Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander

by Phil Robertson

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  Prologue: Happy, Happy, Happy

  1: Low-Tech Man

  Rule No. 1 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Simplify Your Life (Throw Away Your Cell Phones and Computers, Yuppies)

  2: Great Outdoors

  Rule No. 2 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Don’t Let Your Grandkids Grow Up to Be Nerds

  3: Rise, Kill, and Eat

  Rule No. 3 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Learn to Cook (It’s Better than Eating Slop)

  4: Strange Creatures

  Rule No. 4 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Don’t Try to Figure Out Women (They’re Strange Creatures)

  5: Who’s a Man?

  Rule No. 5 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Always Wear Shoes (Your Feet Will Feel Better)

  6: Honky-Tonk

  Rule No. 6 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Put the Bottle Down (You’ll Thank Me in the Morning)

  7: Sportsman’s Paradise

  Rule No. 7 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Buy a House Near Water (It’s a Lot More Fun)

  8: Duck Commander

  Rule No. 8 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Never Sell Yourself Short (You Never Know, You Might Become a Millionaire)

  9: Family Business

  Rule No. 9 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  It’s Cheaper to Hire Your Relatives (Unless You Don’t Like ’Em)

  10: If It Sounds Like a Duck

  Rule No. 10 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  If You’re Going to Do Something, Do It Right (Instead of Doing It Again)

  11: Redneck Caviar

  Rule No. 11 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Suck the Head of a Crawfish (You’ll Want to Do It Again and Again)

  12: Prodigal Sons

  Rule No. 12 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Learn to Forgive (Life’s a Lot Easier That Way)

  13: River Rats

  Rule No. 13 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Share God’s Word (It’s What He Asks of You)

  14: Founding Fathers

  Rule No. 14 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Read the Bible (We Can Still Save This Once Great Country—It’s Not Too Late)

  Afterword: Letters from the Family

  Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  About Phil Robertson

  To my four sons: Alan, Jase, Willie, and Jep

  “Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty.”

  —Excerpt from letter to Abigail Adams from her husband John Adams regarding their two sons, April 15, 1776

  HAPPY, HAPPY, HAPPY

  When A&E TV approached us about doing a reality TV show based on our family, I was somewhat reluctant and wasn’t quite sure if it would work.

  “Let me take a guess here,” I told the producers.

  I told them that there was probably a boardroom meeting at the A&E headquarters in New York City, where all the suits, yuppies, and best creative minds were kicking around ideas for a new reality TV show. At some point during the meeting, someone probably spoke up and said, “Uh, Bob, I know this might sound weird, but why don’t we try portraying a functional American family?”

  And I’m sure the guy sitting across the table shouted, “Now, that’s a novel idea!”

  Everything else on TV nowadays is dysfunctional and for the most part has been that way for forty years. The last TV shows we saw that featured functional families were The Andy Griffith Show, The Waltons, The Beverly Hillbillies (don’t laugh), and Little House on the Prairie. That was a long time ago!

  I’m sure someone else in the A&E board meeting probably then asked, “Bob, where do we find a functional family in America?”

  For whatever reason, they looked for one in West Monroe, Louisiana.

  To be honest, our family isn’t much different from other families in America. There’s a mom and a dad, four grown kids, fourteen grandchildren, and a couple of great-grandkids. We started a family business, Duck Commander, which turned into a pretty lucrative enterprise with a lot of elbow grease, teamwork, and God’s blessings. But as you’ll find out by reading this book, we’ve had our share of trials and struggles, like a lot of other families. We’ve battled alcohol and drug abuse, sibling rivalries, and near poverty and despair at the beginning of our time together as a family. It wasn’t always like what you see on TV. So except for our very manly appearances, it might not seem that we’re all that different from everyone else.

  But I think what separates the Robertsons from a lot of other families is our faith in God and love for each other. It’s unconditional, and it has been that way for as long as I can remember. For me, the most dramatic part of every Duck Dynasty episode comes at the end, when our family gathers around the dinner table to eat one of Miss Kay’s home-cooked meals. You don’t see families gathering up like that anymore. Everybody in America is so busy, busy, busy. Americans are too preoccupied with their cell phones and computers, so they don’t take the time to sit down with their spouses, children, grandchildren, aunts and uncles, and grandparents to eat a meal together. The family structure is slipping away from America, but not in our house.

  Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, probably said it best. Shortly after our founding fathers left the large cities of Europe for the wide-open spaces of America, Jefferson said of the American people, “When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.” You’ll never find me living in a city, folks. Where I live, I am 911. Like I say, if you spend too much time in the subdivision, you go a-runnin’ when the snakes fall out of trees!

  What separates the Robertsons from a lot of other families is our faith in God and love for each other.

