When I was a kid, my dad would pick a weekend for a catfishing trip to Lake Texoma, giving me plenty of notice so I’d catch plenty of longline baits. The pond I liked to get baited from was full of 3 inch black and bluegill perch at 3/4 pound each. They liked crickets. Many crickets.
It took me an hour after dark to chase down and catch a dozen crickets to catch the next morning. Then the perch ate them so fast I finished it in half an hour or so. I had to find a better way to stock up on enough crickets to catch enough perch to run a line of 100 hooks at least four times. That requires a lot of perch and even more crickets.
I noticed that the crickets I needed were on the ground, dead, at the corner gas station every morning. They were stacked under the light that stayed on all night. Nowhere else were they so numerous.
That gave me a brainstorm. I went down to the grocery store and asked for a box of oranges. Don’t laugh…oranges arrived in wooden crates in the mid-1950s. The slats didn’t cover the entire bottom of the crate, but they did allow airflow. I covered the box with window screen wire on the bottom and sides to prevent crickets from escaping. I then made a fitted frame covered with the same screen wire for a lid and placed it on the box.
The box was half filled with lettuce leaves torn from the grocer and placed outside against the garage wall with the lid open. This was the trap.
The lure was a simple invention…an extension cord with a garage trouble light plugged into it. The key was the red light bulb. The red light was placed so that the light fell on the bed of lettuce in the box.
Crickets swarmed in the red light of night, landing on the lettuce where they remained munching happily all night. All he had to do was quietly turn off the light and close the lid of the box at dawn and he had thousands of free crickets.
My live tank at the pond was filled on time and many church fish fry were stocked with fine catfish from that Lake Texoma artisanal fishery.