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

of my life: I leased a honky-tonk in the middle of nowhere. I managed the place, worked the bar, cooked for the customers, and broke up occasional fights. One of my specialties was something I called squirrel mulligan: ten pounds of freshly killed squirrels, ten pounds of onions, ten pounds of potatoes, and enough crumbled crackers to give it the proper thickness. It didn’t taste too bad, and its aroma smelled better than the overwhelming scent of urine and stale beer that permeated the place. I also served fried chicken, pickled pig’s feet, and boiled eggs, though most of the regulars, including me, were only there to drink as much beer and whiskey as we could.
    It was a rough, rough place. I managed the place beforeintegration was firmly established in the South, so my honky-tonk was somewhat unusual. It was really a segregated beer joint, which you didn’t see very often. The blacks drove up in the back, and we had their jive going on back there, and the rednecks came through the front. I was in the middle, serving and cooking for everyone, while trying to keep the peace.
    Kay and our three sons moved out in the middle of nowhere with me. The bar was a long, low, one-story wood building, unpainted and yellowed. Our trailer home and another building were roughly attached to it, making the whole complex an irregular U-shape. It wasn’t very pretty, and it certainly wasn’t the proper place to be raising my boys. Kay, of course, worried about me constantly, so she worked as a barmaid most nights to make sure I stayed out of trouble. She never was much of a drinker—probably because she saw what alcohol did to her mother—but she was right beside me on most nights, watching me slowly drink away our lives.
    After a while, my parents, brothers, and sisters started to hear what was happening with me. One night, my younger sister, Jan, drove out to the bar with William “Bill” Smith, one of the preachers at White’s Ferry Road Church in West Monroe, Louisiana. Jan lived close by in the area, so she knew more than the rest of my family how far I had strayed from my former ways. She was determined to save me and enlisted Bill Smith to help her.
    When they walked into the bar, Smith found me sitting at a desk in the connecting structure. I had a quart bottle of beer in my hand.
    “You some kind of preacher?” I immediately asked him. When Smith told me he was, I added, “You ever been drunk?”
    “Yes, I used to drink a few beers,” he told me.
    “Well, what’s the difference between you and me?” I asked him. “You’ve been drunk, and I’m getting drunk right now. There ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between you and me, Jack. You ain’t putting any Bible on me. That’s the way I was born.”

    “You some kind of preacher?” I immediately asked him.

    At that moment, one of my patrons stuck his head in the door and said, “Phil, your sister’s running into some problems out there in the bar.”
    Jan was in the barroom handing out religious tracts. The patrons were cussing and carrying on as usual—getting drunk. One guy was arguing with her. “Hey! Hey!” I said as I stepped in.
    They all turned around, looking at me. “This is my little sister. She’s handing out religious tracts. Let her hand them out. But don’t be messing with her, or you’re going to deal with me.”
    “This is your sister?” one of them asked.
    “Yes. She’s going to do whatever she does here,” I told him. “Leave her alone!”
    Jan, now in a little bit of a dither, went on handing out tracts—in a dead quiet—until she had given everyone one. I turned around, went back to Smith, and ordered him out of my bar.
    As Jan and Smith walked back to their car in the drizzling rain, with the country music wailing behind them in the front of the building and rhythm and blues blaring in the back, he exclaimed, “Whew! I don’t think he’s ready! Let’s give him a little time. I’m glad I got out of there without getting beaten up!”
    Although Smith’s visit left me unmoved, Kay later began to study the Bible with him. She knew our marriage and lives were rapidly deteriorating.
    A few months later, I hit what I thought was rock bottom. One night the couple that owned the bar came in and informed me they were going to raise my rent. So I decided I’d hightail it out of the place after fulfilling the last two months on my lease. An argument ensued, and I ended up throwing the man and woman across the