Editor’s Note: Unlike the officers of most companies who have guide to take them out, call up gobblers and let the officers harvest the turkeys, Bill Sugg, Toxey Haas, Ronnie Strickland and all the top executives at Mossy Oak spend most of turkey season guiding turkey hunters. Mossy Oak supports many different charities. When these charities have turkey hunts to raise money, the Mossy Oak family guides the hunters who give monies to those charities. They also guide their licensed customers, friends and family.
I usually guide 20 or 30 days during turkey season, but I'm not unique in our company. Just about all the vice presidents and other members of the Mossy Oak family who work in our home office in West Point, Mississippi, donate their time to guide for charity hunts and customer hunts. We love to go turkey hunting, call turkeys and harvest turkeys. All of us love to match wits with wild turkeys. The person who pulls the trigger on the gobbler is not nearly as important to us now as it once was. We just in turkey woods and trying to help all the people we guide to be successful. We feel blessed that we have a business and work for a company that allows us to serve other people and help them be successful in the sport we all love so much - turkey hunting. When we guide for charity hunts and for our customers, we feel like we’re giving back to the sport that has given us so much and blessed each of us.
Ronnie “Cuz” Strickland has led the way for all of us, with the number of hunts he's done over the years with veterans, Catch a Dream, the Seamark Ranch hunt held at Dee-Dot Ranch in Florida and many more. Tack Robinson, who once worked at Mossy Oak, got us involved with Seamark Ranch for children many years ago. We go down and help with that hunt every year. Cuz Strickland is in Kansas right now supporting his Pro Staff manager’s team at the World Turkey Hunting Championship. The proceeds will go to the Catch a Dream Foundation. Cuz has also done the St. Jude’s charity turkey hunt and helped put together the first Wings over Mississippi governor’s hunt. Too, we've done veterans’ hunts in Maine and hunts for Camp Compass for disadvantaged children. Tim Anderson, our Pro Staff Manager, works with Aiming for a Cure which is one of Tim’s favorite charities. Chris Paradise and his licensing team have hunts in Texas each year, and Toxey and I help guide for that hunt. At Mossy Oak, we feel really blessed that we can guide for our customers and for the charitable organizations we support by taking people turkey hunting.
We’re often asked, “Why don’t you publicize all these different charities that Mossy Oak guides for and provides turkey hunts?” I explain, “The Good Book teaches us all to have a servant’s spirit and a humble heart. The Good Book also teaches that you help others not for the recognition that you'll get, but because it’s the right thing to do. We don’t feel that helping these folks is anything to brag about but instead feel it’s our responsibility as human beings to help other people.”
One of Toxey Haas’s, the founder of Mossy Oak, favorite sayings is, “We all have to serve a higher purpose than satisfying just ourselves or our own personal needs, whether that’s your Christian belief or other moral values that you have.” We believe that doing for others the same way we want someone to do for us comes under the heading of being the right thing to do. Helping others has been a major thread throughout the cloth of Mossy Oak camouflage and Haas Outdoors for the last 30 years. Serving others started with the founding of the company and the qualities that Toxey Haas brought to the company in 1986.
Day 1: Bill Sugg Never Will Forget Taking His First Turkey or the Men Who Taught Him How
Tomorrow: Bill Sugg Says Sharing Turkey Hunting is about Giving Back
