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

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 operatingDuck 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 The equipment was out-of-date.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 MonroeHigh 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