Even at such a young age, I could sense that things were different. I’d just been reintroduced to my new born-again father, and I felt the fear and chaos of my childhood had somehow taken a turn for the better. Sure, there were a few hiccups along the way, but my father was a changed man. The move to the Ouachita River was the biggest moment of my life because it reconnected me to my father through hunting and fishing. I took up hunting and fishing more than my brothers, so I think there was even more of a connection between my dad and me. I was his right-hand man in the commercial fishing business and making duck calls. Most of the time when we were in the boat, it was just my dad and me.
Now, you have to understand this: I’ve always viewed my parents more as friends than actual parents. I know all of the self-help parenting books tell us you’re not supposed to be “friends” with your children because it skews their perception of authority and obedience, but my parents were my best friends. I mean, that’s just the way I looked at it, and that’s probably one of the primary reasons my brothers and I have always called them by their first names. Another reason we call them Phil and Kay is that when we were operating Duck Commander out of our house, we wanted to keep telephone calls with customers somewhat professional, so we were taught to never call them Mom and Dad when talking on the phone. We would often say, “Phil, line one,” to sound professional. Of course, we only had one line, but it just sounded better than, “Hold on, let me get my dad.”
Once we moved to the river, I started to learn about Phil Robertson the man. There’s no doubt his most dominant physical feature is his beard. Over the years, it became a symbol of his independence and carefree living.
When I helped my dad in the commercial fishing business, I didn’t view it as work because I loved doing it so much. Don’t get me wrong; it was backbreaking work, especially for a young boy. But I learned a lot of valuable lessons about hard work on the river. I knew what every fish was worth. A catfish brought seventy cents per pound at market, buffalo was worth thirty cents per pound, and gar was twenty cents per pound. My excitement came from figuring out how much money we made from fishing every day, but I had no use for the actual money. We were living in the middle of nowhere. What was I going to do with it? Our hunting and fishing provided us what we needed to eat, and my dad took care of everything we needed for hunting. Really, I didn’t have a care in the world.
Over the years, my dad taught me the skill of fishing, such as finding the underwater highways fish traveled the most and how to use nets to catch them. The science of fishing has always intrigued me, and it’s the same attraction for me in hunting.
The amount of fish we caught literally determined what we ate for supper and how much gas went into our vehicle. The biggest problem we faced was people stealing our nets and fish. Sometimes the thieves would ruin the nets by cutting the fish out. The first time it happened, I asked my dad if we should call the police, but he said, “Son, where we live, I am 911.” He policed the river and would awaken many times during the night to check out boats he heard motoring by. I was with him during a few confrontations after we caught people in the act of stealing our nets. They were the most intense moments of my childhood. How my dad handled these situations was in a way a reflection of his growth as a Christian. He started out with a shotgun and a threat to use it if he ever caught them stealing again. But then one day when we caught two guys red-handed, Dad raised his shotgun and gave one of the best sermons from the Bible I’ve ever heard. Toward the end of our commercial-fishing career, he would have the gun but not raise it, give the sermon, and then give them the fish. He would tell them, “If you wanted some fish, all you had to do was ask.” I actually saw grown men shed tears over this approach, and a couple of them came to the Lord.
Fishing the river wasn’t easy. During the summertime, when there wasn’t a current on the Ouachita River, we’d use trammel nets to fish, and it was really hard work. A trammel net is like a ten-foot wall stretching across the river. There are floats on top of the net and weights on the bottom. Of course, there’s netting in the middle. When fish go through the outlying walls of the netting, they immediately turn to the right or the left and get tangled in the webbing. We’d put about six or seven trammel nets at various spots along the river. The nets were one hundred fifty yards long, and we’d space them a few hundred yards apart. We’d put them out in the evening and then run them in the morning, taking whatever fish we caught to market. We’d run them again in the evening and put whatever fish we caught on ice. We did it over and over again every day in the summer. It might seem like tedious work to some people, but I wouldn’t have traded the job for anything in the world. It was one of the most exciting times of my life.
When you’re using trammel nets to fish, you can get pretty far from home on the river. After a couple of months, you’re many miles up the river. You keep moving, looking for fish. I remember running the nets one morning, and I was wearing only a pair of shorts. I rarely wore socks, shoes, or a shirt during the summertime fishing period. We didn’t have a lot of clothes when I was growing up, and I didn’t want my entire wardrobe smelling like fish! On this particular day, a big thunderstorm came through, and it poured. Of course, there was nowhere to hide on the river and we were too far from home to get back. When the storm finally passed, I was freezing. It seemed like the temperature had dropped thirty degrees! When we started motoring back to our house, the wind made it even colder.
Usually, my dad is all about “Who’s a man?” and “How tough are you?” But all of a sudden, he slowed down the motor and stopped.
“You know what?” he asked me. “I’m freezing my rear off.”
“I’m pretty cold, too,” I told him as my teeth chattered.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“Feel the water,” he said.
I put my hand in the river and it felt like bathwater. My dad and I jumped into the river and drifted home as we held on to the boat. We talked and laughed the entire way home. I don’t know why I’ve always remembered that experience; I guess it’s because my dad turned a miserable incident into a good memory for me. For once, it wasn’t about toughness and being a man. One of the greatest things about hunting and fishing as a kid is you’re spending quality time with your parents and probably don’t even realize it at the time.
