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

rented the house from her, and she put us in charge of tending to her seven cows and bull, an old mule named Jake, and an equally old (andstubborn) horse named Dolly. She rented us the house and her four hundred acres of land for the kinfolk price of twenty dollars a month.
    Moving to that log home enabled my father to recapture his youth, which in turn shaped the lives of my brothers and me. The old Waters place had about twenty acres of land, only ten of which, around the house, was cleared and tillable land. A creek that flowed year-round traversed the rest of the land, meandering across Aunt Myrtle’s four hundred acres and providing ample water for our stock. Our land, which included a mature growth of oak, hickory, pine, sweet gum, and a variety of other trees, adjoined Aunt Myrtle’s property. On her land were two cleared, cultivatable fields of about thirty acres each. Mature woods covered the rest of the property. A wide pipeline right-of-way cut across all the land, which, because of its maintenance and mowing, grew a lot of grass that provided pasturage for the animals. The right-of-way also accommodated electric and telephone lines. A barbed-wire fence enclosed the entire four hundred and twenty acres and was a constant chore for us to repair and maintain.
    Doing things the way they were done while he was growing up enabled Pa to make our farm self-sufficient in many ways—we were still living as people did in the 1800s, although it was a hundred years later. About forty acres of the land were worked with the old mule (and later a gift horse named Dan) and hand plowsto produce a great deal of our food, plus grain and fodder for the horses, cows, hogs, and chickens. The fields and wooded parts of the farm yielded squirrels, quail, and doves; ducks and fish were easily obtainable from Black Bayou, only a couple of miles away. An occasional trip to Caddo Lake produced catches of white perch and bream. Our out-of-pocket expenses were minimal.
    Some lagniappe came from a boom in fur pelts. My brothers and I were able to get a couple of steel traps and set them out on the creeks running throughout our land. “There’s a mink walking every creek in Louisiana” was a popular saying at the time, and an extra-large prime pelt would bring thirty-five dollars—a big sum for a youth, just for the fun of trapping. We never made much money with our too-few traps, but we learned a lot about wildlife in our pursuit of mink, raccoon, and opossum pelts.
    My developmental years also coincided with Pa’s advancement in the oil fields as he progressed from roughneck, driller, and tool pusher to drilling superintendent for a series of small companies. He was a good hand and in his prime. His skills were in enough demand to allow him to shift from job to job easily. When a company for which he was working idled its rigs, he would go to work for another that hadn’t. But he still suffered occasional layoffs—which were sometimes prolonged enough to cause hardship. Granny complained that he always seemed to get laid off during duck season, enabling him to hunt more. He tookit all in stride. His attitude could be summed up in a phrase he often used: “I was looking for a job when I got this one.”
    There were lots of chores on the farm, with my older brothers doing the plowing and tending of the larger animals. Jimmy Frank did the milking, and Harold fed the hogs. The younger children fed the chickens and did the lighter work. Judy did most of her work inside, and the cooking experience she gained would be enhanced later with dishes such as jambalaya and white beans that she learned how to cook while living in south Louisiana.

    Granny complained that he always seemed to get laid off during duck season, enabling him to hunt more.

    Growing up on the farm wasn’t all work—we learned to have a lot of fun, too, and transformed our land into our own massive playground. In the front yard we regularly spent hours playing a game we devised using a broomstick or a broken hoe handle for a bat and several discarded socks stuffed tightly into one another for a ball. The game was a combination of baseball and dodgeball. Once you hit the sock ball into play, it could be picked up and thrown at you. If you hadn’t reached base or strayed too far from it and were hit with the sock ball, you were out. The rest of the rules were those of conventional baseball.
    Jimmy Frank, by virtue of being the eldest brother by four years, was