by Bob Clausen
(KARK) Rich with gold is the only way to describe a section of Lonoke County.
You don’t have to dig to deep to find it. In fact, you don’t have to dig at all. Step up to the waters edge at any one of the hundreds of ponds and it’ll come to you. In school after school of goldfish.
The golden crop is grown, harvested, packed and shipped from Lonoke’s Pool Fisheries.
The Pool family has been doing this since 1959.
Danny Pool’s grandfather pioneered and built the business, his father took it over and expanded the market. Danny then jumped in with both feet.
“It started out as pets back in the 1930’s when the worlds fair started,” says Danny Pool. “Then feeder fish for the salt water aquarium crazy, now it’s back to pets again and exotic gold fish.”
Over the years and under his leadership, along with his brother Ronnie, it became clear, if you want goldfish, you go to the Pool family.
“We went from selling 3 million to 30 million to 300 million,” Danny Pool says. “It was just crazy”
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Billions of fish later, you could call him the current ‘God Father of Goldfish’, overseeing a family enterprise that has locked up 70 percent of the goldfish market. So big, they are PetSmarts sole goldfish supplier. Fifteen hundred stores in the U.S. and Canada take in goldfish grown in Lonoke County. Odds are, if someone in this country has a goldfish, it came from Pool Fisheries.
But one day, Pool saw something that turned the market upside down.
“I’m like, you know, this might be our demise, it really hurt our business,” Pool recalls.
It was the rise of the internet. People who wanted a fish just downloaded them, screen saver fishtanks were in everyhwere. Kids weren’t looking for, or into fish tanks, they were looking at and playing video games. Things dried up.
“You could tell as the internet became more popular, the fish business began to go down,” says Pool.
That’s no fish story, Pool has had to work angle after angle to keep the momentum going, to gobble up his share of the market. Now he says he’s done what he can, it’s time for the next generation to get their feet wet. Enter his son, Landon.
Read the rest of the story at KARK.com