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

by Phil Robertson

  It wasn’t long before I started taking her with me on fishing or hunting expeditions. My qualms about taking Kay into the woods were quickly relieved. And Kay wasn’t only a spectator. She helped catch baitfish, gather worms, hook them onto trotlines, and of course, pick ducks by plucking their feathers to prepare them for cooking. You know you have a good woman when you return home from a hunt and she’s standing on the front porch, yelling, “Did y’all get anything?” Before I repented, Kay also drove my getaway car when I was hunting out of season. I always knew my woman was waiting for me on the other side of the woods if I got into trouble.

  Before I repented, Kay also drove my getaway car when I was hunting out of season.

  When I received a football scholarship to Louisiana Tech, we moved to Ruston and rented an apartment in the same complex as my brother Tommy, who had received a scholarship to play for the Bulldogs two years earlier. Tommy and his wife, the former Nancy Dennig (they were also high school sweethearts), had been living there for more than a year. With their company, the transition to Louisiana Tech was much easier for us. Kay had not yet graduated from high school, so she finished her senior year at Ruston High School. She was pregnant with our first son, Alan.

  We lived in the Vetville Apartments, which the school built in 1945 to accommodate married veterans coming home from World War II. The red-brick apartments were located on south campus, about a mile from the main campus. For Tommy and me, it was like reviving old times. Tommy bought a boat, and I bought a motor for it. We began fishing and hunting in the area waters and woods: the upper Ouachita River and Bayou D’Arbonne Lake, a recently impounded reservoir just north of town. We would usually take someone fishing with us and come home with the daily limit. Kay and Nancy carried a black iron skillet between our apartments until the grease burned it from frying so much fish and other game.

  Tommy and I even arranged our schedules so he went to class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and I went on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Tommy would fish while I was in class, and I fished when he was at school. It didn’t take me very long to figure out that a few of my instructors loved crappie, or white perch, as they’re called in Louisiana. A judicious gift of fresh, filleted white perch to certain instructors, particularly in subjects where I was having difficulty, greatly improved my grades.

  One particular class in sports medicine—which was about taping ankles, diminishing the effects of bumps and bruises, and such—held little interest for me. It was primarily for athletes who were planning to become coaches, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. Those white perch allowed me to make a passing grade in the course without even attending classes. For whatever reason, the instructor only gave me a C. I thought those fish were worth at least a B. Shoot! Maybe even an A—all those fish!

  Generally, I was a quick enough study that I didn’t have difficulties in many classes. I basically looked for a strong C average, and I made sure I maintained it. I paid attention in class and took good notes—when I was there. Occasionally, I had to buckle down with a book to get past some difficulty, but I only spent about 30 percent of my time on college. To get better than a C average would have taken too much time and would have interfered with my hunting.

  Word quickly spread around campus that I had fish. Even a prominent former Louisiana legislator, who wanted to help me while I was in school, was one of my clients. When the politician paid me, he insisted that he was not buying the fish (selling game fish in Louisiana is illegal) but only paying for me to clean and dress them—to which I readily agreed.

  Not everyone on campus was fond of my hobbies. After football practice one day, one of my coaches informed me that the dean of men wanted to see me. I wasn’t sure what I had done wrong, but I knew they had me on something. I walked into his office, and he asked me to close the door.

  “We have a problem,” he said. “Do you know what street you live on? Do you know the name of it?”

  “Vetville?” I asked him.

  “Let me refresh your memory,” he said. “You live on Scholar Drive.”

  Apparently, the president of Louisiana Tech had given members of the board of trustees a tour of campus the day before.

  “When he went to where you live, it wasn’t very scholarly,” the dean told me. “There were old boats, motors, duck decoys, and fishnets littering your front yard. He was embarrassed. This is an institution of higher learning.”

  “That’s my equipment,” I told him.

  “But everybody’s yard is mowed—except yours,” he replied.

