Yes, my arm was severely broken one time. In baseball we used the hardest ball we could find, and you made an out by pegging the runner with it. The winner of games was often decided not by runs but by the last man left standing! In basketball, the punishment came from saving the ball from going out of bounds. If you could bounce the ball off your brother’s face before it went out of bounds, you would maintain possession. Whether you drew blood or not, it was a legal play. Nowhere in the rules of basketball does it put a limit on how hard you can throw the ball at your opponent, nor does it dictate which body part should do the reflecting. Let’s just say every time anyone got near the out-of-bounds lines, everyone else got nervous. I had my nose broken twice on such plays, and one of our buddies actually lost a tooth. It was rough, but, hey, it was part of the game and a great way to vent pent-up frustrations. Even though my brothers and I had our fair share of physical fights growing up, like most teenage brothers do, we always had one another’s backs in the end. Even though we had our angry moments, my brothers were still my best friends. We hunted, fished, and played sports together, just like we do today, just with a little less violence.
I don’t think there’s any question our competitive personalities come from our parents. My parents liked to fuss and argue, but they rarely raised their voices at each other, at least not in a malicious way. If you lived in the Robertson house, you had to be prepared to defend yourself if you made a mistake. Everyone was going to critique and criticize your poor decisions, whether you were cooking, hunting, fishing, or working.
Both of my parents are excellent cooks, and I think food was the difference maker for us when it came to making friends. Although we didn’t have much money and might have looked poor in terms of our clothes, once kids came to our house, most of them never said anything mean about us again because they wanted to be invited back to eat. But some of my friends were probably surprised by what they witnessed at our dinner table.
My mom has always been famous for her biscuits, and we ate them almost every day while I was growing up. One night, we gathered around the table for dinner, and my dad was on a rant about weather, ducks, and just about everything else on his mind. My brothers and I were sitting at the table, but we were waiting for my dad to make his plate before we served ourselves. That was one of the rules in my house: the adults always had the first choice of food before the kids, so we were usually left fighting for whatever was left. Well, on this particular night, I’d snuck a biscuit to the table and was taking small bites of it because I was starving. After a couple of bites, I realized something wasn’t quite right about it. It was missing an ingredient and didn’t taste very good. I knew my dad was in for a surprise when he sat down to eat.
After my dad took a bite of the biscuit, he chewed about three times and spit it out on the floor.
“Well, these aren’t right,” he said.
I’ll never forget what my dad did next. He walked into the kitchen, grabbed the pan of biscuits, and went to the front door. He opened the door and threw the pan into the front yard! We could hear the dogs scurrying and barking over the commotion.
My dad walked back into the dining room and said, “You know they’re bad when the dogs won’t even eat them! I’ll show you how to make some biscuits.”
“Phil, that was my good pan!” my mom yelled.
She was obviously concerned that my dad had broken her favorite pan, but then he started going into this long, drawn-out speech about the proper way to make biscuits. For the next thirty minutes, my mom and dad tried to figure out what went wrong with her buttermilk biscuits, as my dad pulled out the flour, eggs, and everything else he needed to make a second batch. It’s the way it was in the Robertson house: you had to assess blame and critique what went wrong before you could move on. If something wasn’t right, there wasn’t an excuse and you certainly weren’t getting any sympathy from anyone else. The culprit was getting blamed for it!
In my teenage years, I had a horrific wreck that totaled the family truck just up the road from our house. I wasn’t paying attention and pulled out in front of a very large truck and trailer going about fifty miles per hour. My truck spun, flipped, and crashed into a light pole. I didn’t have my seat belt on and was battered, cut, and bruised all over my body, although miraculously none of the injuries turned out to be that severe. I was lying on the ground covered in blood with a piece of glass about six inches long sticking out of my chin when I regained consciousness. When I opened my eyes, my dad was standing over me. His first words were, “What were you thinking?” Thanks, Dad, I was just happy to be alive. Despite my family’s propensity to assess blame while withholding compassion, these moments became stories that we laugh at now and retell over and over again.
As I’ve said before, my dad didn’t have many rules. He told us that as long as we passed in school and stayed out of trouble, we could do anything we wanted. He was a man of his word. I think that’s one of the reasons I was a fairly good kid and didn’t cross him. There were plenty of chances to step out of line. There were a lot of days when I didn’t even know where my parents were. But I was living in a controlled environment, either fishing on the river or hunting in the woods, and there was nothing else to do. I had more fun fishing and hunting than doing anything in town, which might have led me to trouble. I never had curfews, and there wasn’t a lot of trouble to find in the middle of nowhere. I always viewed darkness as my curfew unless I could find a flashlight. You were at the end of a dirt road and surrounded by water. What were you going to do other than hunt and fish? I didn’t have a vehicle to drive until my later teen years, so it wasn’t like I was going anywhere. And there wasn’t anyone else to influence me into making bad decisions, other than my brothers.
