It is a backstreet kind of place, a warehouse down a less-traveled road on the edge of a medium-sized city.

If it weren't a household name to millions of anglers, Ande Inc. would seem like just another industrial park tenant.

Its top competitors in monofilament fishing line, Berkley and Stren, are giants in comparison. Stren, in Wilmington, Delaware, was long held by the multinational conglomerate DuPont. Berkley, in Spirit Lake, Iowa, is located on its own street: One Berkley Drive.

But Ande (whether you pronounce it ahn-DAY or AN-dy) has cornered the saltwater market. It owns more current saltwater world records — 680 — than any company. And about 10,000 pounds of line are shipped from the Mangonia Park warehouse each week.

"Had this company been started in Des Moines, Iowa, it wouldn't have made it," said Ande vice president Bill Munro, one of just two corporate executives at Ande, which has only 14 manual laborers. "But it began in Key West with the glamour and the glory of the Keys. Tourists discovered Ande line and took it home in their cars, trunks and tackle boxes. It was kind of like magic."

Ande has its roots in Germany, where its line is still manufactured. But its somewhat peculiar name has nothing to do with Teutonic tradition. Ande is Edna backward.

Edna was the wife of founder Arthur Berel.

Berel owned a clothing store in Miami until he retired in the mid-1940s, but he loved to fish and play golf. He was among the first to catch permit and bonefish on 2-pound test line and he reveled in catching tiny fish, such as a 7-inch bluefin tuna and a sailfish under 30 inches.

Fishing "was like a therapy," said Edna Berel Palmgren, who married Berel in 1954 and was with him until he died in 1979. She now lives in West Palm Beach. "He was not a very patient man. But he'd sit on that boat by the hour watching that line."

In the late 1950s, the couple lived in Coral Gables and Berel had a nephew in Germany who sent him a sample of some monofilament fishing line made with nylon (perlon to the Germans). Nylon had been discovered by DuPont in the mid-1930s.

Berel tried the line and loved it, Palmgren said. He contacted the German company and asked if he could sell the product in the United States.

"He had to be really interested in something to get his teeth into it," she said. "He loved to work and he couldn't stand anything that wasn't perfected."

The Berels moved to Islamorada, where they rented a home. Berel set up shop and began experimenting with the line. He wanted the manufacturer to design different colors.

He sent some shrimp to the factory to get the pink Ande line, then sent a swatch of Edna's hair for something he called "silver dawn," she said.

Berel was devoted to his wife. He encouraged Edna to fish, and she even won a bonefish tournament in the Keys. She said he wrote her love notes every day for the 25 years they were together.

During the mid-1960s, the Berels stopped frequently in West Palm Beach to market the line. They stayed at a motel, the only one on the shores of Lake Worth. It was next to Spencer's Boat Yard on Dixie Highway.

"My uncle had a motel called Lakeshore Courts," said Chuck Gerlach, current Ande president. "My uncle kept asking Arthur when he was going to sell the company."

Gerlach said his uncle, Dick, and his father, C.W., who owned a hotel in Palm Beach, were not fishermen. But they wanted the line company. They bought it in 1968.

Berel, whose health was failing, moved with his wife to West Palm Beach in 1969. He worked with the Gerlachs and fished with captain Herb Schulz out of Boynton Beach until he could no longer manage.

The Gerlachs moved the company to larger and larger warehouses until they settled in 1983 at their current site on 53rd Street in the small neighborhood of Mangonia Park.

Chuck Gerlach started with his father's business at age 13, when he would spool line after school. Bulk line was brought here in container ships and was rewound onto smaller spools.

It's the same process today and a German company is still involved, though Gerlach jealously guards its name. The line is just as constant, too, he said. It hasn't changed much in the 37 years since Berel founded Ande.

"At that time, Arthur recognized this as a product of the future," Gerlach said. "He liked it for the same reasons people like it today: consistency, abrasion resistance and knot strength."

Ande has targeted the saltwater angler, while Stren and Berkley focused on the more lucrative freshwater market.

Ande, which comes in strengths from 2 to 400-pound test, is made more for saltwater conditions. It is a true nylon rather than a coor tri-polymer, meaning it is one substance instead of two or three blended, Gerlach said.

Co-polymers and tri-polymers cast better and don't backlash, but their knot strength is not as good and they don't hold up as well under the harsh offshore conditions.

Nylon line is made with giant machines called extruders. Nylon pellets are dumped into a hopper and heated to a liquid. The substance is cooled and then run through rollers that pull the monofilament like taffy to its desired diameter.

The line is heated again and pulled. Then it is sent through another set of ovens for the final pull through the rollers. Each set of rollers is calibrated at a specific speed to create the line's uniform diameter.

Some anglers have criticized the line because its diameter is slightly larger than other brands. But a nick or abrasion in smaller diameter line could cause it to break more easily, Gerlach said.

For that reason, and because they are so expensive, the new fluorocarbon lines from Japan don't make sense, he said. And neither do the high-cost braided lines; although there are some situations where they are practical — flipping plastic worms for bass or deep-dropping for saltwater bottom fish.

Ande has just introduced a new high-visibility yellow line. But it has stayed away from the new-fangled gadget products.

"I don't see them as replacing monofilament by any stretch of the imagination," Munro said. "There are some applications, but monofilament still gives the angler the best possible material to catch fish."