After World War II ended and the last of the Liberty ships were launched and outfitted, the South Portland shipyard was a massive, vacant complex of buildings, just waiting for a new life. We’ve written previously about some of the larger employers who moved into the yard over the years, like Portland Machine Tool Works, South Portland Engineering, and General Electric. In recent weeks, we’ve been looking at some of the seafood processors who moved into the West Yard around the outfitting building and piers.

Let’s take a look this week at an interesting company known as LobLure, Inc., and its founder, Osborn Curtis, Jr.

Osborn M. Curtis, Jr. was born in 1889 in Manhattan. He was the son of a school teacher and did not grow up in the seafaring life. After serving in World War I, he became a salesman for a paper company.

In Theodore M. Prudden’s book, “About Lobsters,” he offers some great insight into the origins of the company and how it operated. Regarding how the company got started: “The idea of manufactured lobster bait dates back to early World War II when two yachtsmen of Hingham, MA, veterans of World War I, Dudley Baker and Osborne [sic] M. Curtis, awoke to the help lobstermen might give to the war effort. They realized that lobstermen, who put to sea nearly every day in the week, were in a position to supplement our Naval Intelligence. Lobstermen see the burnt wreckage floating ashore, the bodies drifting in, or the strange light out on a point. So these two men sold our Navy the idea of taking them on as civilian Navy intelligence men, and they organized lobstermen from Eastport to Connecticut into an information reporting group.

“This work involved meeting many of the top liners among the lobstermen, and of course, learning something about lobstering and its problems. Curtis was particularly impressed with the problem of lobster bait – its smell, its cost, its likelihood of causing infection, and its seasonal scarcity. So Curtis set out to develop a manufactured bait.”

Osborn Curtis, Jr. enlisted the help of his friend and sailing partner from the Hingham Yacht Club, Theodore M. “Ted” Prudden.

Prudden was a mechanical engineer, a graduate of Yale University, and an inventor with several patents to his name already. Together they began to experiment with ideas for artificial lobster bait. They applied for a patent for artificial bait in January, 1945, then filed a second application in 1946 (both patents were issued in 1948).

Since neither Curtis nor Prudden were lobstermen, any tests of bait involved someone (usually Osborn Curtis) going out with actual lobstermen when the lobster traps were baited, and then going out again when they went back to haul the traps. All findings were meticulously recorded in their search for a viable artificial bait.

With the initial belief that it was the fish oil in the commonly-used herring and menhaden baits that was attractive to lobsters, they started with a product that was a sand-filled cloth bag, saturated with herring oil. The product did not work, so they tried again.

After hearing about a lobsterman who put a punctured can of sardines in his trap and caught lots of lobsters, LobLure tried its own test with cans of sardines. They tried sardines packed in peanut oil, olive oil, or soybean oil, with holes in the cans to allow the oil to leak out slowly, but they found this also was not a very effective bait.

The number of tests that were performed is impressive. They tried substituting molasses for oil. They tried keeping the cans of sardines in warm conditions to encourage bacterial growth. They tried mixing redfish oil into ground fish. They tried rolling up cotton pads, wrapping them with net and saturating them with herring oil. According to Prudden, “they tested the widely held belief that a brick soaked in kerosene ‘will fish like a fool.’ It won’t. It will fish, but only 60 percent as well as redfish.”

After a few years of testing on their own, Curtis and Prudden felt they were honing in on a solution/product. In 1947, they established LobLure, Inc., raised capital through the sale of company stock (much of it to Osborn Curtis’ friends in Hingham), and they set up the business in the West Yard of the South Portland shipyard. They leased Building 17, the former carbide/acetylene building, which was located adjacent to Crib 3 where the George J. Kern Company was operating.

They were now looking at components of dead fish as their answer to a synthetic bait. They hired a biological chemist, Dr. David Miller, to help find an answer. They found that lobsters like two of the main chemicals found in dead fish: acetic acid and ammonium compounds.

The challenge was to find a carrier that would hold these chemicals under water long enough for a lobster to come and find them. There were many problems with artificial bait related to the temperature of the water and where the lobster trap would land (in a calm spot or in a spot with tides and currents). They needed to find a carrier that would not dissolve too fast (and lose its potency) or too slow (and not attract lobsters at all). They tried dispensing the bait in a salt-water soap cake, in coco butter, and in a paste bait. They tried dispensing the bait in wooden bait boxes and in wire and screen containers.

According to an article that Prudden later published in the May, 1959, edition of Maine Coast Fisherman, they then turned to Dr. George J. Marvin in MIT’s chemistry department. Marvin “modified the formulas, but his hands were tied since he was not given a wide scope to find any attractant, but only to improve the line of development that LobLure was then using. Money was running out. Not only did LobLure have the expense of its plant, but it had to pay lobstermen for testing its baits.”

The article went on to say, “Finally, Dr. Frederic H. Frost of the S.D. Warren Paper Co., Cumberland Mills, ME, was called in to solve a problem of a bait which would fish very well at times, but which would not fish well on its next compounding. Uniformity of manufacture was assured, but the same bait continued to fish with irregular results.”

In spite of all of their efforts, after using up all of its capital, LobLure ceased operation in 1949. According to Prudden, “six years of work, over $30,000 spent, 4,000 supervised tests made of some 350 formulas, and no commercial results.” They were not able to manufacture a bait that worked better than the traditional redfish, herring, menhaden or other fish baits.

There is still a need for artificial lobster bait. Many have tried.

In 2016, a company in North Carolina was testing its own synthetic bait – a calcium-based tablet, shaped like a hockey puck, that would dissolve in water and give off the smell of decaying fish. In 2019, another research group in Canada was testing its own version. Although lobsters are known to eat anything on the ocean bottom, they appear to be picky about the bait used to lure them into a lobster trap. There does not appear to be any commercially-viable artificial lobster bait on the market today.

Note: If you have any photographs, documents, or artifacts related to South Portland’s past, we would love to hear from you. South Portland Historical Society can be reached at 207-767-7299, by email at sphistory04106@gmail.com, or by mail at 55 Bug Light Park, South Portland, ME 04106.

Kathryn Onos DiPhilippo is executive director of the South Portland Historical Society. She can be reached at sphistory04106@gmail.com.

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