Like I said before, I didn’t drink and didn’t do drugs. I made the decision not to drink before I even became a Christian. I remembered the things associated with the honky-tonk bar my dad owned, and I vowed I wasn’t going to do anything to put myself in a position where I could wind up in prison or dead. I decided I was going to wait until I was thirty years old before I’d ever have any kind of drink, which is about what I did. My logic was that I would be mature enough to handle it by then.
I rarely drink alcohol now and have concluded that if you’re not doing it to get a buzz, it must be more of an acquired taste, because it doesn’t taste very good to me. I stay away from drinking more than one or two drinks in a twenty-four-hour period, just in case I find something I like. It’s been a good system for me. My buddies tried to tempt me in high school, and I always told them, “Nothing in a bottle or can is going to make me feel better than catching a mess of frogs or shooting ducks.” They were always perplexed by my answer, but I never was one to care about peer pressure or what people said about me.
My brother Alan is older than me and suffered more consequences from being raised in the bar. Willie and I were younger, so being around the bar probably didn’t affect us as much. Alan struggled with alcohol in high school and even left home for a while. I tried to tell my parents my brother was cutting up on several occasions, but he was pretty good at getting out of trouble. I remember seeing a washtub full of empty beer bottles in the trunk of his car, and I told my mom about it. When she confronted him, he explained to her that he and a couple of buddies were helping a Louisiana litter-free cause and they’d cleaned up a sandbar on the river. She believed him! Alan and his friends whipped my rear over telling my mom, so I kept future discoveries to myself. My parents eventually sent him packing, and he moved to New Orleans.
But after Alan was badly beaten in a fight in New Orleans, he returned home and underwent a complete life change. I remember the day he called home as we were in the middle of a domino game. My dad told him over the phone he was welcome back but had to meet him up the road for a talk. I immediately thought of Luke 15:20: “So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son,
threw his arms around him and kissed him.”
I’m sure there wasn’t a whole lot of hugging and kissing from my dad, but I was proud they hadn’t burned the bridge back home, even though we were all a bit bitter and frustrated with Alan’s choices. God teaches us to love the sinner while hating the sins they commit, and God welcomes everyone with open arms regardless of what they have done. Like my dad had done, Al surrendered to Christ, and he eventually became a minister. Jep, my youngest brother, wasn’t born until after my father became a Christian, so he never witnessed any of my dad’s wild days. But Jep also struggled with drugs and alcohol and left the flock in high school, only to return to my family and the Lord after I, my brothers, and Dad had a type of intervention with him. He was overwhelmed with emotion and confessed to us the bad things he had been doing. That was the only time I can recall seeing every one of us with tears in our eyes at the same time. We gathered around him, put our hands on him, and prayed together. James 5:16 states: “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.”
My brothers and I were allowed to argue and debate all we wanted, but once meat started popping, my dad stepped in. He didn’t care who started the fight or ended it. If there was any kind of physical fracas, everyone involved was getting whipped! In hindsight, it was actually a failed policy. I remember one time I accidentally hit Willie in the nose and it started pouring out blood. We were wrestling and playing around in the yard, and I inadvertently hit him. It really was an accident. Willie started teasing me, telling me he was going to tell Dad I hit him in the nose on purpose. My dad always said, “First blood, you’re going to get whipped.”
As Willie ran off to tell my dad, it hit me that I’d better get my money’s worth if I was going to get whipped, so I chased Willie down and started beating the snot out of him! My dad pulled up and saw us fighting in the front yard. For some reason, I told my dad the complete truth, thinking that would help my chances. Boy, it was the one of the worst whippings I’d ever received, but at least the crime fit the punishment!
There were a couple of times I was whipped when I didn’t deserve to be punished, which is another reason my dad’s philosophy was flawed. One day, Alan and Willie were fighting near where we dipped the duck calls in tung oil. My dad walked out, heard the commotion, and immediately thought all of us were fighting. He whipped every one of us, but I didn’t have anything to do with it! The worst part was as my dad was about to whip me with a belt, I grabbed the board where we hung the duck calls to dry. It had rows of nails sticking out of it! The nails poked through my hands, and I screamed before my dad even whipped me. Of course, my dad made a big deal out of it. “I haven’t even hit you, and you’re already screaming,” he said. Never mind that blood was pouring from my hands. Fortunately, they were only superficial wounds.
Well, I was so mad about getting whipped for nothing that I went into my bedroom, packed a bag, and headed for the woods. Whenever I felt like I’d been wronged, I ran away. At that age, I was still struggling to understand why my dad had left his family during his wild days, so I figured running away was the answer to just about every injustice in my life. I took off down the road and went about a mile before I realized I didn’t have any food. I had some weapons with me, but I didn’t have a gun, so I couldn’t shoot anything to eat. After contemplating my dilemma for a few minutes, I turned around and headed home. I figured I’d probably given them enough punishment for wronging me, and I was certain my mom and dad were sick to their stomachs from their anxiety about my leaving.
