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

hug.” The good news for Jep is that as far as the Duck Commander crowd goes, one thing is for sure: weirdos are in! We covet weirdos; they can do things we can’t because they’re so strange. You have to have two or three weirdos in your company to make it work. It’s truly been a blessing to watch Jep grow and mature and become a loving husband and father. He and his wife, Jessica, have four beautiful children.
    Like I said earlier, Jase was the only one of our four sons who stayed the course and never deviated to the right or left. He always looked straight ahead; he never drank, never cursed, and always lived his life the way God wanted him to live. I think one of the reasons Jase and Willie never strayed too far is because they were so involved in the youth group at White’s Ferry Road Church. Willie’s only problem was that he believed he was a ladies’ man until he met Korie. He was always jumping from one girl to thenext until he settled down. It really made an impact on both of them. Jase was always looking out for his brothers. Even though Jase and Willie were very competitive growing up, Jase always had Willie’s best interests at heart. One time, Willie and Jase were at a friend’s house in high school. Jase walked into the basement and found Willie playing strip poker with some other kids.
    “What are you doing?” Jase asked him.
    “Playing strip poker,” Willie replied.
    “You’ve stripped enough,” Jase told him. “Let’s go.”
    The thing I really like about Jase is that he’s as obsessed with ducks as I am. I rarely took my boys hunting with me when they were very young. In fact, I never took them when I was still an outlaw. “Not this time, boys, we might be running from the game warden,” I’d tell them. But after I repented and came to Jesus Christ, I started taking my sons hunting with me, beginning with Alan. Before we moved to where we live now, it was a pretty long haul from town to the Ouachita River bottoms. Alan got carsick nearly every time I took him hunting, but he didn’t think I knew. We stopped at the same gas station every time, and he’d walk around back and lose his breakfast before he climbed back into the truck. I was proud of him for never complaining.
    I took Jase hunting for the first time when he was five. He was shooting Pa’s heavy Belgium-made Browning twelve-gaugeshotgun, which he could barely even hold up. It kicked like a mule! The first time Jase shot the gun, it kicked him to the back of the blind and flipped him over a bench.
    “Did I get him?” Jase asked.
    I knew right then that I had another hunter in the family, and Jase is still the most skilled hunter of all my boys. I trained Jase to take over the company by teaching him the nuances of duck calls and fowl hunting, and he is still the person in charge of making sure every duck call sounds like a duck. Not only did Jase design the first gadwall drake call to hit the market, he also invented the first triple-reed duck caller. Jase and I live to hunt ducks. We track ducks during the season through a nationwide network of hunters, asking how many ducks are in their areas and what movements are expected. Then we check conditions of wind and weather fronts that might influence duck movement. We talk it all over during the day and again each morning, before the day’s hunt, as we prepare to leave for the blind.
    When Kay and I began to ponder becoming less active in the Duck Commander business, we offered its management to Jase, who had been most deeply involved in the company. But he had no desire to get into management. Jase likes building duck calls and doesn’t really enjoy the business aspects of the company, like making sales calls or dealing with clients and sponsors. Like me, Jase is most comfortable when he’s in a duck blind and doesn’tcare for the details that come with running a company. Jase only wants to build duck calls, shoot ducks, and spend time with his family (he and his wife, Missy, have three kids).
    So then we offered the company’s management to Willie, who seemed to have the most business sense among our sons. I knew from the time Willie was only a little boy that he could sell beachfront property in Iowa if he put his mind to it. When I was a commercial fisherman, Willie sold fish on the side of the road with Kay or me. Willie can still quote some of the sales pitches: “Yes, sir, these are golden buffalo, the pride of the Ouachita River.” Willie was even