Special group, including Bud Grant, helped launch Pheasants Forever 40 years ago

DULUTH – This northern Minnesota city never looks better than when viewed from a boat on Lake Superior, preferably while fishing. This is particularly true at dawn, when the rising sun basks Duluth in a low-angled glow that ascends its steep hillsides gradually, in luminous panels.

If on such a morning a chinook salmon hits a bait you're trolling, the aesthetic trifecta is complete.

Which is what happened.

This was early Wednesday aboard the Nauti Hooker, a 32-footer captained by Peter Dahl. The lake was flat, and in the gathering light a flock of mallards was skimming atop the water to starboard, appearing in the half-light as airborne silhouettes, arrowing north.

The craft's first mate, Joe Kottke, had handed a pulsating fishing rod to Pat Smith, and she was reeling the salmon ever closer to the boat's stern, cheered on by her partner, Bud Grant.

Kottke, meanwhile, had reached for a long-handled net, and when the salmon was close enough, he corralled it with the alacrity of a shortstop backhanding a hard-hit grounder.

Nice fish, Dahl said.

A dozen or so of us had met in Duluth last week with a recreational interest in fishing. But our primary purpose, and passion, for gathering along the shores of Lake Superior was to discuss birds, pheasants specifically, during a month when, 40 years ago exactly, Pheasants Forever (PF) was founded in St. Paul.

In the intervening decades, scores of individuals from throughout the nation have served on the national PF board. Most couldn't make this meeting of emeritus members. But 15 of us did. Of these, only Bud Grant and I were among the original 13 board members, each of whom was from Minnesota.

I had founded PF in 1982 through a series of columns I wrote in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, where I worked at the time. I say founded, but in actuality, many other people were involved, virtually in real time, in getting the bird club airborne, not least of whom were the original board members — and those who have followed in that capacity in the years since.

I had attended college at the University of Minnesota, Morris, surrounding which, historically, has been some of the state's best pheasant country. But habitat losses multiplied in that region in the years after my graduation in 1973, and those grassland and winter-cover shortfalls were a prime motivator for organizing PF.

To launch the bird club, two efforts were undertaken concurrently. One was to secure a 501c-3 designation as a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. Critical to achieving this was Bob Larson, a Wayzata attorney and bird hunter. Secondly, a board of directors was needed, an endeavor that my friend Norb Berg, who was then deputy chairman of Control Data, helped with greatly.

Each of the original board members made significant contributions — some by sharing their expertise, others by performing rudimentary but necessary tasks, and others by lending their names, and their credibility, to the undertaking.

In addition to Larson (first PF secretary), Berg and me (president), PF's initial board included Russ Anderson (vice president, no relation), a farmer from Clinton, Minn.; Cecil Bell, a sporting goods store owner at the time and grandson of James Ford Bell, founder of Delta Waterfowl; Bud and Ted Burger, owners of Burger Brothers sporting goods stores; Walt Bruning (treasurer), a vice president at Control Data and a bird hunter; Chuck and Loral I Delaney of Game Fair and Armstrong Ranch Kennels in Anoka; Jeff Finden, PF's first executive director; Bob Naegele, owner of Naegele Outdoor Advertising and a bird hunter; and Dave Vesall, retired Minnesota Department of Natural Resources fish and wildlife chief.

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In 1982 and the years afterward I could spark significant interest through my column among hunters and others in forming PF chapters. But anytime I could say Bud Grant would appear at a fundraising banquet, the appeal of the PF cause ratcheted up considerably.

Bud was still coaching the Vikings at the time, so his schedule was tight. But when he was available, he and I would drive to Fergus Falls or Morris or wherever, and he would regale the gathered crowd with the wonders of pheasants and pheasant hunting, driving home his belief — as he did the other night in Duluth — that the pheasant is one of the world's true trophy species,

A sacrifice Bud made in this undertaking was his willingness to enter banquet halls filled with cigarette smoke. Few things bother him more than smoking, and I sensed on our late-night drives home he'd rather field a second-string quarterback against the Packers on consecutive days in Green Bay than enter a ballroom again anytime soon clouded with blue haze.

From these and other 40-year-old memories we got a few chuckles last week in Duluth. Bud is 95 now, and while he doesn't move like the pro basketball player, and pro football player, he once was, he's still sharp. And when Pat Smith told him it was his turn to reel in a fish, he jumped at the chance, as did David Bue, the PF chief development officer, who was on board with us, too.

Other emeritus PF board members fishing from a small fleet of boats nearby were Bob Brengman of Rochester; Toby Buck of Sheldon, S.C.; Dr. James Call of Deerwood, Minn.; Don Gartner of Norfolk, Neb.; Bruce Hertzke of Forest City, Iowa; Jon Lee of Missoula, Mont.; Cheryl Riley of Hudson, Wis.; Al Schrock of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Dr. George Wilson of Forest City, Iowa; and Paul Gross of London, Ohio. Also seeking lake trout, salmon and the odd walleye was PF CEO Howard Vincent.

Each — you can bet on it — has one or more dogs at home, and stories aplenty to tell about their times afield over many years in pursuit of the world's most beautiful gamebird.

It's why, happily, they've contributed their time, expertise and treasure to a bird club born 40 years ago in St. Paul.