  “At least the frost will get it,” I said. “It will lay down flat as a pancake when the frost gets it.”

  “It’s July,” the dean said. “Cut your grass.”

  One summer the Louisiana Tech football coaches got me a job in Lincoln, Nebraska, as a tester on a pipeline that was being built. Kay loved it and thought it was the biggest adventure of her life, but I missed being in the woods and lakes back home. I could hardly stand it. We only had a company car, which I drove to work, and we lived in a tiny apartment and didn’t have a TV, so Kay woke up every morning and walked miles and miles all over town. I feared Kay was about to die of boredom, so I brought her a little white kitten I found in a cornfield. We named it Snowball, and it was a lot of company for her. When we flew back to Louisiana at the end of the summer, we hid Snowball in a basket packed with sandwiches and travel necessities that we carried on the plane. That cat stayed with us in Louisiana for the next several years and became the first of her many pets.

  By then, my interest in playing football was really beginning to wane. My game plan was to hunt and fish full-time and get a college education while doing it—putting as little effort into school as possible. The reason I went into education (I wound up getting bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, with a concentration in English) is because you have the summers off, as well as Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays. Consequently, I would have more time to hunt and fish. The only reason I wanted a college degree was so that when people thought I was dumb, I could whip out the sheepskins. Unfortunately, Louisiana Tech didn’t offer a degree in ducks.

  Unfortunately, Louisiana Tech didn’t offer a degree in ducks.

  My interest in football was secondary to ducks, but it was paying for my education. I remember riding on a bus going to ball games and scoping out the woods we passed as to hunting possibilities. I just didn’t have my mind on football. As a result, I had a checkered playing career. In spite of my God-given talent, I was never fully devoted to the game. Even in junior high, it was merely a social event. When I was playing defensive halfback, I would lightheartedly wave to people in the crowd and grin at things shouted.

  I had in my mind that football was a game, something you did solely for entertainment. You go out there and win or lose, but it’s certainly not life or death. If you did well, you won. If you didn’t do too well, you didn’t win. But as far as making a career of football, that never entered my mind—I didn’t see the worth of it. I couldn’t make much sense out of making a living from work that entailed large, violent men chasing me around—men who are paid for one reason: to run me down and stomp me into the dirt. I just didn’t see it.

  Despite football not being my primary interest, I still had a decent career at Louisiana Tech. I played quarterback for the Bulldogs from 1965 to 1967 and was the starter in 1966, throwing for more than three hundred yards against Southeastern Louisiana University. During preseason camp the next year, I looked up and saw a flock of geese flying over the practice field and thought to myself, “What am I doing out here?” I walked off the practice field and never went back.

  The coaches came to my apartment the next morning and found me cleaning a deer in my kitchen.

  “It ain’t season,” I told them. “I had to bring the meat inside.”

  No matter how hard they tried, the coaches couldn’t persuade me to come back. The quarterback behind me on the depth chart was a guy named Terry Bradshaw, who was a lot m
ore serious about football than I was. Terry started the next three seasons at Louisiana Tech and was the number one pick in the 1970 NFL draft. He became the first quarterback to win four Super Bowl championships, with the Pittsburgh Steelers, and was selected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I still tell Terry that if I had never left, he wouldn’t have won four Super Bowl rings.

  The quarterback behind me on the depth chart was a guy named Terry Bradshaw.

  After I graduated from college, former Louisiana Tech running back Robert Brunet, who was playing in the National Football League, encouraged me to come to Washington, DC, and try out for his team, the Washington Redskins. Vince Lombardi had just been hired as coach.

  “You won’t beat out Sonny Jurgensen,” he told me. “But they’ve got this hot-dog rookie coming up, Joe Theismann. Robertson, you can beat him hands down. No problem. You make the team, they’ll pay you sixty thousand dollars a year.”

