News : How a western Iowa farmer became The Gooseman

"The goose is booked." That play on words came from a Vinton Parks and Recreation Board member as the first act of the 2011 Party in the Park was scheduled last November. The Goose Man is coming to Vinton tonight. Paul Messerschmidt -- a former western Iowa school classmate of two Vinton residents, VPRD Board President Jeff Peterson and Bob Noren -- will bring his flock of trained geese to the courthouse lawn tonight. The show is anything but a wild goose chase; Messerschmidt has learned to make the fowls follow him. "This story starts from when I was a small boy," he said. "I was born in a small town of Logan, Iowa just north of Omaha." Messerschmidt was one of 10 children growing up on the family farm in Harrison County. "We raised every thing that farmers would raise," he recalls. Messerschmidt grew up, got married, had two kids and worked on the railroad until, he says, "I fell ill to the everyday grime that the railroad put out and my lungs fell ill." Not long after leaving his job because of his health, Messerschmidt saw the movie "Fly Away Home." The film is loosely based on the life of Bill Lishman, who used his plane in 1993 to successfully led a flock of Canada Geese on a winter migration from Ontario to Virginia. All of the 16 birds that followed Lishman's plane that year returned the following year entirely on their own. That movie caused Messerschmidt to recall his childhood days, and the birds and other pets of his youth. "I already raised chickens and turkeys, a ferret and different birds," he said. "I thought 'What the heck, baby geese would not be hard to raise.' So I started with three the first week." Messerschmidt said he started to walk the "babes" down on the sidewalk and in the yard. "I would sound like a goose every time that I went around the babies," he said. Every day, he would walk a bit farther; every so often, he added a few more geese to his flock. Soon, he noticed that he would attract an audience of people watching from their cars and yards as his geese followed him. "Some said it was like seeing Moses with the Israelites," he said. The flock continued to grow. Messerschmidt recalls one day when he went to the local feed store. "There in the pen were six other babies of the same breed of geese. I didn’t really want any more but I couldn’t resist them," he said. "So home they went to live with the others that had taken over my life. It was much like raising children, he said. "Just like the children I had raised I started to teach them things about the streets of Missouri Valley by stopping at stop signs and how to watch for cars and people on the sidewalks," he said. At first the geese followed their leader; soon they learned the route themselves. "When I would stop and talk to people, the babies sometimes would stop and wait for me but sometimes they would head for home. We had walked the same route so much that if I let them go the babies would walk the same route no mater where they started from. Soon people were asking Messerschmidt to bring his geese to their events. And along with those requests came newspaper people who wanted to write stories about the geese. After being invited to his first parade, Messerschmidt and his sister spent some time considering costumes for the birds. "In designing the outfits my sister and I tried different ideas before using the design of a toddlers outfit with out the inseams left out," he explains. His first parade was Pisgah, Iowa. "We stayed out of sight after we got dressed until just in time for the parade. When we walked up to the start of the parade the people were taking and pointing at the geese and when we started the parade we received a standing ovation during the whole route," he says.