Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 15, 1993 TAG: 9308150053
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GARY ROBERTSON RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
DATELINE: CHILHOWIE LENGTH: Medium
Gillenwater's company, Fish Tales Inc. in Chilhowie, processed and packaged 100,000 premium Canadian night crawlers in July, which is one of its busiest times. His distributors probably packaged an additional 150,000.
Those figures don't include the 100,000 or so meal worms - from the larvae of meal beetles - the company will sell this year. Nor do they include the company's latest product, red worms, which are briskly selling at about 4,000 a month.
"Red worms are going to be big," Gillenwater said. "People keep wanting them, and we keep running out of them."
Gillenwater was in Richmond recently giving away several thousand worms for an anti-drug program called "Get Hooked on Fishing."
Wormwise, it was a drop in the bucket to the tens of thousands he contributes annually to good causes that involve fishing and children.
"We hope they'll get interested in fishing . . . and our good old Canadian night crawlers are the best bait for fishing there is."
The 39-year-old Smyth County resident has been able to devote full time to the worm business for two years.
"It just took off," he said. Now, with distributors in three states, he's selling to more than 500 stores, with dozens being added each year, he said.
For he and his wife, Wilma, a third-grade school teacher, the success couldn't have come too soon. They started the business somewhat out of desperation - "something for me to do" after being injured in an industrial accident, Gillenwater said.
Little by little, the business grew. Gillenwater supplemented it with a string of temporary and part-time jobs.
Gillenwater, who grew up fishing, started with meal worms after realizing that trout were going for them. He finally persuaded a few store owners to take a chance on selling the bait homegrown in Southwestern Virginia.
They were a hit. But it still wasn't enough to make a living, Gillenwater said.
His break came with night crawlers - earthworms that emerge from their burrows at night.
"We had a store owner who said he wanted the best night crawlers, no matter what they cost," Gillenwater said.
That's when the idea for "premium night crawlers" came about. After some research, he went after Canadian night crawlers.
But he wanted to further raise the quality of the crawlers, and the only way he could think to do that was inspecting them by hand.
"We have worm inspectors," Gillenwater said. Each of the 500 night crawlers on a tray is inspected and graded. Only the best get the "premium" label, he said.
"We only get one-half of 1 percent returned . . . that's usually because the store owners freeze them. But we have a 100 percent guarantee - we back every worm."
Many of the night crawlers that don't meet Fish Tales' standards go to the worm giveaways. In 1993, the company projects that it will sell 1.75 million night crawlers.
"And how do you count a million worms? One at a time," Gillenwater said.
The results of all his efforts was a boom in premium fishing worms, he said. Where once Gillenwater had to peddle his products door to door, "now we have distributors who come to us. We don't have to go looking for them."
Gillenwater envisions the Fish Tales trademark reaching bait stores across the nation. Of course, he has also learned that success has a price. The man with a million worms at his disposal doesn't have time to go fishing anymore.
"I didn't even get my license this year . . . maybe next."
by CNB