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

determined to see it through until the duck call business was big enough to support us, and then I would hang my fishing nets up for good. A lot of my friends tell me they thought I was a complete idiot.
    Now I ask them, “Well, it’s forty years since you thought I was an idiot; what about now?” Now they’re calling me a genius! Boy, it took forty years for them to turn, but now they finally say, “That old guy ain’t as dumb as he looks.”
    I remember making a speech somewhere and a man walking up to me after I was finished. He said, “Mr. Robertson, I’ll tellyou what I got out of that speech: You’re kind of like one of them old Airedale terrier dogs. You ain’t as dumb as you look!”
    I told the guy, “Man, I appreciate those words of wisdom.” I laughed at that one; that was a good one.

    “Well, it’s forty years since you thought I was an idiot; what about now?” Now they’re calling me a genius!

    I might not be the most intelligent guy on Earth, but I always had the wherewithal, determination, and work ethic to turn my business into a success, or at least to make it profitable enough to feed and care for my family, which is really all I ever wanted.
    When the serious work started at Duck Commander, I installed a shed roof on the south side of our workshop to shelter a heavy-duty table saw my brother Tommy loaned me to help get the business going. Shavings and sawdust always covered the floor in untidy piles. In one area were cedar shavings, which were cut while we made the end-piece blanks of the duck calls. In another pile was the walnut residue sheared off the call barrels, which I turned on the lathe inside my shop. Several cedar and walnut logs, the woods from which the original Duck Commander calls were made, were piled up in front.
    But the most noticeable addition, and the first thing visitors saw when they came to our house, was the roughly lettered signthat proclaimed DUCK COMMANDER WORLDWIDE. I took an old board, painted it white, and lettered it with black. Then I nailed it up at an angle, which I did for a little bit of show (remember what I said about being dramatic?). People would come out to our house, see the sign above the shop door, and walk around wondering, “What have you got out there?” More than four decades later the sign still hangs in front of our property.
    Obviously, there was a lot of learning on the job, including enough errors and corrections to drive me nearly mad. But it didn’t take us long to get a production line going, and Alan, Jase, Willie, Kay, and Pa were my crew. Our assembly line was out on the porch of our house, which was screened in at the time. Pa was always helping me. Willie was the youngest, so his job was to sweep up the sawdust in the shop. My oldest son, Alan, was given a little more responsibility—he used a band saw to cut the ends of the calls. Then I ran a drill press to set up and calibrate the end pieces.
    Jase and Willie also dipped the calls in polyurethane and dried them on nails, which wasn’t a very fun job. They hung the calls on a piece of plywood, eight feet by four feet, which leaned against one of the big pine trees in our yard. Neat rows of four-inch finishing nails were driven into the plywood, about two inches apart, from top to bottom. They’d open a five-gallon bucket of polyurethane, insert their fingers into the ends of duck-callbarrels until they had four on each hand, then dip them into the thick liquid—submerging a little of their fingers to make sure the resin coated the barrels completely. With a light touch so as not to mar the finish, they worked each one off their fingers as they placed them carefully and separately on protruding nails. Then they repeated the operation until the entire board was filled with shiny, coated duck-call barrels drying in the open air.
    It was a very tedious job, and a big one for boys who were so young, but it was all part of our quest to build the best duck calls in the industry. The dipping ensured a smooth, clear, permanent coat of resin that protected the wood. Sometimes, there would be one little rough spot at the mouthpiece end where the barrel touched a nail. When that happened, it had to be sanded smooth before the call could be sold. Once the calls were dry, the boys sanded them down to a fine finish. I think my boys were a little embarrassed going to school with their fingers stained brown from tung oil, but it was one of the hazards of the job. There were