We had a really good team. I bet we averaged more than a hundred points per game. In a lot of games, we would run over the scoreboard, so the final score would read forty-two points to twenty-seven, when we’d actually scored one hundred and forty-two points. The scoreboard couldn’t even keep up with us! Jase was a set three-point shooter, but he couldn’t make layups to save his life. He would run back and always shoot a three-pointer; it was the only shot he ever took or made. In one game, Jase scored thirty-four points—thirty-three came on three-pointers, and he made one foul shot. He always took a high, arching shot and made most of them. I was the point guard of the team, but I liked to shoot the ball, too. When I went to college, I continued to play in recreation leagues, and I played for my fraternity, too—but more about that later.
At any rate, Jase and I had finally figured out a way to turn our competitive natures to sports, and it was serving us well. That is why our last fight—I was sixteen and he was eighteen—came as a surprise to both of us. Our last fight was a bad one. And it was over toast and pizza! I was at home one night and our friend “Curly” Don Foster was sitting on the couch. Curly Don was living with us at the time; one of our friends always seemed to be living with us because Phil and Kay were always willing to help out anyone who needed it. Curly Don and I were watching TV and cooking a frozen pizza in the oven. Jase walked into the house and started making himself some toast, which he then wanted to put in the oven, but my pizza was already in there. We had a small toaster oven, but Jase didn’t want to use it because he was making like twelve pieces of toast and he wanted to cook it all at one time.
“I’m going to take your pizza out for a minute and cook my toast really fast,” Jase told me.
“Uh-uh, son,” I told him. “When my pizza is done, you can have the oven.”
“No, I can just change the oven to broil and put my toast right on top,” Jase said. “It will cook really quick.”
I wasn’t having any of it. Both of us grabbed the oven door and started arguing about who was going to cook their meal first. I looked at Jase and shouldered him right into the refrigerator, making a big dent in the door. We were both into watching wrestling, and Jake “the Snake” Roberts was one of our favorite wrestlers. Jase picked me up and put me into Roberts’s signature move, the “DDT,” picking me up by my pants and lifting me so my legs were straight up in the air. All of a sudden, Jase dropped my head right into a barrel of flour Kay kept in the kitchen. Flour went everywhere. The entire kitchen was covered in a cloud of white!
I put my shoulder into Jase again—I don’t know why I kept trying to use that move—and we went flying across the kitchen table. Fortunately, the table didn’t break. But the flour barrel splintered and lay flat on the kitchen floor. Jase and I were both covered in flour, and the kitchen was an absolute mess.
THE FLOUR BARREL SPLINTERED AND LAY FLAT ON THE KITCHEN FLOOR.
Curly Don was sitting on the couch watching us fight.
“Don’t y’all look like two fine Christians?” he told us, once we settled down enough to hear what he was saying.
I ran out of the house and jumped into Uncle Si’s Nissan truck and drove around for a while. I knew I had to go home and clean up the mess before Phil and Kay got home, or we’d both be in big trouble, but I needed to calm down first. I walked back into the house and apologized to Jase. He did his best to apologize to me (he told me to shut up or something). We’ve never had a physical fight since. We both realized we were too old and too big to be fighting like that. We could hurt each other or break something else. And to be honest, Curly’s comment about our being fine Christians really made an impact on us. Jase and I are brothers, and we realized that wasn’t the way God wanted us to be treating each other. Kay was always quoting 1 John 4:20: “For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” This was a time in our life when our spiritual walk was growing, and this was a lesson that has stuck with me.
WE HAD TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET ALONG WITH EACH OTHER AND WITH OTHERS.
All of our Robertson confidence and stubbornness could serve us well in life, but if we were selfish and didn’t use it for the good, it could be to our detriment. We had to figure out how to get along with each other and with others, and we were learning those lessons. Most important, we had to learn how to love as God defines it. As 1 Corinthians 13:4–5 says, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.” These were tough lessons for a couple of country boys, but I’m glad Phil and Kay kept “beating” it into us and Curly Don was there at the right time to remind us.
We shook hands and cleaned up the kitchen. The worst part was that during all the commotion, I burned my frozen pizza.
DUCK SAUSAGE PIZZA
Looking for something weird? Well, here it is! We love pizza at the Robertson household. I have tried all sorts of weird toppings on pizza, and am actually building a pizza oven so I can explore even more. Cooking is all about the exploration. Pizza is the most fun food you can experiment with. Put on whatever you like.
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/8 cup crushed red pepper
1 thin pizza crust, fully baked
11/2 cups grated mozzarella cheese
1/2 cup tomatoes, diced
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/3 cup green onions, diced
2 smoked duck sausages, sliced
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
2. Mix olive oil, garlic, and red pepper in small bowl.
3. Place pizza crust on baking sheet.
4. Sprinkle pizza crust with mozzarella cheese.
5. Top pizza with tomatoes, oregano, green onions, sliced sausage, and Parmesan cheese.
6. Drizzle olive oil mixture over pizza.
7. Bake pizza about fifteen minutes, or until cheese is melted and crust is brown.
6
ROADKILL
GOD BLESSED THEM AND SAID TO THEM, “BE FRUITFUL AND INCREASE IN NUMBER; FILL THE EARTH AND SUBDUE IT. RULE OVER THE FISH IN THE SEA AND THE BIRDS IN THE SKY AND OVER EVERY LIVING CREATURE THAT MOVES ON THE GROUND.”