  Some people might think that was pretty good money in the 1960s, but it sure seemed like a pretty stressful way to make a living. I told Brunet, “I don’t know—you’re up there in Washington, DC, and you miss duck season every year. Do you think I’d stay?” He took a long look at me and said, “Nah, you wouldn’t stay.”

  As far as I was concerned, my football career was over. And as it turned out, my career choice of chasing ducks and whatnot turned out to be a pretty good one. Besides, at the time, I had a young wife and a baby boy. I had their future to worry about, too.

  I didn’t know I was about to find out how good of a woman my wife really was.

  WHO’S A MAN?

  Rule No. 5 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

  Always Wear Shoes (Your Feet Will Feel Better)

  According to the Guinness book of world records, a police constable in India set a world record last year by running 150 kilometers (93.2 miles) in twenty-four hours in his bare feet. A couple of years earlier, a forty-one-year-old man in Oregon ran 102.6 miles barefoot on a rubberized track in less than one day. I’m not sure why Guinness World Records doesn’t recognize his feat as the record—it seems to me the guy who ran farthest would be the record holder, but what do I know?

  While I might not be Zola Budd or a world-record holder, I know neither of those cats have anything on me. When I was about twenty-five or twenty-six years old, I chose to go shoeless for about two years. I simply didn’t put any shoes on my feet day after day after day. Here’s what I found out: if you don’t wear shoes for about two years, you develop pads on the bottom of your feet made of about a half inch of solid, thick, tough callus. You wouldn’t believe how tough a man’s feet can get! You can literally walk on hot coals—or briars, hot pavement, cold ground in winter—without any shoes. I went duck-hunting with no shoes at all—no waders and no hip boots—just walked out into the water like it was summertime.

  We’d go duck-hunting in mid-January, and everybody would be covered up with clothes, but I would be barefoot. We would take people on guided hunts, and one of them would look down and say, “Good grief! This cat doesn’t have any shoes on!” I went like it was a summer’s day, even if it was only thirty-five degrees outside. I guess you condition your mind and train yourself to be oblivious to pain. On many nights, Miss Kay would have to remove embedded thorns from my feet with a long needle and magnifying glass. Of course, my hunting buddies and I were drinking whiskey straight out of the bottle, so that probably numbed the pain.

  After I gave up football at Louisiana Tech, I started running with a pretty rough crowd. It was during the turbulent 1960s, when people my age questioned everything about the government and society in general. The Vietnam War was raging, and I wasn’t sure why my brother Si had been sent to Southeast Asia to fight in some country we’d never heard of. It was an era of disillusionment. The status quo and old ways of doing things were being scrutinized with a jaundiced eye. Buttons proclaiming, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”—and a lot worse—were being worn in colleges and elsewhere nationwide.

  I listened to the protest songs of Bob Dylan; John Lennon; Peter, Paul, and Mary; the Byrds; and others, and owned a number of their recordings. Clint Eastwood’s rebel roles on the screen appealed strongly to me. Years later, when we started making our hunting movies, some of the Eastwood phrases and gritty realism still resonated with me. We had parties and everybody got drunk except for Kay, who wanted nothing to do with the tomfoolery. It went on from when I was about twenty-one or twenty-two until I was about twenty-eight. We got drunk on anything we could get our hands on—running wild and duck-hunting.

  Everybody got drunk except for Kay, who wanted nothing to do with the tomfoolery.

  It wasn’t just beer and whiskey, either. It was the 1960s, and so usually there was a little marijuana around. We never bought any, but we’d smoke it if it was available. So between the whiskey, diet pills, and various kinds of black mollies (or medicinal speed), we were staying pretty messed up. As far as alcohol, it was mostly confined to whiskey, beer, and wine. Throw in a little marijuana and pep pills, and that was the drug scene, as far as I was concerned. I never got into any of that serious stuff like LSD or heroin; I thought it would have been insanity to stick a needle in my arm. But we pretty well stayed ripped for seven or eight years.

