Instead, he will let another company move jobs to China and continue a trend that has swept through the U.S. But, ultimately, he says, “I really didn’t want to be the architect of just another marketing company of offshore product.” In fact, a quarter of the company’s lures have been fabricated in Mexico since 1990 and Jensen has visited China several times since 1998 to explore possible manufacturing partnerships. “To see Luhr Jensen products made in China would be an abdication of what Luhr Jensen is: an American fishing-tackle manufacturing company,” he says. Phil Jensen, a spry, athletic-looking man with the garrulity of a salesman, says he sold the $9 million company because he’s turning 70 in July and didn’t have the stomach to do what he says is required to stay competitive: make his products overseas. For the first time since 1932, when a 45-year-old angler started handstamping metal lures in a backyard chicken coop, a brand synonymous with Hood River will no longer be produced here.

Hood River will lose about 140 jobs, roughly one-tenth of the region’s manufacturing positions and the most layoffs by any local company since Golden Northwest Aluminum shuttered two smelters in 2001. In a blow to Hood River’s improving economy - and, to a certain extent, its pride - Jensen last fall sold his fishing-lure business and its brand names to the world’s leading luremaker, the Finnish company Rapala, which in June will start making Luhr Jensen lures in a four-story concrete factory in southern China.

Soon his family’s 74- year-old Hood River company will be but a memory, too. Peanut figurine, a 1950s Yashica camera, a cigarette lighter adorned with the image of Mao Tse Tung.Įach item, says the nostalgic president of fishing-gear manufacturer Luhr Jensen & Sons, holds a cherished memory. Behind him sit bookshelves chock full of random bric-a-brac: a plastic Mr. From his desk, Phil Jensen can look out across the Columbia River to the very spot where he and his father cast for salmon in the 1940s.

Flat fish by luhr jensen