—GENESIS 1:28
Growing up Robertson meant we were all involved in the family business, whatever it was at the time. As we got older that meant helping with duck calls, but in the early days, Phil had other ways to support his family while Duck Commander was getting off the ground. Some of these jobs we enjoyed; others, not so much.
For several years, Dad was in the commercial fishing business, and of course, we all helped out. I started fishing with Phil when I was about six years old. Jase was older than me, so he would go out on the boat and be his motorman, while Phil pulled up the nets.
One of the worst jobs was baiting the nets, which involved filling socks with rotten cheese. I can still recall the horrible smell! Phil would buy a fifty-five-gallon drum of rotten cheese, which was always covered in maggots. We had to reach our hands down into the drum to scoop the cheese and then shove it into an old sock, gagging the entire time. We filled the socks with the rotten cheese at daybreak, and then Phil would go out and set out the traps. At daylight, Phil and Jase would leave and run the fishing nets until about ten o’clock in the morning. Kay and I would be waiting on the dock for them when they returned, and then Jase and I unloaded the fish and carried them back to the house.
After we put the fish in the back of the truck, Kay and I would then drive to town to go to the markets and sell the fresh fish. One store would take maybe half of the fish, and then we’d head to another store to sell the rest. If we had any fish left after hitting the markets, we’d sit on the side of the road and sell them to the public. I learned pretty quickly that the faster you sold the fish, the faster you got to go home. I learned how to b
e a good salesman by selling those fish on the side of the road when I was a kid. When it’s hot, fish spoil quickly, so there was no time to waste. Once I saw that Mom was more likely to spend some of that cash we made on something I wanted at the store if I did a good job that day, that was just the motivation I needed to work on my craft.
As I got older and wanted to buy more things, I realized selling stuff was my ticket. I mostly wanted an awesome boom box, tapes, and parachute pants. Mom wouldn’t buy me the really cool parachute pants with all the zippers; she got me crappy ones that just looked like a windbreaker and didn’t have zippers all over them. One summer I sold enough worms on the boat dock to finally get those pants, which looked exactly like Michael Jackson’s. They were awesome.
When I was in high school, Phil decided he wanted to get into crawfishing. Like most other things, I’m sure we were doing it unlike anyone else. The problem with crawfish is you can never have enough bait. A crawfish will literally eat anything—as long as it’s dead and smells really bad. So if Jase and I spotted a dead possum lying in the road, we’d pick it up and throw it in the back of the truck. We were always looking for roadkill! We took the dead animals home, chopped them up, and threw them into the crawfish nets. Getting the bait became just as fun as the crawfishing.
We had an old deep-freezer in the shop and started throwing roadkill in it. By the end of the summer, the freezer was filled with dead cats, dogs, deer, coons, possums, ducks, and anything else we could find in the road. It smelled awful! We also put tons of snakes in there. We baited snake traps in the water with little perch. We’d pull up the traps at night and then blast the snakes with shotguns. We’d get maybe eight snakes a night; most of them were water snakes but there were always a couple of water moccasins. You never knew what you were going to find in a snake trap.
One night I caught a huge water snake and shot it in the head. I carried it up to the freezer and came back about ten minutes later with my cleaver to chop it up. I reached down in the freezer and grabbed the snake. That snake coiled up and reared its head back with its mouth wide open, ready to strike. It apparently wasn’t dead yet, but it nearly scared me half to death! I threw it down and hit it with the cleaver as hard and as fast as I could. Water snakes aren’t poisonous, but that was a big snake. Its bite certainly would have hurt. My heart was racing!
Whenever one of our friends or cousins came to the house, we made them look in the freezer. It looked like a pet cemetery in there! Our family’s staple foods were the fish and the crawfish we caught, and you had to have food for the crawfish and bait for the fish as well. The stuff we found on the road worked great for both of these duties, and it was free. We were making lemonade out of lemons, son!
We hunted snakes a lot when I was a kid. In the summer of 1991, the Ouachita River flooded Phil’s property pretty badly. Granny and Pa’s house was lower to the ground than Phil’s, so there was almost six feet of water in their house. Once the snakes got into their house, they couldn’t get out. I remember floating around the property on a big Styrofoam block, shooting snakes in the water. We would just sit on the front porch and shoot water moccasins.
Korie: Willie and I were dating by this time, and this was just crazy to me! Because everything was flooded, we had to park up the hill and take a boat to get to their house. They would always have a gun in the boat and would shoot snakes as we rode up. I remember one day when I was down there, Granny needed something from the kitchen in her house, which was literally halfway underwater. Willie got on a block of Styrofoam and paddled into the dark, snake-infested house to retrieve the pot his granny wanted to salvage from her upper kitchen cabinets. It seemed like he stayed in there way longer than he should have. I was scared to death for him, but he came out triumphant and I was proud of my man!
