I just some digging into the history books on the Texas rig and found out that Nick Creme was not the inventor of it... well, some say he is and some say he isn't.
According to the book "Catching Bass Like a Pro" by Steve Price and Guy Eake, on page 71, in chapter 10 they get into the source of the Texas rig and credit it to a local Texas fisherman named Robert Carey Scott in the mid 1960's to get down to submerged brush piles for bass holding up in them without getting hung up.
Here is a link the above reference:
https://books.google.com/books?id=g1ycmGO-ysUC&pg=PA71&lpg=PA71&dq=history+of+the+texas+rigged+worm&source=bl&ots=tENW2fEEqd&sig=QJQh3-mVzH3JvkDZ0qrffm12wSk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rBncVKXHMfeTsQS45YDoDg&ved=0CFEQ6AEwCDgK#v=onepage&q=history%20of%20the%20texas%20rigged%20worm&f=false
Here is part of a good article I found on the subject:
http://www.expressnews.com/sports/outdoors/article/After-65-years-original-plastic-worm-still-made-5233392.php#/0
“(Goswick) called Cosma Creme to ask her for some plastic worms,” Kent recalled in his office last month. “But the answer was that production was too far behind. We'd have to wait.”
Goswick wasn't satisfied. His next call was to a local rose grower. That might seem out of context, but Tyler is known as the “Rose Capital of the World.” Goswick ordered two dozen rose bushes be sent to Mrs. Creme.
Kent eased back in his chair as he retells the story of those two fateful phone calls. “I'm not sure it was the rose bushes, but two or three weeks later, we were covered up with plastic worms.”
The timing was perfect.
There were other factors at work at the time, and Kent is quick to note them and how they all came together in the 1950s and early '60s.
“There was a reservoir-building binge, and Texas was part of it,” Kent said. “Bulldozers would clear brush and it would be piled up. Then the dam would be closed, and the lake would fill. The brush piles were covered. They were out of sight.”
'Texas rig'
Meanwhile, up the road from Tyler, in Tulsa, Okla., a banana and vegetable salesman named Carl Lowrance came up with an idea that would locate the hidden brush piles.
In 1957, sonar was adapted to angling when Lowrance and his sons came out with a structure-finding flasher unit that looked like a little green box. It was the Fish Lo-K-Tor.
Kent recalled that about that same time, Holmes Thurmond, a businessman in nearby Shreveport, La., designed the original fiberglass bass boat. Thurmond had been making plywood Skeeter boats since the late 1940s.
In 1961, along came the upgraded Super Skeeter, seen at the time as the ultimate bass boat. It could handle a 35 horsepower outboard motor and skim across the new reservoirs at an impressive 30 mph.
Bass anglers then had lots of new water and fast transportation as well as a way to “look” at the bottom of a lake and find the brushy, fish-holding structure. And they had that new soft plastic Creme worm that bass seemed to like.
“The problem was that you couldn't get a worm down in the brush without getting snagged,” Kent said. “Fishermen lost a lot of worms.”
It is not known who, or exactly when, but it was about that time and in the Tyler area that someone came up with a terminal tackle combination called the “Texas rig.”
An inventive angler had cut the brass eye loop from a bell sinker, threaded it onto his line, tied on a sharp hook and ran the hook through the head of a Creme worm — then turned the hook and pushed the tip back into the worm.
“The key was that for the first time the point of the hook could be placed back into the lure,” Kent said. “The weedless lure was invented. Now anglers could get down into the hidden brush piles without snagging.”
Here are some more reference articles:
http://www.northcarolinasportsman.com/details.php?id=841
http://staugustine.com/stories/052304/fis_2344511.shtml
http://thecabin.net/stories/053099/out_0530990096.html
If I had to venture a reasonable guess, I'd say that after Nick Creme moved his rubber worm production to Tyler, Texas that he along with other fishermen in the area spread the weedless rig throughout the area by word of mouth and that Nick Creme maybe learned it this way and became one of the first to market the idea outside of Texas.
I'd guess the real original source for the Texas rig is lost to history and will never be known, but today we look back and give credit to those men who brought it out of obscurity and into a national exposure.
