Fishing Nets???
When Chris first ventured into my sign shop I must admit that I was completely ignorant about fishing (the only time I had ever fished was at the age of 6 when my Uncle George fashioned a pole out of a twig and attached some string and a safety pin. Much to my chagrin my brother caught the only fish, a 6 inch perch). And fly fishing? Unheard of. With that in mind imagine my first impression of a “fishing net”. My first thought after I heard Chris’ master plan was, “Poor guy, these things are beautiful but he’ll never be able to sell them.”
But I admired the woodwork and determined to do my best to draw his landing net, as I was informed was the proper term. Mine was the first entry into the Christer Brodin, maker of handcrafted landing nets ledger. Note the generously low price of $20 for the logo. I really liked the guy and wanted him to do well.
It didn’t take long before Brodin and Blank formed a sort of partnership. Chris did the woodwork on the signs and I offered him the basement under my sign shop to make his nets and worked on his brochures, etc. We used the only credit card we had at the time, Sears, and purchased a table saw to go along with his old band saw.
Within a year we had married, sold Blank Graphics and decided to move north to Samuels Idaho just south of Canada where I had a 10 acre wooded parcel tucked into the side of a mountain. As it was raw land we quickly had electricity installed and set to work cutting the larch trees on the property to build the pole building that Chris had in mind. We were halfway finished with it when I asked Chris what sort of building he had built before. He said this was his first and I about fainted. Talk about blind faith! It took us 5 months since we did all of the work ourselves but we had the new 1,000’ shop finished to the point that we could start working on our businesses insides. He dug 21 holes 5 foot deep and 2 ½ feet wide with a post hole digger and shovel so that we could install the 20’ poles we had cut.
As both the tiny trailer we bought to live in had only wood heat as did the shop Chris got out his old milk van and using it as a firewood truck rushed to cut enough wood for both places before the snows came.
