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

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 Englishand 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 thetree in the narrow