“Y’all are fixing to go to the store,” I told them. “There will be bubble gum and shopping—y’all are going to have a big ol’ time. I want you to realize that all that money you’re going to spend is coming off those fish out there. You understand that?”
“Yes, sir,” they answered quietly. They knew this talk was serious.
“What I can’t figure out is, if you’re getting all that money from the fish, why doesn’t someone come down there when that boat pulls up and grab the other side of that tub to help me up the hill? That’s what I can’t figure out.”
They all sat there staring at me, like I was speaking Spanish.
“Hey, just a thought,” I said. “I can get ’em up the hill. But it would be a lot easier with y’all helping me.”
From that day forward, whenever I pulled in with the boat, I’d see the whole little group coming down the hill. They’d have their tubs and be ready to help. It was a lesson that stayed with them. All four of my boys came to realize that the work was a family enterprise, and they needed to pitch in. In fact, the lesson took so well that each of them still works for Duck Commander, as do several other relatives and extended family. If you want a job with our outfit, it helps if you’re blood kin.
I also assigned my boys one of the worst jobs that came with commercial fishing: assembling the bait. I would buy a fifty-five-gallon drum of rotten cheese and let it sit until it was covered in maggots. It needed to smell really bad and be as smelly and nasty as possible to draw the catfish to my nets. When the rotten cheese was ready, I’d get my boys up at daylight. They’d reach down into the drum and grab a handful of the mess and stuff it into socks. I know they were gagging the entire time—and I’m sure they lost their breakfast more than a few times—but it was a job that had to be done.
Later, when the boys were in high school, I decided I wanted to get into crawfishing. The problem with crawfish is you can never have enough bait. And crawfish are attracted to bait that’s even nastier than what a catfish likes to eat. A crawfish will literally eat anything—as long as it’s dead and smells really bad. So when Kay took the boys to town to sell the fish, I always told Alan, Jase, Willie, and Jep to be on the lookout for roadkill. If they spotted a dead possum or raccoon in the road, they’d pick it up and throw it into the back of the truck. They’d bring the dead animals home, chop them up, and then throw them into the crawfish nets.
Of course, I never wanted to waste anything. We had an old deep-freezer in my shop and they threw the excess roadkill in there. By the end of every summer, the freezer was filled with dead cats, dogs, deer, coons, opossums, ducks, and anything else they could find in the road. The freezer smelled so bad it would have been quarantined if health officials ever caught wind of it! My boys also hunted for snakes and put them in the freezer. They baited snake traps in the water with little perch and then pulled the traps in at night. They’d blast the snakes with shotguns, which I’m sure was a lot of fun for them.
The biggest single catch I ever made was on an early morning one June. It came after we decided to launch Duck Commander as a business, so I had recently given up commercial fishing. I was only fishing for fun and to put some fish on the family table. I was using a six-foot hoop net about twenty feet long, with two-inch mesh. My son Jase was fishing with me and I told him, “I’m going to put this old big net out and catch us some Ops.”
By the end of every summer, the freezer was filled with dead cats, dogs, deer, coons, opossums, ducks, and anything else they could find in the road.
“Ops” is short for Opelousas, which are flathead catfish. I think they’re the best eating species of all the freshwater commercial fish in Louisiana. Also called the motley, yellow cat, or shovelhead, the flathead catfish is aggressively predacious and known for eating everything in sight. Some of them weigh as much as 120 pounds.
I set the net out on the other side of the river and up from the boat a little bit. I dropped it in about eighteen feet of water with a little current, but not much, just enough to hold the net open. I came back after about three days. I reached and grabbed the rope and started up with the net. I thought, “That thing must be hung!” But it kept coming; it was heavy, heavy!
I kept coming with that heavy net. When I had about three hoops gathered up, I could feel something moving the whole net ever so slightly. When I got the net up high enough to where I could see down into it a little bit, all I could see were blue cats! One look, and I realized there was way more fish than I could get into my boat! It was just too much weight! There were too many fish to even move them!
So I wound up with about two-thirds of my net in the boat and a third of it in the water—literally crammed with blue catfish. After tying off the hoops that I had pulled out of the water, the rest of the net formed a bag that hung straight down from the boat. It was some weight! But the fish were quietly swimming inside the net—I had ’em!
Now I was free floating. I cranked up my motor and let it idle, but I was moving forward—those swimming fish were moving my boat. I came across the river at an angle, going real slow. I made it to the mouth of Cypress Creek and almost home with a catch of biblical proportions. I headed for the bank, where the water depth begins to decrease rapidly. The net started dragging the bottom. When I got close to the bank, I jumped out of the boat and into the water, which was about four or five feet deep. I pulled the boat closer to the bank. The fish came alive in the shallow water and were making a rumble!
I went to my truck, locked its hubs to get it into four-wheel drive, and backed into the water as close as I could get to the boat and the fish. I climbed into the boat and, with a large dip net, started scooping up the thrashing fish and putting them into my washtubs. After throwing about fifty to sixty pounds into a tub, I transferred the fish to my truck. The blue cats weighed from three to twenty pounds each. From the time I started pulling up the net, I toiled with the rascals for more than two hours.
