The crash of 1929 and the Great Depression brought disaster to all the Orvis
enterprises. The lathes and milling machines were silenced. The Equinox Hotel
properties suffered financial collapse in 1938, after a series of painfully
slow years. By 1939, the Orvis Company was down to two employees, "Bert" Orvis
and Hallie Galaise, the last of Mary's fly tiers. Little inventory remained,
and day-to-day money came in from repairing bicycles and tennis rackets. At
that low point the company was purchased by a group of investors, headed by
Dudley C. Corkran.
Charles F. Orvis started his company when the American sportsman was seeking
civilized adventure in the wilderness at his doorstep. The movement was so
insistent and so attractive it in turn sponsored a massive American sporting
goods business. The customer was the upper middle-class American who Winslow
Homer painted, casting his flies by an Adirondack waterfall, climbing mountains
in New Hampshire, riding in the middle seat of a birch bark canoe, and always
surrounded by the romance of the great outdoors. Such customers and their times
had made the Orvis Company prosperous.
By the 1930s, however, the north woods hotels were rotted and empty, and the
grandchildren of Winslow Homer's people put the old summer home on the market
and turned to other pleasures. One by one the names of the old prestige tackle
makers disappeared from the advertising pages of the sporting magazines. Orvis
was well on its way to becoming a memory when Dudley Corkran assumed
leadership.
DUDLEY C. ("DUCKIE") CORKRAN FIRST VISITED Manchester in 1907. He was eleven
years old and already an enthusiastic angler , and golfer. Golf was a fairly
new sport in America at that time, but it assumed an importance in Manchester's
tourist economy much greater than that of fishing. He visited frequently after
that, coming from Baltimore and, later, from Philadelphia, both to fish and to
golf (winning tournaments twice). He became familiar with the Orvis operation
and arranged to purchase what was left of the company in 1939.
Duckie Corkran bought a building, some well worn machinery, and a time-honored
name. His first task was to organize, find personnel, and supplement the stock
of materials remaining in the old building. Wesley Jordan of Lynn,
Massachusetts, a veteran of the rod building business, who had started with the
Cross Rod Company in 1919 and later moved to South Bend, became the new plant
superintendent and began putting the machinery in order. Hallie Galaise, who
had been taught fly tying as a young girl by Mary Orvis Marbury, continued as
the company fly tier. In 1941 the new Orvis Company employed seven people.
