Story and photos by Tom Carney
“I think that just about anybody’d like to go hunting and get paid for it,” the late Jim Foote once said. “I’ve been fortunate to be able to do that in both of my careers.”
For more than 50 years, in those two careers, he devoted himself to providing, sharing, enhancing and inviting people to enjoy Michigan’s outdoors experiences. In recognition of those contributions, Jim was recently inducted into the Michigan Outdoor Hall of Fame, a cultural-awareness initiative established by the Michigan Outdoor Writers Association (MOWA).
Born on August 12, 1925, Jim grew up in Lincoln Park, Michigan, part of Detroit’s Downriver area. After serving in the U.S. Navy during WWII, Foote returned to earn a bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan and, in 1949, joined the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) while wrapping up work there on his master’s degree in wildlife biology.
For his first nine years with MDNR, he was stationed at the Atlanta Field Office in northeast Michigan. Then, he transferred to Pointe Mouillee State Game Area (PMSGA), also in the Downriver region, for another 18 years.
While Foote’s job didn’t have him hunting every day, he said he was doing things that most people would do for fun. In fact, some people actually took vacation days to come to the marsh to help Foote with his waterfowl research.
Of his time at PMSGA, Foote said, “I like to think that a lot of people went duck hunting because I was able to promote it and make it available to them in areas that maybe it wouldn’t have been.”
Moreover, for MDNR’s use, Foote and his brother, John, designed what proved to be the basic pattern now in use for all two-man layout boats for waterfowl hunting.
Foote began carving duck decoys as a boy and became a world-class carver. Samples of his work are on display at the Ward Foundation in Salisbury, Maryland, where he twice won the World Championship: in 1973, for a decoy pair of gadwalls and, in 1975, for a decorative decoy pair of wigeons.
By 1977, two trends took hold: one in Foote’s immediate world and one in the world of wildlife art in general. First, Foote felt he’d exhausted his potential as a carver. Yet, he still had the need to create art. Second, the increased availability of high-quality, offset lithographic prints started a boom in the wildlife art business. So, despite the fact that he had little formal art training, Foote left MDNR and started focusing on flat art. His wife, Joanne, also left her job with MDNR to become his business manager.
Foote was always very precise about this next fact. “I didn’t retire from the DNR; I quit [at age 52]. There was no way I could not succeed.”
From then until the day he died, Foote painted beautiful pieces of art, the bulk of which focused on grouse, woodcock and hunting dogs with reference photos gathered from the times he’d spend at his cabin in Atlanta each fall with a single-minded purpose: “If it’s grouse season, you hunt grouse.”
He also painted white-tailed deer and elk from the area, and waterfowl from both there and Gibraltar, Michigan, along the Detroit River where he and Joanne lived. He also won awards for his paintings of local wildlife from Marco Island, Florida, where they’d spend their winters.
Foote was a fervent supporter of wildlife and a generous donor to wildlife conservation groups, most notably RGS & AWS, which commissioned him to create its first conservation stamp print in 1979 and also one of woodcock in 1986. By 1991, when the society’s Montmorency Chapter was re-named in his honor, then Executive Director Sam Pursglove estimated that Foote had helped to raise around $4 million for the Society.
However, Foote was more than just the scientist filling in data sheets, more than just the artist with brush in hand, more than just a line item on the income ledger of a group whose mission he supported.
Look up the definition of generous in a dictionary and you’ll likely see Jim Foote’s photo beside it. He helped and encouraged other artists, not only beginners, but also seasoned pros who would visit his home studio to seek his advice. He opened his home to dozens of people each September as he hosted a reception during the Michigan Duck Hunters Tournament at Pointe Mouillee, an event he helped to develop and promote. When his beloved English setter, Libby, bore litters, he gave away puppies to friends. During those autumns at the cabin in Atlanta, he and Joanne entertained countless friends and business associates, seemingly nonstop. Not given to pretension of any sort, he was, nevertheless, the consummate host.
“Make yourself at home,” he’d tell you when you arrived at the cabin, and he meant it. Kind of like a Garden of Eden thing: Treat the place as your own, take whatever treats or drinks you want, just don’t sit in the chair reserved for him and one of the dogs.
Foote enjoyed a good laugh, saving his most unconstrained giggles for those stories in which he was the butt of the joke, such as when, in the 1930s, he and brother’s antics made people think the notorious mobsters the Purple Gang had set up shop in town or the time during the war when, as a tail gunner, he miscalculated and shot up part of his own plane or on that pheasant hunting trip to Michigan’s Thumb area when his buddies went to dinner while he was napping – but not before turning their hunting dogs loose in the room with him.
One more of Foote’s qualities should be mentioned.
In the essay, “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me.”
I’ve always thought Emerson meant that one aspect of being great is to treat others as if they are the important ones, not you. A corollary to that thought might be, “The degree of one’s humility reveals a mark of one’s dignity.” And that interpretation fits Jim Foote to a T.
Foote’s humility was legendary among those who knew him. While he would energetically share his opinions on the day’s hot topics and University of Michigan football, he wasn’t comfortable being the topic himself. “It’s not Jim to promote himself,” his late wife Joanne once said.
Everybody got a glimpse of this side of him the night of the inaugural dinner of the Jim Foote Chapter of the Ruffed Grouse Society in the spring of 1992. After all the kind words, praise and verbal applause heaped upon him and what he’d accomplished for grouse hunting and the society, his speech consisted of a single sentence: “I owe everything that I am to my wife, Joanne.”
Patrolling among the aspens once again this fall will be a slowly diminishing number of grouse hunters as well as others nearby who can say, “I’ve been blessed. I knew Jim Foote.”
For all of these reasons, Foote has earned this honor.
MOWA’s Michigan Outdoor Hall of Fame is housed in the new Jay’s and Webber Wildlife & Education Center on the campus of Jay’s Sporting Goods in Clare, Michigan. For more information about the hall itself, go to MIOWA.net and click the “Awards” tab. “Michigan Outdoor Hall of Fame” appears in the dropdown menu.
For more than 40 years, Tom Carney has been an award-winning journalist, photographer and book author. A Life Member of RGS, he lives near Grand Rapids, Michigan, with his wife Maureen and their Ryman-type setter Jack.
