If you’ve lived in or around Enid very long, you’ve most likely heard stories about this organization and the hunt it puts on yearly. Since 1967, the Grand National Quail Club has put on an invitational celebrity quail hunting event. (www.gnqh.org). It’s conducted in November each year and is intended to bring businessmen (mostly from out of state) to Northwest Oklahoma with the hopes of enticing folks to establish businesses here. The hunt has hosted numerous professional athletes, actors, comedians, singer/songwriters, and business owners from across the nation.
For us local members, it’s great camaraderie and a chance to get together to talk about hunting, a thing we all have in common. Confined to 150 members, one must be invited by a member to join the club and then must be approved by a committee. Upon admittance, the member is given a particular task to perform during the hunt. Members themselves don’t hunt, but are responsible for dog-handling, food and drink, hosting celebrity guests, and the like. Local members can also serve as “Ranchers” which own the land the members take our guests to hunt. It takes a year’s worth of preparation and planning of numerous people to make the hunt successful each year.
The GNQC website sums it up best: The Grand National is truly a state/community effort consistent with the proud tradition of Oklahoma and its genuine, friend, progressive people. For the nation’s top wing shots and most avid quail hunters, the Grand National represents the pinnacle. There is nothing else like it – no other place where a participant can join with a select fraternity of sportsmen and celebrities dedicated to the enhancement of the long-stand game bird hunting traditions of America.