I mean, it was work! I was sweatin’! I filled the truck bed until it was mounded up with fish. Then I drove the truck out of the water onto solid ground. Both Jase and Kay, when they came out and saw those fish, were stunned. Jase said he had never seen so many fish in one pile. When they took them to town to sell, they tipped the scales at one thousand pounds! Kay and Jase came back with three hundred dollars, and they sold them cheap—thirty cents a pound.
That’s the most fish I ever caught in one net. Another time I caught eighteen Opelousas cats in one net weighing from about fifteen to fifty pounds apiece. They were big, but it wasn’t nearly as many fish as I’d caught the time before.
The fishing business became somewhat lucrative—we were at least making enough money to pay the mortgage and utilities and take care of the rest of our needs—but I still didn’t believe it was my, ahem, calling in life. I kept going back to a memorable hunting trip I’d made with Al Bolen a few years earlier outside of Junction City, Arkansas. A large flock of mallard ducks had flown high above us, and I hit them with a long, hailing call when they were on their way out of sight. I turned the flock, and it began to circle, dipping lower as the ducks approached our decoys and blind. When the ducks began to sail wide, I hit them again with a short chop-chop that turned them back toward our blind, where we waited. The flock dropped into the water directly in front of us, in perfect gun range.
Big Al told me, “Man, you weren’t calling those ducks, you were commanding them!”
When the shooting was over, Big Al told me, “Man, you weren’t calling those ducks, you were commanding them!”
Al, who knew of my tinkering with his and other hunters’ duck calls, urged me to make my own and sell them.
“And I’ve got the name for it: Duck Commander,” Big Al told me.
I was struck by the phrase and it never left my mind: Duck Commander. It sort of has a ring to it, doesn’t it?
Duck Commander was always in the back of my mind, its implementation only awaiting a trigger. When Kay and I were discussing our futur
e one night, I told her that I wanted to build and sell duck calls but would continue to fish until I got the duck-call business off the ground.
“I don’t know how I’m going to build the duck-call sales yet, but I’ll figure that out. When they get to where we don’t need to fish anymore, we’ll be on our way,” I told her.
The move to Sportsman’s Paradise and my commercial fishing had turned out well. Our family was together again, and I was thriving both spiritually and emotionally. Would another life-changing gamble work again? With the good Lord behind the steering wheel, we were about to find out.
DUCK COMMANDER
Rule No. 8 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy
Never Sell Yourself Short (You Never Know, You Might Become a Millionaire)
Some of the most successful businesses in American history started as mom-and-pop operations, on nothing more than a family’s dream, hard work, and a shoestring budget. Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream opened its first store in a run-down gas station in Burlington, Vermont, in 1978. It was sold for $326 million to a competitor in 2000. Walmart started as a five-and-dime store in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 1950 before Sam Walton and his family created the world’s biggest retailer. In 1946, S. Truett Cathy opened a single restaurant, a twenty-four-hour diner outside of Atlanta, which was so small it had only ten stools and four tables. He and his brother named it the Dwarf Grill. Today, Chick-fil-A sells more than $4 billion in chicken sandwiches and other food annually across the country.
Like those businesses, Duck Commander was nothing more than a dream when I decided to launch the company. Obviously, I had no idea the business would become what it is today, but I had the courage and determination to believe we could compete with the more established companies in the duck-call industry, some of which had been manufacturing calls since the early twentieth century. My idea of starting Duck Commander began when Al Bolen made his comments about my ability to command ducks on the water. But it was during another hunting trip that my business finally started to come to fruition.
Baxter Brasher, a fellow member of White’s Ferry Road Church and an executive of Howard Brothers Discount Stores, where Kay worked, asked me to take him duck-hunting. Brasher had noticed a lot of men and boys asking me questions about hunting, fishing, and duck calls before and after church, and he was curious to find out what all the fuss was about. After I showed him how it was done, Brasher was even more impressed. He told me, “You really, really ought to build a duck call.”
I told him I had a design and a plan to do it but didn’t have the money to make it happen.
“Well, how much money would you need?” Brasher asked.
So I asked around and checked on the price of equipment and everything else I would need. I went back to Brasher and told him it would cost about $25,000 for me to get into the duck-call business.
“Twenty-five thousand?” Brasher asked me as he shuffled some papers on his desk. “Let me see. Here’s what you do: You take this piece of paper—it’s my financial statement—and you take it down to the bank. Walk in there and tell them you want twenty-five thousand dollars. They’re going to say, ‘Do you have any collateral?’ You hand them this piece of paper and say, ‘There is my collateral right there. He’s backing me.’ ”
I told him I had a design and a plan to do it but didn’t have the money to make it happen.
I asked Brasher, “How much do you want?”
“I don’t want anything,” he told me. “The reason I don’t want anything is I know it’ll work. You’ll do well. I don’t want a dime. I want to know I helped someone get started. You just go down there and tell them what you need.”
So I went down to the bank and walked in, and a clerk asked if she could help me.
“I need to see Mr. George Campbell, the man who loans the money,” I told her.
She walked me back to Campbell’s office and he asked, “How can I help you?”
