Was watching some older tom Miranda trapping videos and saw mark June making a pocket set and was using a lure called “ Mr mink” did mark make it or was it another maker??
I went to his website but didn’t see it listed.
Was curious about its effectiveness and possibly trying to give it a try this season but I can’t seem to find it available anywhere.

This is all I found on a Google search

"Mr. Mink" was a lure that I made with Bud Hall's mink lure formula. Rick Hemsath started using the name after Barringer Brand lures went out of business. I never actually owned Barringer Brand lures, it was owned by my son Ben who was still in high school at the time. In the mid-1990s, he got involved in other things such as football and girls so the lure company languished and eventually went by the wayside.

We sold quit a bit of the lures at conventions through the 1990s. We also had "10,000 Fox" which was also a formula given to me by Bud Hall. I named it that because he had caught over 10,000 fox on it. I added "Castor Blaster," a beaver lure and one other which I forget.

Bud Hall had a license plate on his car that said Mr. Mink, which was given to him by his daughter as a gift but he hated it. He liked to keep a low profile of course. He wasn't well known for the world class mink and fox trapper that he was until I did a story in the Trapper Magazine about him and the story was called Mr. Mink. He booked so many instructions from that story that he gave me his lure formulas as a way to thank me for helping him increase his meager income in his later years.

We became good friends and I had a lot of respect for Bud, a man who made a living off the land his entire life.

Great story, Bernie

I love to read that type of nostalgia

Same here! Thanks Bernie!

Good info and I vividly remember those days...good ...better times for fur trapping for sure.
Did Ben ever sell those recipes?

great story.

We lost the lure formulas when my office burned in November 8, 2001.

The lures were being bottled for us by JR and sons, and he's the only one that had backup copies of the formulas. I called him a few years ago and he did not know what happened to them. Sad.

That's too bad....I used Mr. Mink on my traplines and had good success. I especially liked it on my red, gray fox and coyote remakes.

Mid 90's I was in college at Maryville MO. Just started trapping and drove an hour or so up into Iowa for a traps materials auction. Believe it was Bud Halls when family was selling off his equipment. Still remember all the 110s set up with different types of anchoring devices,. Never have I seen the amount of traps offered at another auction in my life. Anyone remember where Bud Hall lived? What town?
I looked it up - Nashua Iowa - not the town I was thinking of........

Yes Bud was from Nashua but he continued to trap into the 2000's. I believe he died around 2008.

A little bit more about Bud: He made a living doing anything that could produce an income in the outdoors. Commercial fishing on the Mississippi, harvesting ginseng, trapping turtles, harvesting morels, etc. He knew where the clam beds were on the Mississippi River and he had a market where he would harvest clams (freshwater mussels I believe they are) and sell the meat to one place then sell the shells to a market in Japan. He trapped literally tens of thousands of furbearers through his life. His catches of red fox and mink particularly were mind-boggling.

The man literally got up every morning and went outside, and managed to produce enough income through his life to raise a family and provide a good living. He was humble and soft spoken, but incredibly knowledgeable about the ways of the animals. There are precious few men like him these days.

The government (fish and wildlife agencies) wont let a man do that anymore. Way too many restrictions.

Hate to hear that the formula was lost.
Ty Bernie for a fantastic response.
Lots of lures that have came and gone throughout the years,,, especially in my time .
I remember the very first mink lure I ever bought.. was from a guy named muskrat mark,, somewere in the northern part of Illinois probably around 1987-88 time frame ( I’m trying to remember correctly) the name of the it was minky mink.
Really musky smell to it.

Another great report Bernie!
John that was Muskrat Mark Sekulich...great guy!
He was good friend of the Kaatz Bros. and family.
I think he moved to Minnesota???

Mike, I actually found him on Facebook recently,, I added him and we talked a little bit about that time.
I remember his catalog that had some tips .

Bub gave me his Fox and Mink Formulas in the early 80s. He knew I was a up and coming lure maker . I have notice others have ruined his formula by adding new ingredients to it. To me that is Flat out sinful to change a man's formula as GREAT as Bud was. Spent hundreds of hours listening to Bud tell his stories. I still have the formulas. Like I said I listened not thinking I know it all like a lot of people these days. Bud was a wealth of Knowledge. I am fortunate to take lessons from him and to know him. My wife's family lived next to him.

Good read, thanks for sharing

Went down to Nashua in the mid nineties and took instruction from Bud. Still can remember stopping at a bridge over a small creek and Bud seeing mink tracks and dancing a little jig and being fired up. He was probably mid seventies at that point and had beat cancer a few years earlier. He had a tremendous attitude, great work ethic and a love of trapping. The last of a dying breed who made his living off the outdoors.

When Bud died, his wife sent me a sheet of handwritten ingredients to a mink lure. It was not the same formula as the one I was making, so he apparently had multiple formulas. I had no use for it at the time so I framed it and sent it to the NTA to auction at the convention. I never did hear who bought it or how much money it brought. I figured someone would get a kick out of owning a piece of notebook paper with a mink lure formula in Bud's own handwriting. I was very disappointed in the NTA that I did not even get a thank you or an acknowledgement for donating something to the fundraising auction.

Being a former student of Buds I had visited with him a couple times after his final season where he had caught 63 mink out of a few traps in a couple weeks, all the while sliding down the banks/crawling back up them because that’s all he could do. After Bud died, I helped his wife Norma sell all of his trapping stuff at the NTA in Marshaltown, Iowa. He didn’t have much stuff left, about 30 1 1/2 pinch pan coils with 3 feet added chain and his preferred drag, a few Blake and Lamb 44 double longsprings with 8-10 feet of chain(his preferred beaver trap) some other miscellaneous stuff like a few stretchers, knives and such.

Bud never threw anything away. He had a rusted out washtub in the attic of his garage and it was full of his old hip boots that he had saved for patches and such. He also had quite a few sun visors from his various trapping vehicles(his favorite during their time were Pinto station wagons)that had a series of hash marks on them. This was his way of counting how many mink he caught and in a couple of them looked to be from very old vehicles so we had suspected that these were from his fox catches because there were 100’s and 100’s of the hash marks and two of them appeared to be both the right and left side Sun visors. We sold them too.

He had a few books left which we sold, too. Then I helped negotiate the sale of his book transcript and rights to it to Sterling Fur Company.

I too have his mink and fox lure formulas but have never made them up but a fellow Bud Hall student and friend of mine has and uses them successfully.