used in oil-well drilling. He wanted to create a simple reel that anyone could use without line snarls. The idea came after watching a grocery store clerk pull string from a spool to wrap a package of meat.

The device would revolutionize fishing.

``R.D. Hull broke down all the barriers so that anybody who wanted to fish now could actually do so with a casting reel,'' said Zebco spokesman Gary Dollahon. ``Until then, there were two fishing options: either a stick with a string on it or one of the more-difficult-to-use revolving spool reels.

``It allowed more people to fish. It brought a lot of participants to the sport.''

The most common reels of the late 1940s had revolving spools, and the models used for casting heavy lures and natural baits had a notorious tendency to create line snarls, known as backlashes. These occurred when the revolving spool turned faster than the line departed the spool. It took great practice and considerable patience to cast with a minimum amount of backlashing.

Watching string come off a stationary spool made Hull realize that backlashes could be avoided by using a fixed, rather than revolving, spool. His timing was impeccable. Nylon was just becoming established in the manufacture of monofilament fishing line and would soon improve all aspects of angling. And, because Zero Hour Bomb Co. was facing an expiring patent and a new postwar technology landscape, it was ripe for new ideas.

So ripe that in June 1949 the company produced 25 handmade derivatives of Hull's invention, called them closed-faced reels and never looked back. Within a few years, Zero Hour Bomb Co. made more money selling fishing reels than time bombs.

In 1956 the company sent a reel to then-president Dwight D. Eisenhower, an avid angler. White House security personnel saw the name of the company on the package and promptly put the unopened box into a tub of water and called a bomb squad to defuse it.

Shortly afterward, the company changed its name to Zebco, got out of the explosives business and, mainly on the strength of Hull's idea, went on to become one of the world's largest fishing tackle manufacturers. Zebco, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, has sold an estimated 220 million of these reels and is a major producer of other reels, rods and boating supplies.

The closed-face reel devised by Hull would eventually become known to anglers as a spin-cast or the spin-casting reel. The son of a jeweler had been to the drawing board plenty of times before selling the idea to Zero Hour Bomb Co. while applying for a position working on the watches used to detonate the explosives.

Earlier, Hull had crafted what he called the Lashmaster reel with designs on promoting it privately.

``At the time we thought it was great but we didn't sell many reels,'' said Otto Hull, 76, of Catoosa, Okla., who helped his older brother market the Lashmaster. It was one of several times the brothers worked together on reels.

As a 7-year-old, Otto would run lures and line from a reel around to the far side of a pond so that R.D. could test the equipment ``and hopefully catch fish at the same time.'' Otto would later work as a reel sales representative for Zero Hour Bomb Co. from 1949-54.

The ``closed-face'' spin-casting reel is easily distinguished by its push-button line release, a cone-shaped cover, a line pickup device and a line-winding mechanism.

To prove they were simple to use, sales reps wore boxing gloves while making demonstrations and one had a chimpanzee do the casting. Of the reel types that exist today, only the spin-casting reel is an entirely American invention.

Durable and comparatively inexpensive, spin-casting tackle ranks first in units sold annually in North America, with about a half-dozen manufacturers producing it. Nearly every spin-casting reel comes spooled with line, which eliminates the most basic rigging problem; no other reels are supplied to consumers spooled by the manufacturer.

But spin gear is virtually ignored by the most avid anglers in the United States. A relatively low line capacity and inefficient gears that curb cranking power limit the spin-casting reel to light- to medium-duty freshwater fishing applications and occasional saltwater duties.

R.D. Hull worked for Zebco until his retirement in January 1977. He designed 26 reels and held 35 United States patents and 30 Canadian patents. He was inducted into the Sporting Goods Industry Hall of Fame in 1975, and died in December 1977 at 64.

- Outdoors Editor Brett Pauly contributed to this article.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

PHOTO (1) Early Zebco sales rep Frank Carter got an invite to fish in Cuba with Fidel Castro, who also brought aboard a machine gun to shoot coots and turtles.

Special to the Daily News

(2) HULL