They each took an elbow and led their grandfather through the woods. Fox Haas had hunted all his life, but old age—he was born in 1930—had sapped him of the strength needed to go it alone in the Mississippi turkey woods. With a grandson on either side, however, the spiritual patriarch of the Mossy Oak camouflage empire could make it to where the gobblers strutted.
Neill and Daniel Haas, thirty-five-year-old twins from West Point, Mississippi, never wavered. For the last decade, Daniel says, every hunt felt like it would be his grandfather’s last. “Then he would rally,” he recalls. Other family members helped out, but most often the twins accompanied him. “Every time we got one more morning with him, or one more turkey or one more deer, it felt triumphant. It was like your favorite team winning a national championship over and over.”
When Fox died on January 25 of this year, at the age of ninety-five, the Mossy Oak world mourned the brand’s totemic grandfather. His son, Toxey, founded the outdoor brand in West Point in 1986, but Fox and his wife, Evelyn, were deeply involved from the beginning. The company’s first toll-free number went to their home landline. When a call came in, Daniel remembers with a laugh, “one of them would answer, put the caller on hold, and then hand the phone off to the other to create the illusion that there were more people in the ‘office.’” Evelyn served as the first Mossy Oak seamstress, working on a sewing machine in the upstairs of their garage, altering customers’ orders and making Hawkeye Headnets for turkey hunters. Still family-owned and -operated, Mossy Oak now employs some 175 people.
Fox Haas was an ardent conservationist with a particular love for planting trees and managing land for wildlife. Mossy Oak’s wildlife habitat brand extensions—among them, BioLogic food plot seeds, the Mossy Oak Properties rural real estate venture, and Nativ Nursery, with its focus on high-producing acorn and fruit trees—directly grew out of his passion for providing for the future. And keeping Mossy Oak in-house has given the Haases the leeway to work in sectors that have as much to do with passion as profit. “If we were beholden to accountants and investors,” Daniel says, “I don’t think they’d be too thrilled with us selling hand-selected acorns.”
But from those acorns deep roots grew, both literal and metaphorical, to nourish new generations. “For people whose passions are hunting and fishing,” Daniel says, “it’s a dream to have kids that care about the same things, and for them to have great-grandkids that care about the same things. We are so blessed that Papaw got to see all of that.” And that Fox remained just as interested in hunting at ninety-five as he was as a child. “He would say, ‘If I could just live to get out in the woods one more time,’” Neill recalls. “It was never about killing the next turkey. Being out there meant so much to him.”
Toward the end, the jaunts did become more difficult. First Fox used a cane, then a walker. Then he became so feeble he could only proceed with an always-eager helping hand on each side. “Being able to take our hero hunting,” Neill says, “was the biggest honor we could imagine.”
T. Edward Nickens is a contributing editor for Garden & Gun and cohost of The Wild South podcast. He’s also an editor at large for Field & Stream and a contributing editor for Ducks Unlimited. He splits time between Raleigh and Morehead City, North Carolina, with one wife, two dogs, a part-time cat, eleven fly rods, three canoes, two powerboats, and an indeterminate number of duck and goose decoys. Follow @enickens on Instagram.
