Happy, Happy, Happy (2 page)

When I reluctantly agreed to be a part of
Duck Dynasty,
the producers told me they were going to make a reality show without duck hunting. I asked them if they understood that I spend most of my waking hours in a duck blind or in the woods. There isn’t much else I do! I asked the producers, “You know, you’re dealing with a bunch of rednecks who duck-hunt. For the life of me, do you really think this is going to work?”

“Ozzy Osbourne made it,” they told me.

Ozzy was able to pull it off on reality TV, so he’s given hope to all of us. I’d never really watched many reality TV shows and knew nothing about them, but I was 100 percent convinced
Duck Dynasty
would never work. It just goes to show how little I know about today’s world, because I was dead wrong. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why people are so attracted to our family. Maybe it’s because we live our lives like people really want to live, how we all used to live before everything got so busy, busy, busy.

Duck Dynasty
has made us a little bit more famous, but it hasn’t changed much of anything about us. Miss Kay and I still
live in the same house on the Ouachita River outside of West Monroe, and I’m still driving the same truck and hunting with the same guns and dogs. Of course, we still go to church every Sunday morning and I’m still reading my Bible. If anything has changed, it’s that it’s a little more difficult to go places, like driving down an interstate or walking through an airport. If I’m driving somewhere, someone might drive by and recognize me (undoubtedly because of my beard). They’ll get on a cell phone and call their friends, and then when I stop to take a leak, I’ll have to sign autographs and pose for pictures for about thirty minutes.

When we went duck-hunting in Arkansas recently, we stopped at a Walmart to buy our out-of-state hunting licenses. We were in the sporting goods section of the store when some people recognized us, so we started posing for pictures and signing T-shirts. When it was finally time for us to leave, three African-American girls approached us.

“Well, girls, I didn’t know you soul sisters were duck hunters,” I told them.

“We don’t care about no ducks,” one of them said. “You’re ZZ Top, ain’t you?”

I guess not everyone in America watches
Duck Dynasty
.

Miss Kay and I haven’t done too badly, and the good Lord has really blessed us. We’ve been married nearly fifty years and our boys have grown up to become loving husbands and fathers,
the kind of men I wanted them to be. Our business is in good shape, even after I had my doubts about where it was going. But when the boys took over, they breathed new life into it, and it’s still growing. Not many are as fortunate as we are, with all the trouble in the world.

Since I turned over the reins of my company to my sons, I keep busy with hunting and fishing and speaking engagements. God provided those. The appearances give me an opportunity to preach the gospel, which I feel compelled to do. I’ve also had a chance to learn from all the people I’ve met—and the chance to travel all over the country. I hope I’ve helped those who have heard the gospel.

Where do I go from here? The time is near when the dust will return to the earth and the spirit to God who gave it. I’m ready for that, but not quite yet. I have a lot of speeches to give, a lot of blinds to build, a lot of
Duck Dynasty
episodes to make, and who knows how many more duck seasons to hunt.

Maybe the greatest thing is that I’ve been able to live life the way I wanted. Following Jesus has been a blast. The Lord has blessed me mightily.

It is what makes me happy, happy, happy.

Rule No. 1 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

Simplify Your Life (Throw Away Your Cell Phones and Computers, Yuppies)

W
hat ever happened to the on-and-off switch? I don’t ask for much, but my hope is that someday soon we’ll get back to where we have a switch that says on and off. Nowadays, everything has a pass code, sequence, or secret decoder. I think maybe the yuppies overdid it with these computers. The very thing they touted as the greatest time-saving device in history—a computer—now occupies the lion’s share of everybody’s life.

Here’s a perfect example: I owned a Toyota Tundra truck for a while, and I got tired of driving around with my headlights on all the time. If I’m driving around in the woods and it’s late in the evening, I don’t want my headlights on. I tried to turn the lights off and couldn’t do it. I spent an hour inside the truck with a friend of mine trying to turn off the lights, but we never
figured it out. So I called the car dealer, and he told me to look in the owner’s manual. Well, it wasn’t in the book, which is about as thick as a Bible. Finally, about ten days later, after my buddy spent some time with a bunch of young bucks in town driving Toyota trucks, he told me he had the code for turning off my lights.

Now, get this: First, you have to shut off the truck’s engine. Then you have to step on the emergency brake with your left foot until you hear one click. Not two clicks—only one. If you hear two clicks, you have to bring the brake back up and start all over. After you hear one click, you crank the engine back up. I sat there thinking,
Why would you possibly need a code for turning off headlights?
What kind of mad scientist came up with that sequence? Seriously, what kind of mind designs something like that? To me, it’s not logical. I just don’t get it, but that’s where we are in today’s world.

I miss the times when life was simple. I came from humble, humble beginnings. When I was a young boy growing up in the far northwest corner of Louisiana, only about six miles from Texas and ten miles from Arkansas, we didn’t have very much in terms of personal possessions. But even when times were the hardest, I never once heard my parents, brothers, or sisters utter the words “Boy, we’re dirt-poor.”

