The “World’s Original Ice Fishing Contest” is back.

The long-shuttered staple of the St. Paul Winter Carnival used to draw up to 10,000 people to White Bear Lake, all out for a cold day of fishing and prizes and a chance at being listed on the contest’s traveling trophy.

After shutting down in 1982, the event almost sputtered back to life in 2006 before warm weather stymied it.

Now a fishing-contest organizer from Wisconsin plans to resurrect the White Bear event as part of the 2010 Winter Carnival.

“A lot of people after 28 years have forgotten what a big deal it was,” said David Praschak, a teacher and a coordinator of the Bass Lake Ice Fishing Contest in Somerset, Wis., who has spent the past year researching the carnival’s competition.

In 1947, its first year, the contest drew 212 people and featured a snowsuit as top prize.

The next year 2,000 people showed up.

By 1972 — when the top prize was an Arctic Cat Lynx 292 snowmobile — crowds had reached 10,000 people.

“We’d like to get back to that,” Praschak said.

The Somerset resident has helped put on the Bass Lake contest for the past five years and was researching ways to promote his event when he came across the carnival’s long-absent contest.

“I even ran into the second-place finisher from 1962. He told me how much fun it was back then,” Praschak said — thousands of people standing over chiseled holes in the ice, dressed in the early years in fur coats and later in snowmobile suits.

So about a year ago, he approached the St. Paul Festival and Heritage Foundation — the folks who put on the carnival — and floated the idea of resurrecting the contest.

Foundation President Beth Pinkney bit.

“We’re extremely excited and extremely enthusiastic to bring back an old tradition and make it a part of the Winter Carnival,” she said. “It will be a nice addition to our 124-year-old tradition.”

Even though the contest has been gone for almost three decades, the owner of Hansen’s Little Bear Bait in White Bear still remembers the bone-chilling weather during his last outing.

The temp? 18 below. The year? Jim Hansen doesn’t recall.

“It was when they gave away a log cabin,” he said.

Did he win?

“No. Otherwise I’d be there,” he said.

The contest had a shotgun start, Hansen recalled. Organizers plowed a large circle on the ice and dotted its interior with thousands of fishing holes. The contestants waited outside the circle until a whistle was blown, “then everybody would run for a hole,” Hansen said.

“A lot of minnows got spilled, people fell,” he said. “But it was kind of fun.”

Part of the fun was getting carnival royalty out onto the ice, according to old reports on the event.

Like on Jan. 24, 1959, when Queen of the Snows Sally Shields donned a rubber suit and slid into ice-covered White Bear Lake for a photo op to promote the upcoming carnival.

A story and picture from the Pioneer Press show several members of the Gopher State Skindivers Association giving Shields a boost out of the 40-degree water. She’s smiling as she flops out onto the 3-foot-thick sheet of ice.

“All Queen Sally could say was, ‘They’re crazy. It’s cold down there,’ ” the story said.

Cold weather and thick ice are exactly what modern-day fishing contest organizers hope for.

Praschak said he wants to hold the event Jan. 30, toward the end of the carnival’s 11-day run, to have the best chance for good ice.

The carnival last tried resurrecting the contest in 2006 and tasked the Vulcans to host it. But balmy weather put an end to the expected 2,000-person event on White Bear Lake.

“Don’t blame this on the Vulcans,” said then-fishing contest coordinator and former Vulcanus Rex Tom Barrett in a Pioneer Press story. “We do like it warm, but believe it or not, we were hoping for a little colder weather.”

It was the same story on Forest Lake, where the Rainbow Ice Fishing Contest suffered a stint of bad weather earlier this decade. It was canceled four times since 2002 before being scrapped in 2007.

The local VFW Post 4210 picked up the job in 2008 and hosted Fishapalooza on Forest Lake — top prize: a four-wheel-drive pickup.

The event was called off earlier this year, not because of warm weather but because of a cold economy — nobody was able to pony up big-ticket prizes, organizers said. It is back on this year, though, slated for Feb. 27.

On White Bear Lake, the fishing will take place on Commercial Bay, with Keep-Zimmer VFW Post 1782 playing host at its headquarters.

Jerry Kratz, building manager at the VFW, said the contest couldn’t come at a better time: The post found out it won’t be the site of the 2010 Polar Plunge, a fundraiser for Special Olympics Minnesota that drew more than 800 participants to the building last year.

“It was a huge day for us, no doubt about it,” he said.

If Praschak’s plans turn out, the ice-fishing contest could be an even bigger deal for the post.

“Our expectations would be (4,000) to 6,000 people” this year, Praschak said. “We’ve thrown a lot of stuff at this contest, just to make sure it’s set up right after its return.”

Organizers expect to release final details — including prizes and sponsors — later this week.

John Brewer can be reached at 651-228-2093.

ON THE WEB

For more information, go to winter-carnival.com.

Copyright 2009 Pioneer Press.