Happy, Happy, Happy (16 page)

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 Monroe
High 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 an acre back there. I never found out what it was built to turn, but it must have been something big!

I immediately borrowed a ragged dump truck I saw among several at the depot. It belonged to one of the members at church who happened to work there. I backed the truck up to the dock. I remember the depot crew standing there looking at me like I was deranged, but they loaded the lathe onto the truck for me. Away went the Duck Commander.

But further problems lay ahead of me at home. I had planned to put the lathe in a small building on my property that I was using for a shop. It measured about twelve feet by twelve feet. When I arrived with the men I’d gotten to drive the truck home and help unload, one man looked at the building dubiously and said, “It’s not going in there—not through that door.”

I said, “Oh yeah, it’ll go in there.” I got out my chain saw and stuck the snout of it into the north wall and went to cutting.
Whannnnnnnn!
I was cutting through nails and everything. They were all just standing back, looking at me like they were witnessing the Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I kept at it.
Whannnnnnnn!
When I finished cutting my way to the top of both sides,
ka-whooom!
The whole wall fell out!

I backed the truck up to the shed, dropped the dump gate, and hooked one end of a come-along to the lathe and the other end to a tree. I dragged the heavy iron machine inside the shop. It filled the available space from end to end, leaving just enough room in front of it for an operator. We set the wall back in place and nailed it up. All in all, it was a successful operation. It’s amazing what a little redneck engineering can do!

I anchored the lathe down, leaving it on the original shipping skids. It operated that way as long as it was in use. The equipment was so heavy that, within a couple of years, its weight caused the shop to sink a foot into the ground. But the lathe remained relatively level as it sank, so its operation wasn’t affected. Nothing was ever done about releveling the shop.

By now it was dark outside. It had been a long day. Despite all the setbacks, I had overcome my obstacles and was exultant. The factory to make the duck calls wasn’t operating yet, but everything was in place.

I was so excited about our future that I went down the hill to see Pa and Granny. They were seated at the table, playing dominoes with Alan and Jase—they played dominoes together nearly every night. Pa believed in playing dominoes with children because it taught them to add rapidly and develop strategy, thinking
several moves ahead. Whether the dominoes did that or not, all the boys did well in mathematics and the rest of their school subjects.

Now, I told y’all I talk pretty dramatically when the situation warrants it, and this was maybe the biggest day of my life. I walked into my parents’ house and announced to everyone, “Y’all see this duck call right here?”

I was holding the call John Spurgeon Powell built for me. Of course, they all stopped and were looking at me.

“I’m in the process of getting these duplicated on that equipment out there,” I told them. “Read my lips: we’re going to sell a million dollars’ worth of these things before it’s over.”

Pa was sitting there—and they’re all still looking at me. When I said we were going to sell a million dollars’ worth, they all looked back down at their dominoes. Pa picked one up, smacked it on the table, and said, “Ten!” He didn’t even acknowledge what I’d said!

None of them said “Good night,” “That sounds great,” or anything! They just kept playing. I walked out, thinking to myself,
Well, I didn’t get any of them fired up
. And I thought,
Well, maybe not a million dollars’ worth
.

Sometimes I still think about telling Pa I was going to make a million dollars—and that his only response was to take a ten-count.
Since that time, as it turned out, we have sold way more than that. Who would have believed me at the time?

Undaunted, I set to work the next day trying to get the lathe running. It was a harder task than I envisioned. Coupled with my and Pa’s lack of knowledge about running a lathe (Pa did show interest in the project once it got under way) was the fact that it came with no instruction manual on how to operate it.

I had never run a lathe, but I saw a button that said Start. It’s like Jase says: when you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s best to do it quickly! So I pressed 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 I
was 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, and
he 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.

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 Almighty
is 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
?”