Our crawfish business ended up being pretty lucrative. We sold crawfish commercially to the markets in Monroe. We actually put a boat up on sawhorses and sold live crawfish out of it in the Super 1 grocery store. It was hard keeping the boat filled with crawfish all the time. Like with a snake trap, you never know what you’re going to find when you pull up a crawfish trap. You can pick up a trap and find poisonous snakes and about everything else. I picked up a trap one time and there was a big, green river eel in it. This was a good find for crawfish bait. When Phil shoots a duck, he bites its head to make sure it’s dead. That eel was still alive, and I didn’t have anything with me to kill it, so what’s the logical thing to do? I bit the eel’s head as hard as I could, and let me tell you something, you can’t bite through an eel’s head! It’s hard and slimy, and just nasty. It took me a week to get the slime out of my teeth! I never tried that again.
When we were growing up with nothing more than an idea in Dad’s head for a duck call that sounded exactly like a duck, folks would sometimes look at us with pity and wonder why Dad didn’t shave his beard and get a regular job. Some would even poke fun at us. We made it through some really tough times. We were a lot like that roadkill. Most people just saw a dead, stinky animal that had the bad luck to run out in front of the wrong vehicle. But when we saw roadkill, we saw something that could catch a sackful of crawfish. We saw potential in the most unlikely places!
CRAWFISH BALLS
Phil’s the king of the crawfish balls. These are his go-to appetizers. When he cooks them, I usually fill up on them before we get to the main dish.
1 stick butter
2 white onions, diced
1/4 cup green onions, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
2 stalks celery, diced
8 cloves garlic, diced
1/4 cup parsley flakes
1 teaspoon thyme
1 teaspoon basil
2 or 3 dashes of Louisiana hot sauce
salt and pepper to taste
1 pound lump crabmeat (cleaned)
1 pound crawfish tails, cooked
2 eggs
11/2 cups Italian bread crumbs
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
peanut oil
1. On medium-high heat in a medium-size pan, sauté butter, white onions, green onions, bell pepper, and celery until vegetables are soft, about eight to ten minutes.
2. Add garlic, parsley, thyme, basil, and hot sauce.
3. Place mixture in a large bowl and season with salt and pepper.
4. Add crabmeat and crawfish tails. Mix well.
5. Beat eggs, add to mixture, and mix well.
6. Add enough bread crumbs to hold mixture together.
7. Make small patties and roll in flour.
8. Deep-fry in peanut oil on medium heat for 3 to 5 minutes or until golden brown.
7
OMELETS
THAT IS WHY A MAN LEAVES HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND IS UNITED TO HIS WIFE, AND THEY BECOME ONE FLESH.
GENESIS 2:24
Growing up in the Robertson house, you never had much space or time for yourself. Our house had only two bedrooms, so I shared a room with Alan and Jase for most of my childhood. And then Jep came along, and it was just too crowded. I started looking for other places to sleep, where I wouldn’t feel like I was packed in like a sardine.
When I was in middle school, I moved into the cook shack in front of our house, which was screened in at the time. It was during the summer so it wasn’t cold, and it had a sink, which was really cool. I had a hot plate out there and cooked my own meals. I even moved into the building where we made the reeds for the duck calls. Neither of these places was very big and they didn’t have any insulation, heat, or air-conditioning. They weren’t exactly the lap of luxury, but for me, they were mine. And for some reason I always felt like I needed my own space.
Korie: I always thought it was cool that Willie was trying to make his own little place in the world. He liked to fix up his space and paint it. He was a big baseball fan and loved the Los Angeles Dodgers. When he moved into the cook shack, he painted it Dodger blue. Even though it wasn’t much, Willie always tried to make it as nice as he could. He p
ut pictures on the walls and would add his own little touches. He tried to have a nice little place to live. I’ve always been impressed by his ingenuity.
After a while, I figured out I needed to live in a place that was actually attached to the house, so I moved into a small back room that was our laundry room. Korie showed me the laundry room when I visited her house for the first time. I asked her, “Who lives in here? Man, you could fit a double bed in here!”
Korie: I met Willie for the first time when we were in the third grade at Camp Ch-Yo-Ca, the camp I grew up at. Willie and Jase went to my session of the camp, and Alan came for high school week. Kay was cooking in the kitchen that summer, so her boys could attend the camp for free. I remember thinking Willie was the cutest thing I had ever seen and was so funny. We called him by his middle name, Jess, at the time. He had these big dimples and the cutest sideways smile. I had a diary that I never really wrote in, but that summer, I wrote: “I met a boy at summer camp and he was so cute. He asked me on the moonlight hike and I said ‘yes’!” I even wrote “Korie Loves Jess” on the bunk of the cabin I was staying in that summer.
Yes, Willie asked me to go on the moonlight hike with him. It was always a big deal every summer figuring out which boy was going to ask you to accompany him on the moonlight hike, and I was thrilled when he asked me! Willie was definitely my first crush. After camp that summer, I didn’t see Willie for a couple of years. We went to different schools and his family went to a small church out in the country. Our family attended one of the bigger churches in town, White’s Ferry Road Church.
The Duck Commander Family Page 6
