May 2, 2013
An Electronics Shop With Other Lures
By JOHN KNIGHT

World Electronics in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, doesn’t do such brisk
business in TVs and VCRs anymore.

Rather than cling to relics of the ’90s, the owners have simply moved
on. You can mail packages back to Russia, the Czech Republic or Ukraine.
You can borrow a Polish paperback. You can order a rifle or a small
all-terrain vehicle.

But mostly, this Polish electronics shop in the middle of Brooklyn’s
Chinatown sells bait and tackle.

Fishing poles line the walls, and frozen clams, bunker and herring fill
an ice cream cooler. Swinging racks hold six-inch lures, gummy worms and
leader weights. Below the walkie-talkies, drills and binoculars, glass
cases display reels and more glittering lures. Camouflage vests, leader
lines, nets and crab pots hang everywhere.

The remaining inventory in electronics lines the periphery: coffee pots,
extension cords, cameras and a portable ice cream maker.

Above the cash register, the store’s slogan is etched into a green
plaque: “Fishing is not a matter of live or death it is more serious
than that!”

Chris Jendryka, 52, the store’s proprietor and a longtime neighborhood
resident, laughs when he reads the sign out loud. “I don’t go fishing to
go fishing,” he said on a recent Sunday afternoon. “I go to catch fish.”

Then Mr. Jendryka held up an oversize laminated photo of himself on a
frozen lake with a pike the size of a small dolphin, and said: “And I
always find them.”

A reserved, clean-shaven man, Mr. Jendryka has been a kind of godfather
for south Brooklyn anglers for the last 20 years, taking obvious
pleasure in equipping his customers even as this immigrant neighborhood
became less Eastern European and more Asian and Latin American.

“Everything I sell,” he said, holding up a reel, “they can bring it back
if they don’t like it and I’ll refund. But they just come buy more.”

So they do. “It’s always good,” reported John Li, a Chinese immigrant
who lives in the neighborhood and has been fishing from the 69th Street
Pier in Bay Ridge for 10 years. He pointed to Mr. Jendryka stringing his
reel. “He knows.”

Mr. Jendryka moved here from Poland with his wife, Jolanta, in 1986, and
built a business doing favors. First he sold 220-volt converters for
European electronics, and added power tools to the catalog as requests
came in. Then he leveraged a Polish shipping connection to send packages
back home on the cheap.

All the while, he said, he was pulling in 40-inch stripers down at the
pier. His friends began asking for the same lures, and soon word got
around Sunset Park that the best gear was at the electronics store.

“He has everything you need at a good price,” said Robert Rudzinski, a
construction worker who lives nearby and had stopped in to buy extra
leaders and lures for a weekend trip to New Jersey. “It’s good to have a
friend like him.”

On a typical day, Ms. Jendryka (who works alongside her husband) chats
in Russian over a dim-sum lunch while her husband shows off rods in
spotty Spanish. On Friday evenings, men sit in the back swapping fish
tales in Polish. Everyone here can manage some English, but it is no
one’s first choice.

“They are all types of characters,” Ms. Jendryka said of her customers.
“But people come here because they like to fish.”

Between sales, Mr. Jendryka pulled out a glass jar of salmon eggs with a
broken seal. “There’s special ingredient,” he said, offering no details
beyond that the recipe took several years to develop. Holding up the
bait, he smiled. “This will always catch a fish,” he said. “And if you
want to catch fish, you can buy.”

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