We never had new cars, nice clothes, or much money, and we
certainly never lived in an extravagant home, but we were always happy, happy, happy, no matter the circumstances. My daddy, James Robertson, was that kind of a guy. He didn’t care about all the frills in life; he was perfectly content with what we had and so were we. We were a self-contained family, eating the fruits and vegetables that grew in our garden or what the Almighty provided us in other ways. And, of course, when we were really lucky, we had meat from the deer, squirrels, fish, and other game my brothers and I hunted and fished in the areas around our home, along with the pigs, chickens, and cattle we raised on our farm.

It was the 1950s when I was a young boy, but we lived about like it was the 1850s. My daddy always reminded us that when he was a boy, his family would go to town and load the wagon down and return home with a month’s worth of necessities. For only five dollars, they could buy enough flour, salt, pepper, sugar, and other essentials to survive for weeks. We rarely went to town for groceries, probably because we seldom had five dollars to spend, let alone enough gas to get there!

We rarely went to town for groceries, probably because we seldom had five dollars to spend, let alone enough gas to get there!

I grew up in a little log cabin in the woods, and it was located far from Yuppieville. The cabin was built near the turn of the twentieth century and was originally
a three-room shotgun house. At some point, someone added a small, protruding shed room off the southwest corner of the house. The room had a door connecting to the main room, which is where the fireplace was located. I guess whoever added the room thought it would be warmest near the fireplace, which was the only source of heat in our house. In hindsight, it really didn’t make a difference where you put the room if you didn’t insulate or finish the interior walls. It was going to be cold in there no matter what.

I slept in the shed with my three older brothers—Jimmy Frank, the oldest, who was ten years older than me; Harold, who was six years older than me; and Tommy, who was two years older than me. I never thought twice about sleeping with my three brothers in a bed; I thought that’s what everybody did. My younger brother, Silas, slept in the main room on the west end of the house because he had a tendency to wet the bed. My older sister, Judy, also slept in that room.

I can still remember trying to sleep in that room during the winter—there were a lot of sleepless nights. The overlapping boards on the exterior walls of the house were barely strong enough to block the wind, and they sure didn’t stand a chance against freezing temperatures. The shed room was about ten square feet, and its only furnishings were a standard bed and battered chest of drawers. My brothers and I kept a few pictures, keepsakes, and
whatnots on the two-by-four crosspieces on the framing of the interior walls. Every night before bed, we unloaded whatever was in our pockets, usually a fistful of marbles and whatever else we’d found that day, on the crosspieces and then reloaded our pockets again the next morning.

To help battle the cold, my brothers and I layered each other in heavy homemade quilts on the bed. Jimmy Frank and Harold were the biggest, so they slept on opposite sides of the bed, with Tommy and me sleeping in between them. My daddy and my mother, Merritt Robertson (we started calling them Granny and Pa when our children were born), slept in a small middle room in the house. My youngest sister, Jan, was the baby of the family and slept in a crib next to my parents’ bed until she was old enough to sleep with Judy.

The fireplace in the west room was the only place to get warm. It was made of the natural red stone of the area and was rather large. One of my brothers once joked that it was big enough to “burn up a wet mule.” Because the fireplace was the only source of heat in the home, it was my family’s gathering spot. Every morning in the winter, the first person out of bed—it always seemed to be Harold—was responsible for starting a fire. It would usually reignite with pine fatwood kindling, but sometimes you had to blow the coals to stoke the flames. Some of my favorite memories as a child were when we baked potatoes and roasted hickory
nuts on the fireplace coals for snacks. We usually ate them with some of my mother’s homemade dill pickles. There was never any candy or junk food in our house.

The only other room in the cabin was a combination kitchen and dining area. The cookstove was fueled by natural gas from a well that was located down the hill and across the creek. The pressure from the well was so low that it barely produced enough gas to cook. Pa always said we were lucky to have the luxury of running water in the house, even if it was only cold water coming through a one-inch pipe from a hand-dug well to the kitchen sink. We didn’t even have a bathtub or commode in the house! The water pipeline habitually froze during the winter, and my brothers and I spent many mornings unfreezing the pipe with hot coals from the fire. When the pipe was frozen, we’d grab a shovelful of coals and place them on the ground under the pipe. When we finally heard gurgling and then water spitting out of the kitchen sink, we knew we could return to the fire to get warm again.

Breakfast began when Granny put a big pot of water on the stove to heat. We didn’t have a hot-water heater, so we bathed in cold water when I was young. Granny used the hot water for cooking and cleaning the dishes. Breakfast usually consisted of hot buttermilk biscuits, blindfolded fried eggs, butter, and fresh “sweet milk”: every morning, one of my brothers or I would take
a pail of hot water to the barn to clean the cows’ udders after we milked them. There were always several jars of jams and jellies on our table. Pa and Granny canned them from wild fruits that grew in abundance in the Arklatex area. Pa liked to scold us for having too many jars open at once; he said we opened them just to hear the Ball jar lids pop. He may have been right.