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

by Phil Robertson

  We never considered what we were doing as poaching on someone else’s land. We had our own code. We didn’t bother any equipment, crops, or anything on someone else’s farm. And I was always careful not to step on any young cotton or corn plants. But if it flew, grew wild, swam, or lived in trees, I figured that it belonged to whoever captured or gathered it. I might have even picked up a ripe watermelon (there were thousands of them out there) every once in a while—wouldn’t have wanted it to be overlooked and get overripe!

  I can still remember my first encounter with a game warden. I was squirrel-hunting out of season—my family had to eat—and I had a mess of them. It happened before I repented and was one of the reasons I needed to repent. When I squirrel-hunted, I carried a big, metal safety pin, and I sharpened its end so it would run through the squirrels’ legs right above the joint. If I saw a game warden, I’d drop the squirrels, close up the pin, and then take off running like the wind. On this occasion, I was wearing two pairs of old men’s argyle socks without any shoes and had my pant legs taped so they wouldn’t flop when I was running. I was trying to be as quiet as possible. I was sitting there shooting squirrels when I sensed that someone was watching me. I couldn’t see anybody and couldn’t hear anybody, but I just had a feeling come over me that I was being stalked in the woods.

  If it flew, grew wild, swam, or lived in trees, I figured that it belonged to whoever captured or gathered it.

  Suddenly I heard a stick break behind me, and I turned and saw a man standing there with a gun in his hand. He was wearing a wide-rimmed cowboy hat and identified himself as a game warden. He was standing about twenty yards from me. When I heard the stick break, I dropped the squirrels and they hit the ground.

  “Hold it, son,” he told me. “I’m a game warden.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said.

  I was lean and mean and could run for miles. After the man identified himself as a game warden, I put it into high gear. For the first one hundred yards, he was running with me. But I was grinning and thinking, This guy doesn’t realize that he’s not in good enough shape to be running with me. He was wearing cowboy boots and wasn’t properly dressed to keep up with me. A buddy who had dropped me off earlier picked me up on the other side of the woods.

  When I was in high school, our basketball coach, Billy Wiggins, asked me if we were killing any squirrels. He said he wanted to go hunting with me, as long as we weren’t hunting on land that had been posted for no trespassing. “Of course not,” I told him. “You’ll be fine.”

  Coach Wiggins and I went hunting right after daylight one morning, and it wasn’t long before I heard a truck coming at a pretty good rate of speed. It was coming across a pecan orchard right toward us. The last two words Coach Wiggins heard were, “Run, Coach!” I took off running in the other direction.

  Moving to Dixie also introduced me to frog gigging. Some of the larger bullfrogs have legs bigger than chicken drumsticks and are delicious! We never ate frogs before moving to Dixie, but they were so abundant in the area that they eventually became part of our regular diet. In springtime, in less than an hour we could gather up a large enough bunch to make a meal, even for a family as big as ours. The slough behind our house was overrun with frogs, as were many others just a short distance across the road.

  To catch them, we waited until dark and immobilized them by blinding them on the shoreline with a bright flashlight. One of us held the light and another used a long-handled, spring-loaded clamp, or “grab,” to “gig” the frog. Some people called the clamps gigs—but the actual sharp-pronged gigs were illegal. The trick was to hit the frog sharply on the back, thus springing the grab and causing it to clamp around the frog, then to lift it out of the water or off the ground quickly so it couldn’t use its powerful legs to leap free.

  During one particularly memorable frog gigging, we caught a tow sack full of the big ones, probably thirty or forty pounds of them—so many that cleaning them was going to be a chore and take a while. So we laid the sack on the floor by the door when we went into the kitchen for a snack before beginning—carelessly leaving the top only loosely twisted to keep the frogs secure.

  While we lingered in the kitchen, the frogs worked themselves out of the bag. When we returned, the bullfrogs were everywhere: leaping and jumping under the beds, tables, chairs, and chest of drawers. They were even inside our shoes—and every other place they could find to hide! One big one was in the middle of a bed!

  It took us longer to find and catch the frogs the second time than it had the first.

  It took us longer to find and catch the frogs the second time than it had the first. We were still finding them hours later, and when we finally went to bed, we nervously wondered if we would wake up with a cold, clammy companion.

  Of course, we grew up with guns in the house. It was the era of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Cap pistols were always a big Christmas item in our house, and as we grew older, BB guns became our prized possessions. Shotguns and .22s for each of us were beyond my father’s means, but there was always ammunition for his shotgun, and he freely allowed all my brothers and me to use it.

  Every one of us learned to shoot with our father’s Browning semiautomatic sixteen-gauge shotgun. We also used a Remington .22 that belonged to our uncle Al Robertson and somehow wound up in our house. It was a bolt-action with a seven-shot clip.

  From the time Pa purchased his shotgun, the year after World War II ended, he or one of us boys hunted with it almost daily. It would be difficult to calculate how many shells were fired through the old gun’s barrel—or the pounds of meat that were downed for our dinner table. Pa bought an entire case of shotgun shells at the beginning of each duck season—and purchased more if that wasn’t enough.