“I need twenty-five thousand dollars,” I told him. “I’m going into the duck-call business.”
“Mr. Robertson, what do you have for collateral?” he asked me.
I laid that piece of paper down on Campbell’s desk just like Brasher told me to do and answered, “There’s my collateral.”
I never will forget what happened next. Campbell looked at the paper and looked at the name. Then he said, “Brenda, will you get us some coffee?”
Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought to myself. He went from “who are you,” “what do you want,” and “where’s your collateral” to “let’s have coffee.”
Duck Commander—and my dream of building my own duck calls—was about to take flight.
After I had the bank loan, I went into high gear looking for the machinery I would need. By chance, I ran across a classified in the back of a magazine that was advertising a lathe, which is a woodworking machine I needed to build the barrels for my duck calls. I called the seller to inquire about the lathe he was trying to get rid of.
“How much money do you have to spend on this, Mr. Robertson?” the guy asked me.
“Well, I only have about twenty-five thousand,” I told him.
“You’re in luck, Mr. Robertson,” the man replied. “The equipment is only $24,985.”
The sucker fleeced me! The lathe was worth maybe five thousand dollars, but he took everything I had for it. It’s one of the reasons we were so poor during the first ten years of operating Duck Commander. Everything we made was going back to the bank to pay for the lathe! I later learned the lathe was built in the 1920s. It was originally used in Chicago and was in Memphis, Tennessee, when I bought it. The equipment was out-of-date. It was an old-fashioned, flat-knife lathe, but thankfully it actually worked pretty well once I got it hooked up and running.
While I waited for the lathe to arrive, I finalized my model for a duck call. I was able to call ducks from the time I was very young. I learned as a teenager using a P. S. Olt D-2 duck call, which was designed by Philip Stanford Olt of Pekin, Illinois, in the early 1900s. It was an Arkansas-style call, which is a one-piece insert with a straight reed and curved tone board. I always had a knack for making a call sound right or better. My hunting buddies were always asking me to tune, adjust, or repair their calls, and they always seemed to sound more like a duck when I finished tinkering with them.
When I decided to make my own duck calls, I enlisted the help of Tommy Powell, who went to our church. Tommy’s father, John Spurgeon Powell, made duck calls, and I went to him with my concept of how one should be built. John Spurgeon Powell looked at my specifications and concluded that my call wouldn’t work; he told me it was too small. But he promised me if I could get the hole drilled properly, he would turn it on his lathe and make me a call.
A lot of new ideas were going into what I was asking him to build: mine would be a smaller caller and would have a double reed, which I thought were significant improvements. The call’s barrel size, thickness, and a few other specifications were to come later as I refined it. One other big improvement was actually Pa’s idea, and I’m not sure I would have ever come up with it. The double reeds had a tendency to stick together, so Pa suggested we put a dimple in the bottom reed to eliminate the problem.
So we took a nail, rounded off the point, and with a hammer tapped a little dimple in the reed. When assembled with the protruded dimple of the bottom reed against the top reed, it worked perfectly. We later made a small tool from a sewing kit and just pressed the dimple into the reeds we were making. To this day, with all the automation that has come into the making of Duck Commander calls, Si, who has worked for the company since retiring from the army, still puts the dimples in the reeds by hand, one at a time.
Si, who has worked for the company since retiring from the army, still puts the dimples in the reeds by hand, one at a time.
After my meeting with John Spurgeon Powell, I cut a little six-inch-long, three-inch-square block of wood but still needed someone to drill a hole in it. To get it done, I took the block to nearby
West Monroe High School’s woodworking shop. The shop teacher told me he didn’t have time to fool with it.
I told him, “Four dressed mallard ducks for that hole.”
“Good night! Now we’re talking!” he replied.
I gave him four dressed mallard ducks to drill a hole that took him just a matter of seconds. That was the beginning of my first duck call. John Spurgeon Powell turned it on his lathe and finished it off for me. I had a prototype to build what I guessed would be millions more one day.
After a few weeks, a train brought the lathe to West Monroe, and I drove my pickup to the depot yard and backed it up to the loading dock. As I got out of the truck, I told a man on the dock to load up my shipment.
“You the one here after that equipment—that machine for the duck deal?” he asked me.
“Yeah,” I told him.
“Son, have you seen it?” he asked.
“Nah. I don’t have any idea what it looks like,” I said.
“Well, have you ever run any machinery like that?” he asked again.
“Nah, I’m going to figure that out when I see it,” I said.
“Well, first of all, you ain’t going to haul it in no pickup truck,” he informed me. “Son, you need a flatbed—a big truck.”
“Really?” I asked.
I walked back into the warehouse and looked at it. Good night! It was iron! I thought it was going to be little stuff, you know—for duck calls. But the machinery was huge—and heavy. It looked to me like it covered an acre back there. I never found out what it was built to turn, but it must have been something big!
I immediately borrowed a ragged dump truck I saw among several at the depot. It belonged to one of the members at church who happened to work there. I backed the truck up to the dock. I remember the depot crew standing there looking at me like I was deranged, but they loaded the lathe onto the truck for me. Away went the Duck Commander.
Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander Page 8
