When Greenville Steel Car shut down in the late '80s and John "Jake" Satonica of Jamestown was out of a job, he decided to use his love of fishing and carve out a niche of his own.

Literally.

"I knew how to fish and I knew how to make fishing lures and I needed a job," said the 65-year old. "You just get a hunk of wood and whittle on it."

Satonica's whittling on hunks of wood is now a full-time business that yields 800 to 1,000 lures a day and are sold as far away as Europe, Canada, and Mexico, and in stores nationwide such as Gander Mountain, Cabelas, and Dick's Sporting Goods.

"When we started, it was basically a muskie business," Satonica said, adding that he had been creating his own lures since the sixties. "It was just trial and error. Back then, you didn't have a selection. You had a daredevil and a pikie minnow and that's all there was. There weren't lures that big. There still aren't."

The lures range from 13 inches for muskie and saltwater fish at the longest to 3 inches for walleyes, bass and trout.

"They're used to catch muskie, bass, salmon, walleye and trout, and the fish out in the ocean you can't even pronounce and they're catching them too," he said.

Satonica claims its the size, the action of the lures and their color that makes them so popular.

"The action is the way the lures wiggle through the water and the color combination is very complicated," he said. "We definitely have the most colors in a lot of different layers. You've got to stay ahead of the game. It's what makes us one of the best in the market."

The lures are no longer wood but plastic and assembled by hand in the shop on East State Road in South Shenango Township, Crawford County, just a few miles out of Jamestown, by seven full-time and 14 part-time employees.

The business also includes Hi-Tec Custom Painting, which is contracted by Grandma Lures to air brush the tackle in a variety of colors.

"Some of the lures are painted to look like perch, black suckers, shad, orange tiger and fire tiger," said Satonica, who also pointed out some lures painted like rainbow trout and the American flag.

"Down the line, we'd like to make bigger lures and smaller ones with more variety; and possibly ice fishing lures," Satonica said.

Though this business is only about a couple of years old, the couple have been in the lure business on and off for the past 20 years, but not to this magnitude.

"To get started in business is tough, but this time it was a freebie, because of the word of mouth we had from before," Satonica said. "When we went back into business, some of our customers were down to their last (Grandma) lure and they were afraid to use it. They'd tell us, 'If we can't buy anymore, we're not going to Canada to fish."

A silent partner and hunting buddy, Dr. Michael Jurenovich, of Jamestown and Warren, Ohio, who owns the 26-acre property and the building in which the business runs out of, lured the Satonicas back into the tackle business.

"He encouraged us to try it again," Satonica said.

And now with business reeling along nicely, he also tries to make sure he takes time to do the one hobby he loves the most and which got him involved in the lure-making business in the first place.

"Other times in business, I could be working around the clock," Satonica said. "Now I leave at 4. Any little problem can wait. I'll be getting in my boat and fishing."

For more information about Grandma Lures, call (724) 932-5380.