Tom
Freddy Phantom and his two friends say Hi!
Freddy doesn’t appear in your 54 catalog but it looks like he came out in full force in 55.
Many company’s in the 50s /60s had corporate mascots.
Phantom came out with Freddy Phantom at a time when “Casper” the friendly Ghost was on the Big Screen in movie theaters/Paramount Studios cartoons 50-59 .
Both of my rods feature Freddy Phantom making them (I would hypothesize) 1955+up rods.
I would contend Phantom’s are “lost classics” that do not get their due since most who knew about or actually fished these wonderful rods are most likely not around and most definitely not on this forum...yet ..
Terrible shame that an early pioneer of glass rods has Sorta been thrown to the pile of obscurity due to lack of knowledge/history and pure ignorance/bias of what constituted a good fishing rod for its day with the technology at hand ..
These phantoms have great action and are valued members of my growing collection .
I’m a collector for sure but if it’s in my collection it
“ gets bent” on the water not just on the lawn.
If folks do not think they are worthy of collector status ..
I’d say they must be revarnishing rods in unventilated spaces..
Hopefully some more info or later catalogs and rods will start showing as the word gets out a lil more .
Thanks Again for posting your 54’ catalog.
The timeline has started..
Very nicely layed out and looks like a very quality printing.
Was it printed on gloss paper?
Very cool stuff indeed !!