# Muskegon - Auction will lure fishing collectors



## Hamilton Reef (Jan 20, 2000)

Auction will lure fishing collectors

http://www.mlive.com/news/chronicle/index.ssf?/base/news-11/1178808352288770.xml&coll=8

05/10/07 By Robert C. Burns [email protected]

Before he died in December, Lee Eshleman of Wolf Lake had spent more than three decades pursuing a hobby that became something of an obsession -- collecting fishing lures. Or indeed, practically anything related to fishing and hunting. 

On Friday in Muskegon, a local auctioneer will begin to auction off what is said to be one of the largest private collections of fishing equipment ever sold in the U.S. -- more than 3,000 vintage fishing lures and nearly 500 antique and modern folk-art spearing decoys and wood carvings, and much, much more. 

And that's just the beginning.

Midwest Liquidators of Muskegon has scheduled a series of five auctions of Eshleman's collection through the summer. The first, covering vintage fishing equipment, is scheduled for 2-8 p.m. Friday and starting at noon Saturday at the Sherman Banquet Room, 1531 W. Sherman. 

Later auctions and their tentative dates will focus on vintage hunting (June 9), modern fishing (July 13), general antiques (Aug. 4) and modern hunting (Sept. 1), according to Midwest's Tim Fitzsimmons. 

Fitzsimmons has been assisted in the effort by Harold Dickert, a local fishing historian and collector. 

"He was a collector who became a hoarder," Dickert said of Eshleman. 

Jacquelyn Eshleman said her husband got the collecting bug from a cousin in the mid-1970s, and hoped to open an antique store specializing in hunting and fishing equipment after he retired from Delphi Corp. in Coopersville. His death at age 57 short-circuited that dream. 

Eshleman was a native of Grand Haven but spent the last 17 years of his life in the Muskegon area. He was an avid outdoorsman who enjoyed fishing and goose and deer hunting, and was an accomplished skeet and trap shooter, according to his obituary.


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