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Secret Weapon Founder Bob Rickard
 On September 3, 2007, Bob Rickard passed away at his home in St. Charles, Missouri. For years, Rickard courageously and patiently battled a host of health issues that might have broken the spirit of most men, but throughout he remained upbeat. People who called on Bob to encourage him invariably were uplifted by his positive, light-hearted attitude. His love for family, friends, and fishing was apparent to all. The ingenuity that produced Bob’s truly unique spinnerbait design and his commitment to go an extra mile for his customers are woven into the fabric of the company he founded. He remains an example of how to bless people and handle adversity. Bob Rickard will be fondly remembered and sorely missed by his co-workers, vendors, customers, and friends whose lives he enriched.
Secret Weapon was conceived on clear-flowing Missouri streams and took form on the workbench of this skilled mechanical engineer and ardent angler. Over a span of thirty-five years, Rickard handcrafted a number of innovative baits, testing and perfecting them on the lakes and rivers of America’s heartland.
A law student who became a self-taught mechanical engineer, Rickard was Production Manager for Comet Tool and Die Company, manufacturer of precision components for the aircraft, aerospace, and defense industries. At McDonnell Aircraft his engineering team assisted on projects that included the F-14 Tomcat, F-15 Eagle, and the lunar landing module. To make the most of his few free hours he kept rods rigged and gear packed for short trips down the small streams and rivers of southeast Missouri.
 One characteristic of all spinnerbaits at the time was that the twirling blade “helicoptered” the bait upward. At rapid retrieves it rose to the surface. Bob wanted to be able to keep his lure deeper, and he found opportunity to tackle this engineering problem as he recuperated from open-heart surgery in 1992. Unable to exert himself to even bend even a spinnerbait frame, he used lightweight stainless steel wire to fashion in-line spinners that he used to replace the split ring and swivel-mounted blades. The results in his first test tank (his bathtub) were promising, and when he was finally able to return to the river, he was amazed to learn that his redesign achieved not only greater range of depth and speed, but a long list of other advantages as well.
Rickard had long preferred using in-line spinners for their ability to attract more species of fish, but he acknowledged the superiority of the safety-pin style for fishing around brush, lay-downs, and vegetation. By marrying the two using his patented, no-tool, quick-change universal spinner blade attachment, he introduced the first true innovation in spinnerbaits since the original came out forty-seven years earlier. Coincidentally, St. Louis — the birthplace of the original safety-pin spinnerbait design — was the city of its rebirth as the Secret Weapon Spinnerbait, too.
While fishing from a canoe, another advantage of his design became immediately apparent to Rickard; by swapping blades, he could drastically reduce the number of lures he needed to carry without sacrificing versatility. With a few heads and a handful of blade attachments, he could assemble the perfect spinnerbait for virtually any situation in seconds, without tools.
Even more exciting, though, was his discovery that the free-floating, inline blade assembly produced better vibration and rotated at even slower speeds than swivel-mounted blades. That resulted in more hits, plus he was getting more solid hookups because the blade attachments simply swung out of the way on the strike rather than blocking the hook as convention spinnerbait frames often do. For many years, only family and fishing buddies experienced firsthand the effectiveness of his lures.
After a term as part owner of Manchester Machine and Manufacturing in St. Louis, Rickard built a successful audio and video equipment business. He devoted himself after retirement to the outdoor pursuits he loves and to refinement and perfection of the lure that is earning a place in anglers’ tackle boxes around the world.
Convinced that no other lures came close to matching his own design, in 2001 Rickard began market-testing the commercial potential of his spinnerbait designs. He proved them through rigorous field-testing by experienced guides and tournament anglers from across the United States, identified the patterns that produced best in every region, and then introduced them to the retail market a year later.
Several heart attacks and failing health curtailed Rickard’s level of activity during the last decade, but he delighted in seeing the lures he designed earn the confidence of anglers everywhere and in passing on his experience, insights, fishing lore to others.
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