Tackling 60 Years in Fish Creek

It’s not unusual to drive through downtown Fish Creek and see a curious crowd gathered around what is arguably Door County’s most unusual vending machine: the live bait dispenser outside Nan & Jerry’s Bait Shop. Planted nonchalantly between the Pepsi machine and the ice dispenser, the live bait machine is a modern technological innovation in a business known for its history: the oldest company in Fish Creek to have been owned and operated by the same family since its inception.

“We used to open at six in the morning,” says Jerry Daubner, who owns Nan & Jerry’s with his wife, Suzie. “With the vending machine, we don’t have to open that early anymore, and that’s a lifesaver.”

Knowledge of the shop’s early wake-up call comes firsthand to Jerry, who has worked at the store since his parents opened Nan & Jerry’s in 1948. Jerry’s mother, Dorothy Daubner, opened the store as a pet project while her husband, Bill, was working in Appleton.

“We started out just selling nightcrawlers,” Jerry remembers. Jerry (for whom the store is named, along with his sister Nancy) has worked in the store since the business’s inception. Meanwhile, his future wife, Suzie, worked at Koepsels’ Mink Ranch, her own family’s business – and, coincidentally enough, the Daubners’ main source of nightcrawlers.

“The mink food would fall out of its containers, and the nightcrawlers would come and eat it,” Suzie explains. “So they were big, juicy ones.” Suzie and her parents supplied the crawlers to the Daubners’ shop, and she and Jerry became friends.

A lot has changed in the six decades since Nan & Jerry’s opened. Back then, a dozen nightcrawlers cost 12 cents. Now, the same product costs $2.75. And Jerry and Suzie’s relationship has developed significantly since the early years when they were loosely connected as childhood business associates: this year they celebrate 43 years of marriage.

When Nan & Jerry’s first opened, it was housed in a modest wooden building across the highway from its current location. In 1967, the store moved across to the west side of the highway, where it still stands. Bill and Dorothy continued to run the store until Jerry and Suzie bought the business from them in 1989. Now, Jerry and Suzie run the business themselves with the help of a few seasonal employees and live in the back portion of the building.

Though they escape temporarily to Florida every winter, Jerry and Suzie have no current plans to retire, and, Jerry says, “want to keep [the store] in our family. Our children will take it over, so it will hopefully be here for a long time.”

By most standards, Nan & Jerry’s has already been around for a long time. This year, the business celebrated its 60th birthday, in honor of which Jerry and Suzie decided to renovate the store. The building on Highway 42 that used to have only one story now boasts two. Indoors, among other renovations, Jerry and Suzie built a platform high above the store’s main counter, from which a wizened old seaman looks down on customers.

That seaman used to reside outside – just one of the figurines sitting upon a bench at the northeast corner of the store. The figurines have been around 25 years, Jerry estimates, and (along with the live bait vending machine) are the most immediately recognizable feature of Nan & Jerry’s.

“For us, those figurines are like Al Johnson’s goats on the roof,” Jerry says. “We have some people who come in every year and take pictures with their kids next to [the figurines], and now there are pictures of their little kids sitting there.”

But it’s not just the figurines that bring customers back from year to year. Jerry and Suzie can easily name several customers who have been coming to the store for close to 50 years, and Jerry credits high standards of customer service with the long-term success of the store.

“Customers are always first, and we always try to keep prices reasonable,” Jerry says. “That’s why they come back here.”

Customers also return for the products they can find at Nan & Jerry’s, which still includes bait and tackle, along with gift and souvenir items like t-shirts (“the first t-shirt shop in Door County,” Suzie points out) and nautical knick-knacks.

Jerry and Suzie have been careful to remain true to the store’s original fishing-centered purposes, updating their tackle collection to keep up with changing times. Door County’s primary fishing targets have shifted over the years (less perch and salmon, still a lot of walleye and smallmouth bass), and the technological standard of the tackle has changed, too.

“We had nothing but hooks and sinkers and bobbers years ago,” Suzie remembers. “Now we have all these fancy plastic worms and stuff like that.”

Jerry agrees: “Things have changed since the simple bamboo pole off the pier.”

Fishing equipment isn’t all that’s changed over the years. Asked what else has altered since his childhood, Jerry says, “Oh, condos. Developments. Some are good, and some are not. But you have to grow; you can’t stay stagnant. We’re very fortunate to be here. Fish Creek is in our blood.”

The live bait vending machine, sitting proud and modern outside one of Fish Creek’s oldest establishments, seems to attest to the truth of Jerry’s statement – to the importance of continuing a tradition and the simultaneous necessity for growth. Firmly dedicated to both these principles, Nan & Jerry’s seems likely to be here (as Jerry puts it) “for a long time.”