Steve Salisbury’s workplace these days looks out over woods and water. It’s a calming, quintessential Northwoods view from a walk-out basement where fishing rods in progress share space with lake decor, including boat oars for a handrail. It’s a view of Salisbury’s childhood summers, then of adult summers away from the grind of work and city, and now of a retirement dream of fishing and his one-man-team custom fishing rod business.
For 21 years in Rice Lake, Salisbury’s office looked over a sprawling athletic complex, not a bad view for a high school athletics director/assistant principal. But those days at Rice Lake High School came with meetings, schedules, games and the daily dealings with student-athletes, coaches and fellow administrators. And phone calls.
“The phone doesn’t ring much up here. It’s quiet,” said Salisbury, his smile reaffirming the decision to walk away from his academic career in 2016.
“Up here” is on 129-acre North Lake of the Spider Lake Chain of Lakes about 20 miles east of Hayward, where the blacktop cuts off Highway 77 and gives way to dirt roads twisting, rising and falling through several miles of woods, carrying lake residents to their homes. It has been the full-time home for Salisbury and his wife, Bev, since they left Rice Lake eight years ago upon retiring, Steve from Rice Lake High School and Bev from Royal Credit Union.
Steve now fills his days with fishing, especially musky fishing in the fall, and working on custom fishing rods in his basement.
“I’m down to eight rod orders to fill,” said Salisbury last week, looking forward to more fishing and less work as the gamefish season opens Saturday.
On this day in late April, spring sunshine glitters off North Lake. Salisbury’s boat and floating dock bounce a bit in the gentle breeze. At his workbench, Salisbury bends over a lighted magnifying glass, watching his fingers work with red thread, fastening guides to a rod. Between Salisbury and the wide windows, two other rods are turning, pig-on-a-spit style, their glossy paint drying.
The modest workplace with the great view is home to Great North Custom Rod & Tackle, a business Salisbury and Larry Brown, a fishing buddy and former Rice Lake School District superintendent, started in 2012.
“We said, ‘Why don’t we build our own custom rods?’ So we both threw in a couple of hundred bucks and ordered equipment and supplies,” said Salisbury, who housed the budding gig in the basement of his home near the high school.
The partnership continued until Brown pursued other business interests after leaving his Rice Lake job. Salisbury carried on, and now builds up to 100 custom rods a year in the North Lake house built in the mid 1970s by Steve’s parents, Jim and Helen.
Steve and Bev have updated its exterior with log siding and new windows.
Although the rod work needs to be exact, Great North Rods & Tackle’s business plan is quite informal, succeeding on Salisbury’s personable style and his connections to the fishing world. The plan works.
“Word of mouth is all it’s ever been,” said Salisbury, adding somewhat apologetically that he needs to do more on his Facebook page.
That Facebook page reveals Salisbury’s connections in the fishing community, a lineage of guides and anglers that began with his dad’s acquaintances, and even those of his grandfather, who started the whole family lake thing 100 years ago; in the 1920s, a partnership of Illinois residents bought land on the Spider Lake chain. Those adventurous folks rode northward out of the Chicago area on trains.
(Descendants of that group, including Salisbury, are in the No-Pi-Ming Association, dedicated to preserving the land, water and wildlife on 3,700 acres.)
Professional musky expert Pete Maina of Hayward provides some of that word of mouth via a short video filmed while fishing with Salisbury. Says the animated Maina in a video shot in a boat with Salisbury: “So if you’re interested in a custom rod that’s built for you … Great North Custom Rods.” Maina, with a penchant for pink, shows the Salisbury-made pink rod with the personalized “Pete’s Pink Musky Rod.”
Maina appears regularly on Fox Sports’ John Gillespie Waters and Woods television show, on which Salisbury has also been a guest, and is friends with Christian Laettner, former Duke and NBA basketball star turned musky fishing enthusiast.
“I hope to build a musky rod for Laettner this year,” said Salisbury.
