Many years ago in a small town in northern Michigan, a 10-year-old boy on vacation with his family stood in awe in front of a sporting goods store’s shelves stacked with boxes of tantalizing slim-minnow lures.

The family vacationed every summer in the same town, Indian River, between Burt and Mullet lakes, and every summer the young angler visited the store to admire the fishing lures. He lacked the pocket money to buy the beautiful balsa wood baits hand-crafted in Finland and longed for the day when he could own as many of them as his tackle box might hold.

That boy was me and my visits to the northland sporting goods store were among the experiences that shaped my interest in the wonderful world of fishing.

More than 60 years later, I have more than made up for my late start in acquiring the lures hand-carved by Lauri Rapala and imported into the U.S. as American sport fishing took off in the late 1950s and ’60s. I own a box loaded with various Rapala models and colors, and put them to use often as I cast for largemouth and smallmouth bass throughout northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania.

I know well the back story behind the venerable Rapala brand, that Lauri Rapala was an angler and innovator who was instrumental in the development of successful hard baits for fishers of pike, walleyes, bass, trout and other freshwater fish. I was awestruck back in the 1960s that a lure made in faraway Finland was beckoning me to put its magic to work on the end of my fishing line.

I knew that Rapala first carved his minnow plugs from cork and applied foil wrappers from chocolate bars to gain the flash that enticed fish to strike. His early baits were wrapped in photographic negatives, which he melted to essentially shrink-wrap them to keep water from soaking in.

My familiarity with the Rapala brand has deep roots and has delivered numerous memorable catches. But something about Rapala remained a mystery to me.

How is the name pronounced?

For the majority of my fishing life, I pronounced the brand name the way I heard it in the store in northern Michigan. The proprietor and my father called them Ra-PAL-a, with the accent on the second syllable.

OK, fine. I spoke of the Ra-PAL-a brand for several decades self-assured that I was pronouncing the name the way Lauri would have said it.

But then I heard anglers on TV and professional fishermen on the Bassmaster Tour put the accent on the first syllable: RAP-a-la.

Who was saying it correctly? Google didn’t deliver a definitive answer. Some say Ra-PAL-a and some say RAP-a-la.

So I formulated a plan to get my question answered once and for all. I would ask a Finnish person how to pronounce Rapala. This was not as problematic as it might seem, because I was going to be in Finland for a few days.

Monday afternoon, on a street corner in Helsinki, I posed the question to a Finn. He did not hesitate to respond.

“RAP-a-la,” he declared.

Mystery solved. If a Finlander says it, it must be so. But regardless of the pronunciation, it is one of the fish-catchingest lures ever created.

Jack Wollitz also is the author of a book, The Common Angler, published by Tucker DS Press. Contact him at jackbbaass@gmail.com.