Kansas man's homemade catfish bait gets the job done

MARION RESERVOIR - Warren Kreutziger lifted the lid on a bucket of catfish bait and there was no gasp, cough, head jerk, dry heave, face wrinkle, unprintable words or other typical reactions when an angler's nose gets a whiff of a traditional bait that would make a vulture wretch.

"I don't use any ground or rotten shad. What I make catches a lot of catfish and I figure why put up with that smell if you don't have to," Kreutziger said as he punched a treble hook into the tub of brown goo. "I just use regular old ingredients you find in the kitchen. "

That's assuming you have dehydrated blood, 50-pound chunks of low-quality cheese, a lot of peanut butter and pillow stuffing in your kitchen. One thing about it, though: When Kreutziger uses his homemade bait there's usually catfish fillets in the kitchen by lunch. Recently, he brought home enough to feed a sizable family.

For more than six decades, Kreutziger has fished the Neosho River Valley in Marion County in Kansas. As a boy that meant the actual river, which flowed near where he grew up on a farm. As an adult, it's been in the lake created when the river was dammed.

A four-season catfisherman, he has long enjoyed catching good numbers of catfish in the dog days of summer. For the past 20 years, that's meant fishing over areas he's chummed regularly with water-logged wheat, corn and soybeans.

A short stick was used to stab the treble hook down into Kreutziger's bait. A tug on the line showed a hairy glob stuck to the hook. Kreutziger started talking about the recipe for the catfish bait that's put thousands of fish in his boat.

"The cheese and the peanut butter are the main things," he said. "I don't really measure anything, but I'd said it's about 80 percent cheese and 10 percent peanut butter. I probably add about another 5 to 10 percent dehydrated blood." To get the goo to stick together, and on to the hook, he uses poly-fill, the fluffy stuff inside pillows and stuffed animal toys.