  The other problem in America today is that the young girls don’t know how to cook. Their grandmothers and mamas cooked for them, but they never took the time to learn how to cook. They were more interested in other things. If you go out into the subdivisions and suburbs of America, where all of the yuppies live, you’ll see the restaurants are packed with people. They don’t want to eat slop and they’re looking for good food, but they don’t want to take the time to make it. Dad is working, Mom is working, and so no one has the time or energy to cook a good meal anymore. So our families end up eating in restaurants, where they’re surrounded by noise and clutter, instead of sharing quality time in a family setting.

  When I reluctantly agreed to be a part of Duck Dynasty, the producers told me they were going to make a reality show without duck hunting. I asked them if they understood that I spend most of my waking hours in a duck blind or in the woods. There isn’t much else I do! I asked the producers, “You know, you’re dealing with a bunch of rednecks who duck-hunt. For the life of me, do you really think this is going to work?”

  “Ozzy Osbourne made it,” they told me.

  Ozzy was able to pull it off on reality TV, so he’s given hope to all of us. I’d never really watched many reality TV shows and knew nothing about them, but I was 100 percent convinced Duck Dynasty would never work. It just goes to show how little I know about today’s world, because
I was dead wrong. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why people are so attracted to our family. Maybe it’s because we live our lives like people really want to live, how we all used to live before everything got so busy, busy, busy.

  Duck Dynasty has made us a little bit more famous, but it hasn’t changed much of anything about us. Miss Kay and I still live in the same house on the Ouachita River outside of West Monroe, and I’m still driving the same truck and hunting with the same guns and dogs. Of course, we still go to church every Sunday morning and I’m still reading my Bible. If anything has changed, it’s that it’s a little more difficult to go places, like driving down an interstate or walking through an airport. If I’m driving somewhere, someone might drive by and recognize me (undoubtedly because of my beard). They’ll get on a cell phone and call their friends, and then when I stop to take a leak, I’ll have to sign autographs and pose for pictures for about thirty minutes.

  When we went duck-hunting in Arkansas recently, we stopped at a Walmart to buy our out-of-state hunting licenses. We were in the sporting goods section of the store when some people recognized us, so we started posing for pictures and signing T-shirts. When it was finally time for us to leave, three African-American girls approached us.

  “Well, girls, I didn’t know you soul sisters were duck hunters,” I told them.

  “We don’t care about no ducks,” one of them said. “You’re ZZ Top, ain’t you?”

  I guess not everyone in America watches Duck Dynasty.

  Miss Kay and I haven’t done too badly, and the good Lord has really blessed us. We’ve been married nearly fifty years and our boys have grown up to become loving husbands and fathers, the kind of men I wanted them to be. Our business is in good shape, even after I had my doubts about where it was going. But when the boys took over, they breathed new life into it, and it’s still growing. Not many are as fortunate as we are, with all the trouble in the world.

  Since I turned over the reins of my company to my sons, I keep busy with hunting and fishing and speaking engagements. God provided those. The appearances give me an opportunity to preach the gospel, which I feel compelled to do. I’ve also had a chance to learn from all the people I’ve met—and the chance to travel all over the country. I hope I’ve helped those who have heard the gospel.

  Where do I go from here? The time is near when the dust will return to the earth and the spirit to God who gave it. I’m ready for that, but not quite yet. I have a lot of speeches to give, a lot of blinds to build, a lot of Duck Dynasty episodes to make, and who knows how many more duck seasons to hunt.

  Maybe the greatest thing is that I’ve been able to live life the way I wanted. Following Jesus has been a blast. The Lord has blessed me mightily.

  It is what makes me happy, happy, happy.

  LOW-TECH MAN

  Rule No. 1 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Simplify Your Life (Throw Away Your Cell Phones and Computers, Yuppies)

  What ever happened to the on-and-off switch? I don’t ask for much, but my hope is that someday soon we’ll get back to where we have a switch that says on and off. Nowadays, everything has a pass code, sequence, or secret decoder. I think maybe the yuppies overdid it with these computers. The very thing they touted as the greatest time-saving device in history—a computer—now occupies the lion’s share of everybody’s life.

  Here’s a perfect example: I owned a Toyota Tundra truck for a while, and I got tired of driving around with my headlights on all the time. If I’m driving around in the woods and it’s late in the evening, I don’t want my headlights on. I tried to turn the lights off and couldn’t do it. I spent an hour inside the truck with a friend of mine trying to turn off the lights, but we never figured it out. So I called the car dealer, and he told me to look in the owner’s manual. Well, it wasn’t in the book, which is about as thick as a Bible. Finally, about ten days later, after my buddy spent some time with a bunch of young bucks in town driving Toyota trucks, he told me he had the code for turning off my lights.

  Now, get this: First, you have to shut off the truck’s engine. Then you have to step on the emergency brake with your left foot until you hear one click. Not two clicks—only one. If you hear two clicks, you have to bring the brake back up and start all over. After you hear one click, you crank the engine back up. I sat there thinking, Why would you possibly need a code for turning off headlights? What kind of mad scientist came up with that sequence? Seriously, what kind of mind designs something like that? To me, it’s not logical. I just don’t get it, but that’s where we are in today’s world.

