Spring is here. The weather is getting warmer. Anglers are flocking to lakes and rivers.

To catch fish, you need good lures. Kerry Thompson, a retired high school teacher and former star athlete at Shelbyville Central High School has some handmade ones you might be interested in. Approximately six hundred at last count.

Like most artists Thompson has a studio. He has converted his garage into a space where he painstakingly creates lures of all shapes, sizes and colors. He is a fisherman as the garage door covered with fishing rods will attest.

He uses his own lures and admits they are not only colorful and imaginative, but they do work.

“I’ve caught some nice smallmouth bass with them,” Thompson said.  “I do a lot of crappie fishing now because the guy I go fishing with, Don  Everett, from Flat Creek, likes to go crappie fishing.”  

Thompson balks at being classified as an artist despite the imagination he uses in his hobby.

“I am a terrible artist,” Thompson said. “I can’t draw a straight line. That’s the  truth. I can’t.

“This is just a relaxing thing for me to do. I have my own molds. I tie jigs. The only thing I haven’t tried yet that I might try is making molded plastic worms and putting all the colors in.”

When pressed that the creative elements of his hobby mean he is a true artist he responds simply with an “I guess.”

He uses a variety of  tricks to enhance the looks of his lures like fine netting for designs and a variety of paints and sheens. He has shelves and drawers filled with paint of all types and colors.

He is influenced by fellow lure developers, but he also likes to experiment with different finishes.

“I just have picked stuff up on YouTube,” Thompson said. “Some of it I have just tried.”

He taught history for 10 years at Shelbyville Central High School after spending  29 years as a high school teacher in Alabama. He also has been a coach at each of his teaching stops.

A native of Shelbyville, Thompson was a quarterback for then head coach Doug Langston, and a left-handed pitcher for coach John Stanford at Central High School. He also played for Stanford on an American Legion team.

Thompson has always loved Shelbyville and not just for the effect it had on his life athletically.

“I was very fortunate to have  grown up in this town,” Thompson said. “I have always considered myself lucky to have been born and raised here.

“It’s big enough to have some conveniences, but not big enough to have all the crime you have in the bigger cities.”

He attended Jacksonville State in Jacksonville, Ala., where he was a pitcher. He played in the NCAA Division II World Series in 1973.

“We were put out by Ithaca, New York,” Thompson said. “College baseball was a lot of fun.”

“My college coach Rudy Abbott won over 1,000 games. I was blessed to play baseball for two of the greatest coaches of all time and two great human beings in coach Abbott and coach Stanford. Both are Hall of Fame baseball coaches.”

Right now, Thompson’s fishing lures are his hobby and not a business. He has occasionally allowed some of his lures to be auctioned off for charity, but he doesn’t actively sell them.

“I might do that one day,” Thompson said. “I’ve got so many now I would never be able to fish with all of them.”