There are many thousands of anglers around the world who dream of competing on the Bassmaster Elite Series.
The thought is that they’d much rather be fishing for a living than answering the bell five or six days a week at their jobs in sales, or construction, or anything else.
While few would question that Bassmaster Elite Series pros have great gigs, some fans don’t realize that being a full-time angler involves much more than fishing. Pros are expected to attend trade shows and conventions. There are demands from sponsors and the media. And, of course, there are the countless miles pros spend crisscrossing the continent trying to hook big bass, and if they’re lucky, some pretty big money, too.
But even if life on the Elite Series meant catching lunkers all day, every day, Oklahoma pro Luke Palmer isn’t sure he’d take the bait.
Sure, he loves catching big bass as much as any of the 74 other men competing on the Elite Series this year, but Palmer, 28, is devoted to another passion back home that he can’t imagine leaving for any great length of time.
C & C Hardware first opened its doors in the tiny town of Coalgate, Okla., in 1940. The store was founded by men named Corsini and Cushenberry, the former being Palmer’s maternal great-grandfather. The store was passed to the next generation of his family, and eventually Palmer’s uncle Joe Avanzini and his own father Tammy Palmer became proprietors.
Now, Luke Palmer is a co-owner of the landmark “mom and pop” business that defies the ages in the community of about 1,800 people in south-central Oklahoma. It’s a destination for everyone in the town that has exactly zero stoplights and zero strangers.
While many similar family stores across America have given way to big box conglomerates, C & C remains a small-scale force in Coalgate. Not only does the store sell hardware as its name suggests, but It also carries appliances, furniture and housewares, and it boasts automotive and gardening sections as well.
C & C is not a big place, but because of its wide variety of goods, it’s where most everyone in Coalgate finds what they need. And because Coalgate itself is remote (about two hours from the nearest metropolitan areas of Oklahoma City, Dallas and Fort Smith, Ark.) people come to C & C from neighboring rural communities, too.
It’s there, among C & C’s aisles of lug nuts, lawnmowers, paint cans and PVC fittings that Luke Palmer feels at home. He’s been working at the hardware store since he was a child, and he started there full-time when he was 20.
Eight years later, and Palmer’s still in the store 5 1/2 days a week, at least when he’s not on the road competing in a Elite Series tournament, that is.
Tammy, Uncle Joe, Luke and any of other half dozen C & C employees take great pride in what they do, whether it’s stocking shelves, working the register or dispensing advice to grateful customers on the floor.
“We have people that drive an hour or two to come to us,” Palmer said. “Atoka is about 15 or 20 miles away and it has the nearest Walmart, but the main furniture store there closed down, so now those people are driving over to us. McAllister and Durant are about 45 from us, and Ada is about 35 minutes. But people get tired of the box stores. They’ll come to us from all over to buy a lawnmower because they know if something happens to it, I’m going to take care of them.”
“Work ethic” carries great meaning in Palmer’s family, and it shows.
Luke and his father have fished together for a long time, but it was something to be enjoyed after work or on their scheduled day off, not before. And Luke had additional obligations as the owner and sole employee of a lawn care business he began at age 11. He still operates the lawn care business today, doing the bulk of work after he closes the hardware store or when he returns from an Elite Series event.
It’s a difficult schedule to manage, but it doesn’t seem to have had a negative impact on Palmer’s tournament results. He qualified for the tour through the 2018 Bass Pro Shops Central Opens, where he had a season-best fifth-place finish on Mississippi’s Ross Barnett Reservoir last March. He capped the year with an eighth-place finish in the Bassmaster Opens Championship on Missouri’s Table Rock Lake in October.
Palmer’s been impressive, as well, in his rookie season on the Elite Series. He’s finished in the top half of the field in four of the season’s first six events, with his best performance coming on South Carolina’s Winyah Bay, where he finished eighth of 75 competitors.
And for the record, of the 15 Bassmaster tournaments Palmer has entered since 2010, he’s been in the money in 13 of them.
Not bad for a guy who said he really doesn’t have a home lake, though he lives about an hour from two of the nation’s best bass fisheries.
“I fished Lake Texoma and Lake Eufaula most, I guess, but I’m still not the hammer on them like most these guys,” he said. “I’ve had a very blessed year so far, but I don’t know what I’d do if I win one of these tournaments. (A lot of people have shown interest in what I’m doing) and I’m still a nobody, relatively coming out of nowhere. People are still trying to figure where Coalgate is.”
Palmer knows right where his tiny hometown is, however, and he’s pointed his truck in that direction after every tournament he’s entered.
C & C Hardware is, after all, much more than a building at 11 North Stacy St. — It’s home.
“It’s been in my blood since Day 1,” Palmer said of the store, but even more so of the people who work and ship there. They are his customers, his family, his world.
“We’re the last business around here that’s still family who’ve been at it for this long,” he said. “It would be hard for me to say ‘I’m out,’ when I already have what I need.”
