Steve Gruber

My father was a significant force in my life. That is the definition of understatement. He kindled in me a fire and a passion for life beyond the concrete that is hard to define with mere words. My earliest memories all involve my dad coming home with his friends and showing off King Salmon from Lake Michigan, pheasants from Iowa and my favorite a 13 point whitetail from Saskatchewan that until the age of about 14 I was convinced was the biggest deer anyone had ever killed.

My father also had the ability to rearrange my emotions in a cold and calculating pattern that would often result in uncontolable rage. He knew me well and could entice the very best or the very worst from me and often in the same moment.

The lessons I learned from my father are many. Today I am relying only on the fact that I trusted him. If he told you how things were, well that’s how they were. So when he told me Argentina was a place of spectacular beauty, amazing people and tremendous hunting and fishing I believed him. I’d always figured I would go there with him on one his adventures filming for Benelli’s American Birdhunter. Sadly that will not be the case as he died in an accidental fall a few years ago and it was a trip we never made.

I will travel with him in my heart and on my mind in a few days and I will celebrate his life by taking his grand daughter, my oldest daughter with me. We both miss his singular pearls of wisdom these days but we both know our passion for life, for the outdoors and for telling stories flowed and still flows from him. So we will celebrate his time and the special relationship we all had the only way we know how. We will shoot until our barrels are hot and doves litter the landscape and we will hoist a toast and say Dad… Grandpa thank you for giving us the time you did. “Shoot straight sonny… now pull up your pants and get back to work.” I couldn’t resist the chance to post just one.