Story by Ken Duke
Penicillin, the X-ray, Viagra and stainless steel all have their origins in “happy accidents.” We wouldn’t have any of them except for dedicated researchers working long hours in search of something else, who realized that what they found instead had real value. And in these cases, it was value far greater than what they were hoping to find in the first place.
Luckily, happy accidents are not restricted to the medical and industrial fields. They happen in fishing, too, and if you’re a bass angler you’ve already benefitted.
Maybe the best example of a happy accident in the fishing world occurred in the late 1980s at Zoom Bait Company in tiny Bogart, Georgia. Today, Zoom is one of the largest manufacturer of soft plastic lures in the American bass market, but in the 1980s, the company was still making a name for itself.
Zoom was the brainchild of Ed Chambers, a gaming machine salesman and avid bass angler who couldn’t find the bait designs he wanted to fish with, so he took matters into his own hands and started making lures himself.
Chambers was a design genius. In fact, I’d argue that he’s the greatest designer and developer of soft plastic baits in history, though some might make a pitch for Nick Creme, who created the first soft nylon baits in the late 1940s. Creme built the canvas, but Chambers created masterpieces.
Through the years, Chambers designed hundreds of different bait styles, including many that have become staples in the bass market. He designed the industry’s standard lizard, the Finesse Worm, the Trick Worm, the Speed Worm, the Fluke, the Brush Hog and the Horny Toad. These baits define and mostly created their categories, and they’re just some of the highlights of Chambers’ amazing career.
But his most far-reaching and enduring contribution to bass fishing and the tackle industry was the result of a happy accident.
If you’re not familiar with the injection molding process, know that molten plastic is forced through tubes and into molds where it cools and hardens to the consistency we use for soft plastic fishing lures. A production run could create tens of thousands of baits or just a few, but it generally consists of a single color or pattern.
When you finish running one color and start the next, there will be a batch of baits that combine the two hues as the machine clears itself. For example, if you finish a run of black baits and start a run of white, the batch in between will contain a bit of black, a little white and a lot of gray. Ordinarily, this concoction is discarded or gets thrown into a bin and is later used to create black lures.
In the late ’80s, two of the most popular colors in Zoom’s catalog — in the entire bass chasing world, for that matter — were watermelon and pumpkin.
“We had finished with watermelon and had started to run pumpkin,” Chambers told me years ago, “and the batch in between looked pretty good. Rather than throw it away, I took it fishing. It looked really natural in the water, and the bass loved it!”
He called it “Green Pumpkin.”
Chambers knew he had a fish-catching color on his hands, but he couldn’t have had any idea just how valuable Green Pumpkin would become to Zoom or how successful it would be in the bass industry.
Today, Zoom is a top manufacturer of soft plastic baits. They’ve grown from Chambers’ garage to a 40,000 square foot facility with state-of-the-art equipment manned by over 100 full-time employees who make 74 different lures in about 500 different colors.
Yet Green Pumpkin makes up more than half of their production and sales.
That’s amazing, but it’s not just Zoom. Among bass tackle manufacturers, Green Pumpkin is more ubiquitous than black, and it’s the most popular color of virtually every soft plastic manufacturer in North America. Coast to coast, border to border, Florida, largemouth, smallmouth and spotted bass love Green Pumpkin.
So, too, do the best anglers. I’ve polled them through the years, asking, “If you could only use one color of soft plastics, what would it be?”
More than 90 percent have said Green Pumpkin.
And Green Pumpkin doesn’t stop with soft plastics. Over the past two decades it’s made inroads with skirted lures like jigs, bladed jigs and spinnerbaits. Many manufacturers are now making hard baits — like crankbaits — in Green Pumpkin. They catch bass, too, and all have their origin in the happy accident at Zoom Bait Company.
Before Green Pumpkin, worm colors in the bass market were like fashions — here today, passé tomorrow. Black was the first color to dominate, but only because it had no competition in the early days. Like the old Ford Model T, you could have any color worm you wanted … as long as it was black. Red came along later, then Tom Mann expanded the palette with his Jelly Worm “flavors.” In 1973, Bill Dance told us that any color worm was fine … as long as it was blue.
Strawberry, Black Grape, Motor Oil and even Scuppernong all had their time in the spotlight, but no color can touch Green Pumpkin for popularity or longevity. For a couple of generations now, it’s been a must-have color and the default choice for discriminating anglers.
Almost as astonishing is the durability of the name “Green Pumpkin.” What started at Zoom has been copied by virtually every other manufacturer. They mimic the color and the name in an industry where companies scramble to find any excuse or opportunity to differentiate. They know their customers will ask for it by name and will accept no substitute.
Ed Chambers got it right. It may have been an accident, but he knew a winner when he saw it, and he built an iconic company on innovative designs and one very special color.
Sadly, Chambers is gone. He passed away in 2018 at the age of 78, but his wonderful designs and Green Pumpkin will outlast us all.