When I walked into our house, my parents and brothers were sitting around the table eating lunch! I heard them talking, but they weren’t worrying about me! It was like I’d never left. They didn’t even act like they cared that I’d run away. I thought to myself, Huh, isn’t this something? So I went back outside and climbed up on the roof of the house. I sat there for a couple of hours and nothing happened. Nobody came looking for me, and they went about their normal business. Then it got to be nightfall and I started smelling fried squirrel, and I didn’t hear anybody say anything about going to look for Jase. So I climbed down from the roof and went into the house. No one said anything to me. They didn’t even ask me where I’d been! I probably ran away ten times when I was a kid, and not once did anyone come looking for me.
Probably the scariest moment of my childhood occurred when Jep was about three years old. He wandered off from the yard and no one could find him. We always had Labrador retrievers as our hunting dogs, but one in particular didn’t like to duck-hunt. His name was Gabe, and no matter how hard my dad tried, he couldn’t turn the dog into a retriever. He was black and had a white patch on his neck. My dad said, “He’s not full bred and that’s why he’s worthless.” We turned Gabe into a house dog and he ended up becoming my favorite pet. After several frightening minutes of not being able to find Jep, we went to the riverbank and found him. Gabe was standing in front of Jep, almost blocking him from going into the water. If Jep had fallen into the river, he would have drowned. It was almost as if the dog was protecting him. Gabe ended up being a really smart dog and always seemed to be looking out for us. On a couple of occasions, he stopped in front of me on the riverbank and would start to growl. As I looked around I would discover he was growling at a cottonmouth. What I found strange is that he would not growl at non-poisonous snakes; that alone made him smarter than a lot of people I know! Even his death was pretty smart. He was old and had gotten really sick, so he waded neck-deep at the edge of the river and just stood there for two days. We would call him and he wouldn’t come. By the third day, I got up from bed and went down to the river to see if he was still there and he was gone.
Al was always the instigator. One night, I was lying on the couch watching TV, and Al and his friends were throwing things at me. They loved to pick on me and pester me because they were older and bigger than me. Of course, my dad was in the room, but he was oblivious to what was going on. He was blowing on duck calls and packaging them to sell. All of a sudden, Al threw a shotgun shell and it hit me on top of the head. It knocked me out cold! When I regained consciousness, my dad was beating the fire out of Al! That was one time Al was busted. He always seemed to get away with everything. He’d start a fight between Willie and me and then we’d get punished for it. But Al was the one who always started trouble.
Al loved to pick on me when I was sleeping, which was when I was most vulnerable. After a few incidents, I started sleeping with rocks and batteries. When I sensed Al and his friends were coming after me, I came up firing. Holes covered the walls and doors of our bedroom, and they were the product of pure meanness as we threw things at one another. The one instance I felt really bad about was when I was awakened thinking Al was in the room. Since it was dark, I reached to find some sort of weapon. I grabbed the alarm clock and flung it as hard as I could. I heard a loud thud, a cry of pain, and another loud thud as the perpetrator hit the floor. I jumped up, turned on the lights, and realized that I’d knocked Jep out cold. He was just passing through but happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I still don’t know where my parents were when all of this was occurring. It was survival of the fittest.
I always whipped Willie because I was older. I had the upper hand on him, but Al always got the best of me. Al was five years older than me, but the last time we sparred, I won through what might not have been fair tactics. I knew Al had knee problems from playing sports in recreational leagues. Shortly after Al graduated from high school, he and his friends came to our house and started messing with me. As they were walking away, I took off after him. Al must have sensed I was coming after him, because he turned around just before I reached him. I lowered my shoulder and took his bad knee out. He fell to the ground in a heap. He was in agony.
“Hey, if you don’t quit messing with me, I’m going to do this every time you turn away,” I told him.
It was the last
time Al and his friends ever messed with me. Willie and I also had our share of physical fights, but he learned to leave me alone, too. We have the same relationship in business now. When my parents decided to turn over the Duck Commander business, I think they assumed I would run it because I knew how to make the duck calls better than anyone else. But I didn’t want anything to do with the business part of it. I didn’t want the responsibility or stress of dealing with customers, and I certainly didn’t want the business interfering with duck season. So when my parents sat me down to talk about it, I told them I didn’t want the company. I told them I was perfectly content making the duck calls. So my parents offered Willie the company, and he and his wife, Korie, agreed to take over Duck Commander.
Willie and I talked shortly thereafter, and I told him, “Look, I’ll do the duck calls. You do the business. You can make all the money if you want to take all the risks, it’s fine with me.” I liked what I was doing, and it was providing a good life for my family. I didn’t want to be consumed by the day-to-day operations of Duck Commander to the point where it would take time away from my wife or kids. I commend Willie for the job he’s done with the company. He has taken it to heights none of us could have imagined, and he’s worked hard to make it happen. He has a very good business mind and sees the big picture, despite the fact that he annoys the heck out of me sometimes. I often tell people that having your brother as a boss is like dating your cousin—it’s a bit weird!
Good Call: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Fowl Page 5