  The shotgun, more than sixty years old, has been retired. Silas, the last to use it regularly, still has it but doesn’t shoot it. Before his death, Pa sent the gun to Browning for refurbishing and repair but received a letter back from the company saying it was “extremely abused.” To repair and replace all the worn and damaged components would have cost almost as much as a new one. One of the faults, said the letter, was that the “barrel was kinked and unsafe” and would have to be replaced. Pa had always prized the hard-hitting, close pattern of shot the full-choke barrel delivered (you had to be pretty good to hit with it, as the tight cluster of shot left little room for error). He reluctantly laid the gun aside and bought a new one when times improved.

  My brothers and I were all excellent marksmen. Yet my first remembered experience with guns was anything but auspicious. Tommy and I received new BB guns for Christmas one year, but one of them didn’t survive. There’s still some confusion as to exactly what happened. As my brother Jimmy Frank remembers it, he found Tommy and me fishing in the outhouse toilet hole with straightened wire coat hangers. One of us had been holding a BB gun over the toilet hole. I remember it being Tommy; he, of course, says it was me. Whoever was the culprit was trying to get the other to do something (what isn’t remembered) and was bluffing that he would drop the BB gun if he didn’t do it. Then he did drop it—accidentally. It disappeared into the mess below.

  Tommy remembers that it was his gun and that I did the dropping. Harold remembers that it was his BB gun that was dropped into the hole, and he blames both Tommy and me. I don’t exactly recall what happened. Regardless, the gun was never recovered—although desultory fishing operations went on for some time.

  When Pa’s cast was finally removed, Barnwell Drilling Company put him back to work doing light duty as a tool pusher. He recovered almost completely, and later, after I left to go to college at Louisiana Tech, he and Granny moved south of Baton Rouge to Gonzales, Louisiana, where Pa worked as a pipe fitter in the area’s refinery and petrochemical construction boom along the Mississippi River.

  Fortuitously, Pa had acquired a union card during the construction of a plant in Marshall, Texas, where he worked for a few months shortly after the war. The plant was under a construc
tion deadline and was hiring anyone who could fit pipe together—particularly those in the drilling industry. Workers were required to obtain a union membership, and it was this reinstated pipe-fitter card from the late 1940s that later gave him the seniority to get high-paying construction jobs—if he was willing to travel to them, which he was in his later years. He worked at a particularly well-paying job in Page, Arizona, in the 1970s, where a coal-fired electricity-generating plant was being built.

  Even after we left the log cabin where I grew up and the beautiful woods and swamps surrounding it, I was never far from nature. I always found a way to get back to God’s most beautiful creation. Since I was a little kid, I’ve had this profound connection with and love for deep, dark, unmolested woods. I’ve always had a longing to be in the deep woods or on the water. I want to be on the lakes, streams, and rivers and be surrounded by everything that comes with it—the ducks, birds, fish, and other wildlife. I guess it’s in my DNA, and I just love being out there. Even to this day, it’s where I want to be. I think part of it is that there’s no clutter out there—there are no computers or cell phones (at least not in my duck blind), and constantly updated information isn’t being thrown at you from all directions. You might hear a train in the distance every once in a while or see an airplane in the sky flying to New York or someplace else, but your sense of peace and serenity isn’t disturbed by clutter.

  I’ve always had a longing to be in the deep woods or on the water.

  I have a deep connection with what God created, and what I would love to see more than anything else is a pristine Earth, just like the one He created. There would be no power lines, skyscrapers, or concrete, but there would still be a big ol’ kitchen for Miss Kay to make her home-cooked meals. Heaven to me is endless cypress swamps and hardwood forests loaded with game and ducks and not a game warden around! Now, that would be a sight!

  STRANGE CREATURES

  Rule No. 4 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

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

  I’ve been on this earth for sixty-six years, and I’ve reached a conclusion and it’s a fact: women are strange creatures. One day I went into the bedroom to go to sleep and then woke up a couple of hours later with my wife, Kay, standing over me.

  “Phil, do you love me?” she asked.

  “Yeah, of course I do,” I said.

  “Well, write it down then,” she said.

  “What?” I asked her as I closed my eyes to go back to sleep.

  “Write it down,” she said.

  I turned over and went back to sleep. I woke up about four A.M. the next morning to go duck-hunting. When I looked at my chair in the living room, I saw a piece of paper with a felt pen sitting right in the middle of it. Then I remembered my conversation with Kay the night before.

  I took the sheet of paper and wrote the following: “Miss Kay: I love you. I always have, and I always will.”

  I told Kay I loved her when she asked me, but she wanted it in writing. You know what Kay did with that piece of paper? She taped it to the headboard of our bed, where it has been for the last few years. I guess she goes to bed every night with the comfort of knowing that I really do love her. Therefore I concluded that women are very strange creatures; there’s simply no other explanation for the way they sometimes act.

