Mike Grandick was born in 1951 in the
eastern Iowa River town of Clinton. His family moved
to the opposite side of the state, Council Bluffs, while
he was still in grade school.
Mike shot his first pheasant when he was
a sophomore in high school. Some guys he knew were really
into pheasant hunting and wanted him to go with them.
Mike didn't have a shotgun so he borrowed a Marlin goose
gun. It was a bolt action thing with a 36" barrel. Unfortunately
his first bird was a hen. No one told him the ones you
could shoot had fancy colors.
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Mike has been bird hunting every since. While he was
in the Navy Mike took his leave so he could come home
and hunt. In the late sixties the pheasants were so thick
they flushed in flocks of fifty or sixty. You didn't need
a dog. You just walked the fields or soil bank areas and
shot a limit.
They did hunt with a dog for awhile. A farmer whose land
they hunted had an old German Shepherd that followed them
hunting. His buddies renamed it "Mike" because it was
the ugliest dog they had ever seen. "Mike" was
good retrieving dead birds and later on he just caught
them on the ground and brought them back alive.
Mike has been hunting over dogs for 25 years. The first
ones were rescued from the dog pound by his brother and
hunting partner Dan. Later they started training and hunting
with Vizslas, a dog not commonly seen in Iowa fifteen
years ago.
Today Mike lives with his wife, two children in high
school, and two Vizslas Huckleberry and Lucky. Mike has
been a school teacher for twenty-six years and a cartoonist
for ten. He is also a staff cartoonist for Fishing Facts
magazine and sell free lance cartoons to a variety of
magazines. In the Fall you can find the "boyz" and Mike
hunting pheasants and quail in SW Iowa.
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