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

which was adjoined by a one-room post office. The general store and a cotton gin were the only businesses in town.
    My father hoped the change of environment would help my mother, who had suffered a nervous breakdown and needed numerous trips to Schumpert hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, for treatment. Granny was diagnosed as manic-depressive and was twice confined to the Louisiana mental institute at Pineville, where she received electric-shock therapy, a treatment in vogue at the time. At times my mother was almost her old self, and Pa would bring her home to be reunited with us. But her condition didn’t stabilize until several years later, when it was discovered that lithium could control it. Fortunately, my mother went on to live a productive and venerated life until her death at ninety-five years old.
    Granny’s illness couldn’t have come at a worse time for my family. A short time after we moved to Dixie, Pa fell eighteen feet off the floor of a drilling rig and landed on his head. The impact fractured two vertebrae in his back. As Pa collapsed forward, he was bent so severely that it burst his stomach. He also broke hisbig toe, which slammed into the ground as he doubled up. Telling us about it later, Pa said with a wry smile, “I’ve heard of people getting hit on the head hard enough to break both ankles—but not their big toe.”
    The vertebrae in Pa’s back were fused with bone from his hip; his stomach and big toe were repaired. But he was in a neck-to-hip, heavy plaster-of-Paris cast for two years; a round opening had been left only over his injured stomach.
    As always, Pa met the situation in his own laid-back manner. Jimmy Frank and Harold were in college at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge at the time. They were sharing a GI Bill payment of $110 a month and supplementing their income by Harold’s work at the Hatcher Hall cafeteria and Jimmy Frank’s work on the LSU horse-and-sheep unit experimental farm. They wanted to drop out of school and come home to work to help support the family, but my daddy insisted they stay in school, remarking dryly over the phone, “We’ll make it.”
    And we did—but not without hardship.
    Pa’s disability payment from the state was thirty-five dollars a week. In the late 1950s, that money went a little further than it does today, but not nearly far enough. Somehow my family coped. With our mother sometimes away in the hospital, Pa was often left on his own, with five children under his care. He wasalmost immobile at first, but within a few months, he was able to get around and help with the cooking.
    My sister Judy was a rock and did much of the cooking, though all of us helped, and she saw that Silas and Jan got off to school in good order. Fortunately, the school bus stopped in front of our house.
    To help make ends meet, Tommy and I gathered pecans and sold them for thirty-five cents a pound. In three hours, we could gather about a hundred pounds—equaling the weekly disability payment. Tommy also cleaned the church building each week in Blanchard, Louisiana, where we worshipped, for five dollars a week. With this money he was able to pay for our school meals, which were fifteen cents per day per child, thanks to Louisiana’s liberal school-lunch supplement.
    Our food staples became rice and beans, which we bought by the hundred-pound sack. To this we added corn bread. Our meager diet made fresh game and fish doubly appreciated. Fortunately, vegetables were cheap in a farming area, and we purchased what we could with our scanty means from the Biondos, an Italian family that had a commercial truck farm a few miles down the road.
    As I noted earlier, a real man can’t survive without meat, so it was up to Tommy and me to find some. It wasn’t easy, becausewe no longer had acres and acres of bountiful land surrounding our home. There were plenty of farms around us, but the farmers in the area didn’t want anyone on their land. They depended on it for their living and were diligent in warning off what they considered intruders.
    Tommy, Silas, and I often led the farmers on wild-goose chases through the woods surrounding their plowed land. When the ground was wet, the red clay in the plowed fields would cling to our shoes and build up to several inches in depth and pounds in weight. My only remedy was to stop occasionally, shake my leg vigorously to dislodge the mud, do the same with my other leg, and then continue on. Progression across the