  In a lot of ways, I was withdrawing from mainstream society. I was trying to drop back about two centuries to become an eighteenth-century man who relied on hunting and fishing for his livelihood. But I was living in the twentieth century, and everything was constantly changing around me. Hunting and fishing was no longer a way to provide food for my family’s table; it was a competition between my buddies and me, and all the rules and laws regulating it were thrown out the window.

  Our mantra, or battle cry, was “Who’s winning? Who’s a man?” We were romping and stomping! We were getting drunk, shooting way too many ducks, and catching too many fish. We were outlaws. It was all about who could kill the most ducks and catch the most fish. We didn’t care about anything else.

  After leaving college, I took a teaching job in Junction City, Arkansas. The guy who hired me, Al Bolen, persuaded me to take the job with what he called “fringe benefits.” One night when I was at home blowing on a duck call, Bolen showed up.

  “The fringe benefits are these,” Bolen said as he handed me a stack of pictures of ducks and fish.

  We agreed on my taking a job teaching tenth-grade English and physical education to junior-high boys. As soon as I accepted the job, Bolen said, “Let’s go get a beer.” Before too long, one beer turned into a six-pack, and we became close drinking buddies. And after he showed me the game-rich Ouachita River bottom in the Junction City area, I thought, Boy, good times are here.

  It was a riotous time. I totaled three new trucks by turning them over or running into trees. It took a good truck to go hunting because we were going into some of the most inaccessible areas of the river bottom. The winch on the front of a truck was forced into use on virtually every trip, as our truck would sink into mud holes on the rutted tracks that passed for roads. The truck would sink so deep that mud flowed onto the floorboards when the doors were opened. When we were stuck, we would stretch out the winch cable, tie it around a tree, pull ourselves back to solid ground, and continue on. It was careless, rollicking, and sometimes very dangerous.

  One time, I was running a boat through a small creek with the throttle wide open. Big Al Bolen was in the front of the boat. We were jumping up wood ducks and shooting ’em, which is illegal. But that’s what we were doing; we had no fear of the law. When I came around a curve, I was almost on top of a huge pin oak tree that had slid down into the creek. The bank had caved in. There was no time to stop or guide the racing boat around the tree in the narrow confines of the creek. After throttling down for a split second, I decided our best chance was to run up the trunk and sail over the treetop like Evel Knievel. So I gunned the motor.

  We hit the trunk, and our boat went airborne, bouncing about three times across the limbs. It came to rest
nestled in the limbs, still upright, at about a twenty-five-degree angle. We were two-thirds the way up the tree, leaving Al and me suspended twenty feet in the air above the water—the motor still running.

  To get down, we selectively shot limbs off the tree, allowing the boat to slide down far enough so we could pull it back into the creek. I just fired up the motor again, and we were on our way. Big Al reached in his coat and took a swig of whiskey. We continued along, feeling no pain.

  On another occasion, when I was trying to save time, I decided to run my aluminum boat up on the bank instead of going through the trouble of pulling it up to the boat ramp, backing the truck and trailer into the water, and loading the boat the usual way. Unfortunately, hidden behind a wall of reeds on the shore was a stump that I hit at full speed, head-on, throwing my passenger in the front of the boat over the stump and out onto the bank.

  When the guy was thrown, his legs, which had been under the small front deck of the prow, slid under the deck and hit it with enough force to pop out the rivets that were holding the deck to the side of the boat. His momentum just peeled the deck forward. That probably saved him from breaking his legs. But it ripped the skin off his shins, and his legs immediately turned purple and puffed up. His injuries were severe but didn’t incapacitate him. I was thrown from the back of the fourteen-foot boat to the completely crumpled front, breaking a finger. He sailed over the stump, hit the ground, and bounced twice. I was shook up from the collision, and he was pretty addled. When he got up, he took off running toward the lake, dove in, and started swimming away from shore. When he was several yards away, he grabbed on to a tree.