Whenever it rained, we always made sure to check the beaver dams on the river. After it rains, game fish like to gather up where the current comes across the dams. We usually threw a couple of rods and reels in the boat on rainy days. I remember one particular morning we pulled up to a flooded beaver dam and caught over a hundred largemouth bass. We were cackling like little girls at a slumber party. On the way back we also caught the biggest fish I’ve ever seen out of a trammel net. My dad caught a seven-foot gar that weighed about one hundred and forty-five pounds! It was a giant! It was a monster! We went home and my dad immediately called the guy who bought our fish. He sold the gar for about thirty dollars. It always struck me that the fish might have eaten me if I’d fallen in the water. That’s one of the great things about fishing—you never know what you’re going to catch!
My dad didn’t allow us to fool around in the boat or in a duck blind. It was too dangerous. He only had a few rules: my brothers and I couldn’t physically fight with one another, we had to take care of our fishing and hunting equipment, and we’d better not talk back to our mother. His blood would boil if one of us broke a fishing pole or motor because of carelessness. Eventually, he trusted me enough to let me fish the river on my own.
After my dad started making duck calls, he’d leave town for a few days, driving all over Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas trying to sell them. He left me in charge of the fishing operation. I was only a teenager, but it was my responsibility to check almost eighty hoop nets three times a week. Looking back now, it was pretty dangerous work for a teenager on the river, especially since I’d never done it alo
ne. If you fell out of the boat and into the river, chances were you might drown if something went wrong and you were alone. But I was determined to prove to my father that I could do it, so I left the house one morning and spent all day on the river. I checked every one of our hoop nets and brought a mound of fish back to Kay to take to market. I was so proud of myself for pulling it off without anyone’s help!
When Dad came home a couple of days later, Mom told him about the fish I’d caught and how much money we’d made. I could see the smile on his face. But then he went outside to check his boat and noticed that a paddle was missing. Instead of saying, “Good job, son,” he yelled at me for losing a paddle! I couldn’t believe he was scolding me over a stupid oar! I’d worked from daylight to dusk and earned enough money for my family to buy a dozen paddles! Where was the gratitude?
I was so mad that I jumped in the boat and headed to the nets to see if I could find the missing paddle. After checking about seventy nets, I was resigned to the fact that it was probably gone. But when I finally reached the seventy-ninth net, I saw the paddle lying in a few bushes where I’d tied up a headliner, which is a rope leading to the net. It was almost like a religious experience for me. What were the odds of my finding a lost paddle floating in a current on a washed-out river? It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. I took the paddle back to my dad, but he was still mad at me for losing it in the first place. I have never liked the line “up a creek without a paddle” because of the trouble boat paddles caused me. I swore I would never lose another one, but lo and behold, the next year, I broke the same paddle I’d lost while trying to kill a cottonmouth water moccasin that almost bit me. My dad wasn’t very compassionate even after I told him his prized paddle perhaps saved my life. I finally concluded that everyone has quirks, and apparently my dad has some sort of weird love affair with boat paddles.
I started dating Missy shortly after I’d graduated from high school. She couldn’t understand why I was working so hard for my parents without receiving much of a salary in return.
Missy: After a few dates, I realized he didn’t have a job and wasn’t going to school. I was busy being a junior in high school and planning my time as a college student in the near future, so this seemed very odd to me. It didn’t take me long to figure out that while I was at school during the day, he was fishing on the river, mending nets, working crawfish traps on his dad’s land, and not receiving any kind of a paycheck. I knew he was a smart guy, so I couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t pursuing more in his life during this time. So one day, I finally asked him, “Why are you working so hard every day when you know you’re not going to get any money from it?” He said simply, “Because my parents need me.” I remember feeling in awe of the loyalty Jase felt toward his parents. Those were difficult times financially for them, and Jase understood, even at the wise old age of nineteen, that it would take his efforts to help Phil and Kay make ends meet. In return, Jase received three meals a day (awesome meals for sure), a bed, and even a little gas money to take me on dates. He was perfectly happy with the situation. I knew right then I had a good man on my hands.
Once during that first year of dating, I was sitting in the Robertson living room when Miss Kay came stomping in from the back room telling Willie that his room was a mess. She couldn’t even get to the washing machine to do the laundry (Willie had his bed in the laundry room/pantry at that time). Without even looking at her, Willie said, “I’ll clean it for five dollars.” I remember laughing, thinking he was joking, especially when his brother had been outside working on the nets all day. But do you know? She actually paid him. Even back then, Willie was showing signs of being a shrewd businessman.
If I wasn’t hunting and fishing with my dad when I was a kid, I was usually spending time with my grandparents Merritt and James Robertson, who lived in a second house on our land. We called them Granny and Pa. My grandfather worked on oil rigs for a long time. After Pa retired, they moved back to Louisiana from Arizona and helped my parents buy the property on the Ouachita River. Pa liked to hunt and fish and helped my dad make duck calls in the early days of Duck Commander. But as my grandparents got older, they liked to watch TV and play games with my brothers and me.