  Miss Kay was the perfect woman for me. I was sixteen and she was fifteen when we were married. Nowadays some people might frown on people getting married that young, but I knew that if you married a woman when she was fifteen, she would pluck your ducks. If you waited until she was twenty, she would only pick your pockets. Now, that’s a joke, and a lot of people seem to laugh at it, but there is a certain amount of truth in it. If you can find a nice, pretty country girl who can cook and carries her Bible, now, there’s a woman. She might even be ugly, but if she cooks squirrels and dumplings, then that’s the woman you go after.

  I was sixteen and Kay was fifteen when we were married.

  I counsel young men all the time, and I tell them to find a woman and eat six of her home-cooked meals before signing on the dotted line. If you’re going to spend the rest of your life with her, you at least have to know what the grub is going to taste like. If her cooking passes the test, then she’s passed the first level. Even more important, she has to carry a Bible and live by it, because that means she’ll stay with you. She also needs to pick your ducks. Some of the young bucks call and ask me, “Hey, what about two out of three?” I tell them two out of three is better than nothing.

  As it says in 1 Peter 3:1–6:

  Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to adorn themselves. They submitted themselves to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear.

  That’s Miss Kay in a nutshell—she’s a kind and gentle woman. In my eyes, she’s the most beautiful woman on Earth, on the inside and the outside. She has a natural beauty about her and doesn’t need a lot of makeup or fancy clothes to show it. The more makeup a woman wears, the more she’s trying to hide; makeup can hide a lot of evil. I think Miss Kay is probably a lot like Sarah was. For some reason, we always talk about Abraham, the father of our faith, but nobody ever mentions Sarah, the mother of our faith. I’m beginning to suspect the reason the mother of our faith is never mentioned is because people don’t appreciate a woman who is beautiful on the inside, who is quiet, gentle, and submissive. But God says that being a woman like that is of great worth in His eyes. I believe that Sarah, the mother of our faith, should be revered as much as Abraham, the father of our faith.

  Kay and I always were the perfect match. I was our high school quarterback, and she was a cheerleader. We first started going together when she was in the ninth grade and I was in the tenth. One of Kay’s older friends decided we might make a cute couple, so she told Kay that I wanted her to walk me off the football field after one of our games. Then the girl came to me and said, “You know that little cheerleader Kay Carroway? She wants you to walk with her off the field after the game.” The rest is history, as they say.

  Kay and I started dating shortly thereafter, but it didn’t last very long. As soon as the Christmas holidays were over, hunting season started, and I was determined to spend all my free time in the woods. I didn’t have time for a girlfriend, and I certainly wasn’t going to take Kay in the woods with me. Women are a lot like ducks—they don’t like mud on their butts. I figured she would just get in the way. But then the next May, Kay’s daddy died of a massive heart attack. She was only fourteen at the time, and I knew it was going to be really hard on her. I went to her daddy’s funeral, and we made eye contact. I asked her out a few weeks later, and we’ve been together ever since.

  Women are a lot like ducks—they don’t like mud on their butts.

  Kay’s mother wasn’t thrilled when we started dating again. She told Kay, “You don’t want to marry into that bunch.” But Kay told her mother that even though my family didn’t have much money, we loved each other and that was worth a lot more than new cars and fancy clothes.

  “They might be poor, but they don’t know they’re poor,” Kay told her mother. “They’re a very happy family and love each other. They don’t realize they’re missing things other people have.”

  After Kay’s daddy died, her mother started dating again and spent a lot of time away from home. Her mother started drinking heavily and became an alcoholic. It was a hard time for Kay, but she always had
a safe place to go at our house. Kay is a person of strong principles—many of them learned from her grandmother, whom she called Nannie. Kay spent a lot of time during her growing-up years with Nannie, as both her parents worked full-time in the Ida general store, which was founded by her grandfather and had been in the Carroway family for seventy-five years. Kay’s father worked in the store every day, while her mama tried to do it all: cooking, taking care of the house, and working alongside her husband.

  Kay learned how to cook from her grandmother, and I love the woman for teaching her. Kay can prepare anything from wild game to unbelievably good pies, biscuits, and just about anything you can name. The table she sets is renowned among our family, friends, employees, television crewmen, hunters, and others, and there always seems to be a large number of people eating at our house. For years Kay prepared a big meal at the noon hour for anywhere from six to fifteen or more people. She jokes that we could have built ten mansions with the money we’ve spent feeding everybody over the years. But we don’t regret it one bit, and she’s enjoyed doing it every day. As it says in Romans 12:13: “Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.”

  Because both of her parents worked, Kay spent many childhood hours alone. She filled them with activities like taking in stray cats and other animals. Some of the cats were wild, and she would give them milk and tame them. Her father had bird dogs, and she made friends with them. Her family also had chickens, turkeys, canaries, turtles, baby alligators, and a pony. She likes to joke that she had her own circus while growing up, but she didn’t know she was going to marry into one!

  Kay’s father hunted and fished, and she always loved those things about him. When I came along with the same attributes, she was naturally drawn to me. Her love for animals also came into play in our relationship. We were soul mates from the very beginning.