The origin tale of Dick Cabela, who founded the outdoor-goods chain Cabela’s, and who died recently, at the age of seventy-seven, begins with fishing flies. In 1961, according to company lore, Cabela bought forty-five dollars’ worth of hand-tied lures to sell at his family’s furniture store, in Nebraska. Customers weren’t interested, so Cabela bought an ad in the magazine Sports Afield, offering five flies in exchange for twenty-five cents in postage. When people wrote in to redeem the offer, he put their names on a mailing list, which he blasted with three-page-long catalogues of fishing gear.
The growth of Cabela’s reflects Americans’ odd relationship with the outdoors: we mythologize it even as we pave it over.
LINK (via: The New Yorker)