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

the button, and that thing fired up. Good grief! There were big old belts spinning with no protection on them, and the whole thing was humming! I saw a big handle, and I wondered what would happen if I pulled it up. Whiiizzzzzz! All these blades and metal parts started moving. I said, “Whoa, whoa, now!” and shut her down. Remember what I said about on and off buttons? Fortunately, the lathe was old enough to still have them!

    It’s like Jase says: when you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s best to do it quickly!

    I had never seen such a thing before. I didn’t have a book. Nobody was there. I didn’t know how to set anything. So I just went a little bit at a time. The first thing I did was call some cat from the company that built it. When I started telling him what Iwas trying to do, he said, “Aw, naw, naw, man! You’ve got to have templates.”
    “What?” I asked him.
    “You’ve got to have some templates,” he repeated.
    And then he started explaining what they were and how that thing worked. After that, it was trial and error to get everything working right. I hadn’t been sent any templates, or jigs as some call them, which are thin metal plates used as guides to cut wood accurately into the shape you want. So I acquired what we needed.
    Let me tell you: we tore up some wood out there. You wouldn’t believe the pile of shavings and waste. But Pa and I were determined to make it work.
    While we were getting the lathe lined up and figuring out how it worked, I came up with another idea. I decided that maybe I could get someone to build my duck calls for me so I could start selling them. At least there would still be some money coming in, while we figured out how to build our own.
    I was already testing the market and had traveled to quite a few areas, including my old hometown of Vivian, as well as places in eastern Texas, southern Arkansas, western Mississippi, and as far away as the bayou parts of southern Louisiana. It was in Lake Charles, Louisiana, that I encountered Alan J. Earhart, who had been making the Cajun Game Call. It was an old duck call, andhe had been building it for years. Earhart was sympathetic to my quest, so we made a deal from which both of us benefited.
    Earhart agreed to build two thousand Duck Commanders at a price of two dollars each, while I was getting my equipment lined up. Earhart had his own lathe, and he switched it over to build my calls. Earhart said that of all the people he had met starting out in the duck-call business, he thought I had enough energy and drive to pull it off.
    “But man,” he told me. “You’ve got a long way to go.”
    I had no idea exactly how long it would take me to get Duck Commander to where it is today.

FAMILY BUSINESS
    Rule No. 9 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy
    It’s Cheaper to Hire Your Relatives (Unless You Don’t Like ’Em)
    P eople ask me all the time about the early days of Duck Commander, when it was just Pa, Kay, the boys, and me trying to learn how to operate a heavy lathe and build duck calls in a small woodshop outside our home. I’m sure that at various times Kay and everyone else assumed I was crazy, and they were probably right.
    Like my childhood, our company started from humble, humble beginnings. When we first started fishing the Ouachita River, it was so slow you might see two buzzards fighting over an inner tube! When we ran out of roadkill to bait our nets, the buzzards fought over anything else they could find! After we launched Duck Commander, our first year of sales totaled only eight thousand dollars. I told Kay, “I know I have a master’s degree, but I’m gonna stay the course on this one. I think this will work. If the Almightyis with us, it will work.” It was just like when I persuaded her to move out next to the river, so I could give up my teaching job to become a commercial fisherman. I told her then, “If you get me a place on the river, I’ll fish the river. I’ll be the smartest commercial fisherman out there.”
    Of course, everybody laughed at us in the early days. People would come by our house and say, “Let me get this right: you have a master’s degree from Louisiana Tech University, you could’ve played professional football, but you turned that down so you could do what ?”
    I always told them that I was fishing the river and following my dream. I got seventy cents a pound on the catfish and thirty cents a pound on the buffalo, which wasn’t a bad living. I was