  I miss the times when life was simple. I came from humble, humble beginnings. When I was a young boy growing up in the far northwest corner of Louisiana, only about six miles from Texas and ten miles from Arkansas, we didn’t have very much in terms of personal possessions. But even when times were the hardest, I never once heard my parents, brothers, or sisters utter the words “Boy, we’re dirt-poor.”

  We never had new cars, nice clothes, or much money, and we certainly never lived in an extravagant home, but we were always happy, happy, happy, no matter the circumstances. My daddy, James Robertson, was that kind of a guy. He didn’t care about all the frills in life; he was perfectly content with what we had and so were we. We were a self-contained family, eating the fruits and vegetables that grew in our garden or what the Almighty provided us in other ways. And, of course, when we were really lucky, we had meat from the deer, squirrels, fish, and other game my brothers and I hunted and fished in the areas around our home, along with the pigs, chickens, and cattle we raised on our farm.

  It was the 1950s when I was a young boy, but we lived about like it was the 1850s. My daddy always reminded us that when he was a boy, his family would go to town and load the wagon down and return home with a month’s worth of necessities. For only five dollars, they could buy enough flour, salt, pepper, sugar, and other essentials to survive for weeks. We rarely went to town for groceries, probably because we seldom had five dollars to spend, let alone enough gas to get there!

  We rarely went to town for groceries, probably because we seldom had five dollars to spend, let alone enough gas to get there!

  I grew up in a little log cabin in the woods, and it was located far from Yuppieville. The cabin was built near the turn of the twentieth century and was originally a three-room shotgun house. At some point, someone added a small, protruding shed room off the southwest corner of the house. The room had a door connecting to the main room, which is where the fireplace was located. I guess whoever added the room thought it would be warmest near the fireplace, which was the only source of heat in our house. In hindsight, it really didn’t make a difference where you put the room if you didn’t insulate or finish the interior walls. It was going to be cold in there no matter what.

  I slept in the shed with my three older brothers—Jimmy Frank, the oldest, who was ten years older than me; Harold, who was six years older than me; and Tommy, who was two years older than me. I never thought twice about sleeping with my three brothers in a bed; I thought that’s what everybody did. My younger brother, Silas, slept in the main room on the west end of the house because he had a tendency to wet the bed. My older sister, Judy, also slept in that room.

  I can still remember trying to sleep in that room during the winter—there were a lot of sleepless nights. The overlapping boards on the exterior walls of the house were barely strong enough to block the wind, and they sure didn’t stand a chance against freezing temperatures. The shed room was about ten square feet, and its only furnishings were a standard bed and battered chest of drawers. My brothers and I kept a few pictures, keepsakes, and whatnots on the two-by-four crosspieces on the framing of the interior walls. Every night before bed, we unloaded whatever was in our pockets, usually a fistful of marbles and whatever else we’d found that day, on the crosspieces and then reloaded our pockets again the next morning.

  To help battle the cold, my brothers and I layered each other in h
eavy homemade quilts on the bed. Jimmy Frank and Harold were the biggest, so they slept on opposite sides of the bed, with Tommy and me sleeping in between them. My daddy and my mother, Merritt Robertson (we started calling them Granny and Pa when our children were born), slept in a small middle room in the house. My youngest sister, Jan, was the baby of the family and slept in a crib next to my parents’ bed until she was old enough to sleep with Judy.

  The fireplace in the west room was the only place to get warm. It was made of the natural red stone of the area and was rather large. One of my brothers once joked that it was big enough to “burn up a wet mule.” Because the fireplace was the only source of heat in the home, it was my family’s gathering spot. Every morning in the winter, the first person out of bed—it always seemed to be Harold—was responsible for starting a fire. It would usually reignite with pine fatwood kindling, but sometimes you had to blow the coals to stoke the flames. Some of my favorite memories as a child were when we baked potatoes and roasted hickory nuts on the fireplace coals for snacks. We usually ate them with some of my mother’s homemade dill pickles. There was never any candy or junk food in our house.

  The only other room in the cabin was a combination kitchen and dining area. The cookstove was fueled by natural gas from a well that was located down the hill and across the creek. The pressure from the well was so low that it barely produced enough gas to cook. Pa always said we were lucky to have the luxury of running water in the house, even if it was only cold water coming through a one-inch pipe from a hand-dug well to the kitchen sink. We didn’t even have a bathtub or commode in the house! The water pipeline habitually froze during the winter, and my brothers and I spent many mornings unfreezing the pipe with hot coals from the fire. When the pipe was frozen, we’d grab a shovelful of coals and place them on the ground under the pipe. When we finally heard gurgling and then water spitting out of the kitchen sink, we knew we could return to the fire to get warm again.