Brainerd Real Estate Blog

It was reported  in the Brainerd Dispatch today that the Lindy Little Joe Company was sold to Pradco which is a leading player in the fishing industry. Before I moved here in 1994 my friends and I came to the Brainerd area every summer for the great fishing. For about 15 years we rented a cabin at Little Hawkeye Resort on Pelican Lake. Clyde and Mille were the nicest people you could meet and our week was filled with memories of fishing Pelican and Little Pelican lakes. I have scrapbooks full of pictures of fish we caught, us sitting at the beach, sleeping in the hammock, having a cold one with Clyde and the list goes on. We would leave Sioux City Iowa at 10:00 pm travel all night just to get the full vacation time at the cabin. We would stop atMarv Koep’s sometimes at 3 in the morning ring the bell and Marv would come down to the shop sell us some bait and give us the tips on how deep and what they were biting on.  I enjoyed that so much that in 1994 while working in Sioux City at Scheels Sporting Goods as the fishing department supervisor when I was offered a job at Marv Koep’s to work in  retail. At that time Marv had just sold his business to the Duke Fischer family and I met Duke while staying at Craguns and attending the CSI tackle buying show  earlier that spring. My son Aaron and I spent many a day working the bait tank at the store listening to hundreds of stories from families of three and sometimes four  generations of the days they spent in the Brainerd area fishing.  That’s all lost now. The Koep’s building in now owned by Dondelinger and sits empty. If it wasn’t for Fish lectroncis in the back of that lot and people like Jim Wentworth that era would be gone completely. The Nisswa guides are a shadow of what they once were and  the overall fishing industry locally is at an all time low . So when they announced the sale of Lindy Little Joe I was really saddened not for them but for me and all the old diehards that remember the ways things were and why we live and moved here. Fishing put Brainerd on the map now what are we noted for?? The movie “Fargo”