Pa and Granny were really two of my best friends growing up. They loved to tell jokes. If my dad was working or my mom was cooking, my grandparents entertained us. They never complained about it and loved the company. Our favorite games were dominoes and spades. We played cards or dominoes every day, and I became very good at them. Later in life, after the proliferation of computers, I started playing a spades game called Ladders on the Internet. When I signed up, I was ranked like 250,000th in the world. I eventually made it to number one in the world because I played it so much!
I still consider myself a professional card and dominoes player, and I warn my friends not to sit to my right or left. It’s a joke meant to convey to them that my teammate sits across from me, but I find most people take it as a challenge. I became a very good poker player, and when Missy and I were first married, I played in a lot of poker games to make money. You gauge your success at poker in the long term, and I’ve never had a year when I didn’t come out ahead, way ahead. Hey, it’s not gambling if you know you’re going to win, right? That’s just the honest truth. I do not consider myself a gambler, as I never play blackjack or other games of chance because the odds aren’t in your favor. I prefer Texas Hold’em poker or other card games in which you create your own odds by the way you play. You’re not playing against a casino in poker; you’re playing against other people. I consider it a game of skill in which some luck is involved. In the end, the best player is going to win. I view poker a lot like the fishing tournaments I used to participate in. You can be the best overall fisherman but on any given day have bad luck. But over the long haul your skill wins out. When I play cards with my buddies now, the stakes are low and it’s more about good fun than winning or losing. But there was a day when I depended on playing cards for my spending money.
Granny and Pa were great dominoes players, and our games were fierce competitions. I think outsiders were surprised at how intense the games became. Missy was shocked the first time she witnessed a Robertson family dominoes game.
Missy: The first time I met Granny and Pa was at their house during a dominoes game. Phil, Jase, Willie, and Alan were all playing with Granny and Pa at their living room table. When I arrived, I heard all kinds of banging and slamming noises. I thought someone was tearing the room apart! When I got inside, it looked like a pool hall. Granny and Pa both smoked cigarettes, and the smoke was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. Through the smoke I saw all of them slamming down domino after domino onto the wooden table and yelling at one another. I was appalled, thinking how disrespectful the boys were being to their dad and grandparents! Jase introduced me to Granny and Pa, and in between puffs, I received a polite smile from Granny and a nod from Pa. Then they went right back to yelling and slamming. Since I’d never been around smokers, I couldn’t stay there for more than a few minutes. I told Jase I would be next door at his house, waiting on him to finish playing. When he finally came home, I asked him if everything was okay between everyone over there. Realizing my genuine concern, he said, “Hey, that’s just part of the game.” See, to them, it was only a friendly game of dominoes. I learned quickly how close Jase was to his family. It was an almost-nightly occurrence. It was hard for me to relate because I had never lived that close to my grandparents or had that kind of daily relationship with any of them. Jase and his brothers showed a comfort with their granny and pa that I had never experienced in my own life. The more time I spent with them, the more I came to love them. Pa was always very quiet and reserved (unless he had dominoes in his hands). They became very special people in my life as well.
Granny had health problems throughout her life and was even hospitalized in the Louisiana state mental institute for a while. Once doctors administered her the right kind of medicine, she had a very
productive and fruitful life. She loved being around her grandchildren. One of the best things Granny did for our family was knit each of us an afghan. At some point in her life, she knitted an afghan for every one of her children and grandchildren for a special occasion. If she wasn’t playing dominoes or cards, she was usually knitting in her chair. She knew I was a big Louisiana State University football fan, so she made me a big purple, gold, and white one (the Tigers’ school colors) and gave it to Missy and me on our wedding day. She gave it to me twenty-five years ago, and it’s still one of my most prized possessions. Granny also made each of my three children an afghan blanket. Mia, who is ten at the time of this writing, still sleeps with her afghan, or at least what’s left of it. Granny’s afghans are masterpieces as far as I’m concerned, not as much for the way they look but because she put so much hard work and love into making each one of them.
In a lot of ways, my family is knitted together, just like one of Granny’s afghans. There were plenty of times my family might have come apart at the seams, especially when my dad was running wild. But once he followed my mother’s lead and became a disciple of Christ, everything changed. My parents never pressured my brothers or me to become Christians. They realized it was a personal choice each of us had to make on his own. But our mutual love for God and one another is what kept my family intact.
One Sunday, I was asked to speak in front of our congregation at White’s Ferry Road Church in West Monroe. I was asked to talk about my heroes. I’m sure everyone assumed I’d talk about my dad because he’s accomplished so much in life and served as a role model for people who want to turn their lives around. Instead, I told my family and friends that my mom is my biggest hero. Even though my parents weren’t Christians when I was a young kid, she put enough godly influence in us to teach us what was right and wrong. She was the glue that held everything together during the hard times. If she wasn’t determined to keep her family together, our family might have dissolved. It took a lot of patience and love to keep us somewhat secure and stable despite all the chaos. I still remember the tears flowing down her cheeks after I spoke, and as only my mom can, she cooked all my favorite meals for the next week.
Good Call: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Fowl Page 3