What Salisbury offers are rods customized to each angler’s needs and preferences, whether they are pursuing muskies or panfish, stream trout or ocean fish, using spinning, casting, trolling or flyfishing reels.
Customers can select the rod length, its grips, material, weight balances, guides, design pattern, color, and reel seats. Spiral guide wraps ease the effort in landing big fish.
“The rods are tailored to what they want,” said Salisbury, who invites customers to try out rods. “I tell them to take three rods and try them, play with them, so they know what they want when we build one for them.”
Salisbury notes that Great North is not a big money-making business; the custom rods range a reasonable $200-450. “I just enjoy making them for people. I enjoy seeing pictures of the fish they’ve caught with my rods.”
The rods are called blanks when Salisbury receives them and starts adding the components. The customer can choose a design or decal if so desired. The design material can be as fancy as real snakeskin, which one customer ordered. Personalized decals are epoxied to the rod; businesses and groups often order rods for promotional use, to give to clients, or to donate for fundraisers.
Salisbury often donates rods to charity causes, including the Terry Peterson Fishing Foundation memorial event honoring the legendary Hayward fishing guide while raising money for fishing conservation. Salisbury also collaborates with Tim and Dawn Knutson on the “Owen Knutson Memorial Edition Rod” in memory of the Knutsons’ son Owen, a Chetek-Weyerhaeuser High School student who died in a plane crash in 2017. Sales of the rod help support the Owen Knutson Memorial Fund.
“The fund helps where we can, doing good things for good people,” said Tim Knutson. “We’re really fortunate to have the quality of what Steve does, and his support. He’s the best.”
The rods include the words, “Fly High No.56,” in memory of Owen’s football number. Tim said that nearly a couple of hundred rods have sold, simply by people contacting his family or Salisbury.
Salisbury graduated from Elgin High School in 1975, having spent childhood summers at his parents’ lake home. That summer of ’75 he worked making baits for Eddie Ostling at nearby Moody’s Camp Lodge. And he fished.
“All I wanted to do was fish,” said Salisbury, who skipped playing high school football so he wouldn’t have to return to Elgin for August practices.
In the summer of ’75, he seemingly had all he wanted — fishing and a job making fishing baits. What else was there? He talked his parents into allowing him to stay at the North Lake house after summer, forgoing college, at least for a time. But after October, his parents convinced him to return to Elgin, which led to attending colleges in the Chicago area as he studied his way into the academia world.
In 1995, Salisbury was assistant athletics director and head coach in wrestling and softball at his alma mater Elgin High School. He and Bev were still spending summers at the lake home near Hayward, but northern Wisconsin as a permanent home was beckoning more and more as their children, Allison and Matt, arrived. Did they want to raise their kids in a city atmosphere or northern Wisconsin?
In a twist of fate, Salisbury picked a sheet of school job listings out of a waste basket one day at Elgin High School. There it was: athletics director in Rice Lake, a town not far from Hayward, a town the Salisburys were familiar with. He interviewed, and was offered the job. Simultaneously, Elgin High School offered Salisbury its head athletics director job. It was decision time, everything spinning on the same day.
“It turned out to be an easy decision. Over the years it also proved to be a good decision,” said Salisbury, with Bev smiling in agreement regarding the move to Rice Lake.
Thirty years later, the days of scheduling games and game officials, of hiring coaches, of guiding coaches helping athletes with their education, and of attending sports events on nights and weekends, are all behind Salisbury. He left a legacy of spearheading the multi-million dollar athletic complex project, founding the Rice Lake Sports Hall of Fame, and helping the Rice Lake Warriors be competitive in a Big Rivers Conference with larger schools, while keeping an emphasis on academics.
“That down there (Rice Lake) was good. The people and community are remarkable. But now that’s over. This is the next chapter. I’m living the dream,” said Salisbury, as he walked to the lakeshore with Bev on a sunny April day. He stops and looks around. “It’s quiet here, isn’t it?”
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