The Duck Commander Family (2 page)

Phil was born and raised in Caddo Parish in Northwest Louisiana, near where the state converges with Arkansas and Texas. His father, James Robertson, was the son of Judge Euan Robertson, the longtime justice of the peace in Vivian, Louisiana. James Robertson married Merritt Hale; we always called them Pa and Granny.

Phil Alexander Robertson was born on the family’s farm outside Vivian on April 24, 1946. Phil had four brothers and two sisters, and they spent much of their childhood living in an old log house located on land owned by Pa’s aunt Myrtle Gauss. The cabin was pretty rustic and didn’t even have indoor plumbing. But the log house came with more than four hundred acres, which is where Phil and his brothers learned to hunt and fish. The woods surrounding the farm were filled with squirrels, quail, and doves, and the Robertson boys could
hunt for duck and fish for white perch and bream at nearby Black Bayou and Caddo Lake.

Pa started working in the oil industry when he was young, after black gold was discovered in East Texas and at the Caddo Pine Island Oil Field in Caddo Parish in the early twentieth century.

When Phil was in high school, his family was forced to move because Aunt Myrtle sold her farm. They relocated to Dixie, Louisiana, which is about fifteen miles north of Shreveport. Granny had suffered a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed with manic depression. Pa hoped the move would stabilize Granny’s condition. She was twice confined to the Louisiana mental institute at Pineville, where she received electric shock treatment. Her condition didn’t improve until years later, when doctors discovered that lithium could control her mental imbalance.

A short time after Phil’s family moved to Dixie, Pa fell eighteen feet from the floor of a drilling rig and landed on his head. He broke two vertebrae in his back and ruptured his stomach. The accident nearly killed him. Doctors fused the vertebrae in his back with bone from his hip and repaired his stomach. But Pa was forced to wear a heavy plaster of Paris cast from neck to hip for nearly two years and obviously couldn’t work. Making matters worse, Granny was confined to the mental hospital at the same time, so Pa was left to care for five of his children while he was immobilized.

Phil’s older brothers, Jimmy Frank and Harold, were
enrolled in classes at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Both of them volunteered to come home and work to help the family make ends meet. But Pa insisted they stay in school and finish their education. The family somehow survived on Pa’s disability checks of thirty-five dollars a week. Phil’s older sister, Judy, did most of the cooking and cared for her younger siblings, Silas and Jan. Phil’s other older brother Tommy and Phil gathered pecans and sold them to local markets. The family subsisted on rice and beans, cornbread, and whatever fish and game the boys could catch. Rice and beans was a staple dish at the Robertson dinner table. A hundred-pound bag of rice and several cans of beans would last for weeks. There are dozens of ways to prepare rice and beans, and the recipes could be altered by adding a simple gravy or squirrel, quail, or fish, so it was a perfect meal for the struggling Robertson family.

About the only thing Phil cared about other than hunting and fishing was playing football. The Robertson boys learned to play football in the backyard of their log home. They constructed a goalpost with oak-tree uprights and a gum-tree crossbar. Four of the Robertson boys played football at Vivian High School and later North Caddo High School (after the parish consolidated several schools). Jimmy Frank played center and guard but always wanted to be a quarterback. He taught his younger brothers how to play the position. Tommy was a track star and was the first Robertson
to play quarterback, but moved to halfback when Phil made the varsity team at North Caddo High. Harold broke his elbow while playing on the freshman team and never played football again. Silas was a hard-hitting defensive back, but Phil ended up being the best athlete in the family. He was a first-team, all-state quarterback and all-district outfielder in baseball.

Phil and Kay started dating when she was in the ninth grade and he was in the tenth. She assisted the Robertson family at times by giving them food from the general store her family owned in Ida, Louisiana. Phil and Kay broke up during the Christmas holidays the year they started dating because Phil didn’t want a girlfriend interfering with hunting season. But then Kay’s father passed away the next May, and Phil attended his funeral. They started dating again soon there after.

After finishing high school, Phil received a football scholarship from Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, where his brother Tommy was already playing for the Bulldogs. Kay moved there with Phil and completed her senior year at Ruston High School. She was pregnant at the age of sixteen with my oldest brother, Alan. Phil and Kay moved into the same apartment complex where Tommy and his wife, the former Nancy Dennig, lived, which made the transition to college a lot easier. Phil was redshirted his freshman year at Louisiana Tech but then won the starting quarterback job the next season. He was ahead of Terry Bradshaw on the depth chart.

In his book
It’s Only a Game,
Bradshaw remembered Phil: “He’d come out to practice directly from the woods, squirrel
tails hanging out of his pockets, duck feathers on his clothes. Clearly he was a fine shot, so no one complained too much.”

During one practice before his senior season, Phil saw a flock of geese fly over the practice field. Phil looked up at the geese and thought, “Man, what am I doing here?” He quit the football team a few days later, handing the starting job to Bradshaw. Bradshaw later led the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers to four Super Bowl championships and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1989. Phil stayed at Louisiana Tech and earned a bachelor’s degree in health and physical education in 1969 and a master’s in 1974. He spent the rest of his fall days in the bayou, hunting ducks and squirrels, instead of throwing touchdowns.

To be honest, I came along at a difficult time in Phil’s life. After he earned his bachelor’s degree at Louisiana Tech, he was hired to teach English and physical education at a school in Junction City, Arkansas. Phil spent most of his time fishing, hunting, and drinking with the guy who hired him. They were doing some pretty wild and crazy things, and Phil was reprimanded a few times by the school board for his boorish behavior. He quit his teaching job before they could fire him and signed an eighteen-month lease to run a honky-tonk at the bottom of the Ouachita River near El Dorado, Arkansas. Phil was drinking a lot and spending very little time with us. Kay was so worried about Phil that she began working as a barmaid at the honky-tonk to keep an eye on him.

When Phil and Kay were at the bar, they’d leave Alan, Jase, and me with Aunt Rose, who was my favorite babysitter. She wasn’t actually our aunt, but in the South, when you’re a kid you’ve got to put something in front of the name of any adult you talk to. It’s a sign of respect, and having good manners is a big thing for us Southerners. Aunt Rose made clothes for us and took good care of us. I loved that woman.

There was another babysitter that I didn’t have such warm feelings for. The only thing I remember about her is that she would always try to feed us Raisin Bran. Not that there is anything wrong with Raisin Bran, but I just happened to hate it. I would refuse to eat it, and she would lock me in the closet! Unfortunately for me, I spent a lot of time in the closet that summer. I’m not sure if Jase actually liked Raisin Bran or if seeing me locked in a closet was enough of a deterrent to make him eat it, but he seemed to be her favorite and immune to the closet torture. I’d complain to Kay and she would always say, “Why don’t you just eat the Raisin Bran?” I guess I was stubborn even as a little kid.

There wasn’t much Kay could do about it anyway; she was just trying to keep our family’s head above the water. Phil’s bar was nothing more than a low wooden building attached to a mobile home. He was the bartender and cook. He served fried chicken, pickled pig’s feet, and boiled eggs. Occasionally, he’d cook venison or wild boar. But more than anything else, Phil just drank a lot. Phil’s sister Jan was so concerned about his drinking that she brought a preacher, William “Bill” Smith, from White’s Ferry Road Church in West Monroe, Louisiana,
to his bar to try to save him. Phil took one look at the man and said, “Are you some kind of preacher?”

Smith said he was a preacher, and Phil asked him if he’d ever been drunk. Smith admitted he used to drink a few beers.

“Well, what’s the difference between you and me?” Phil asked him. “You’ve been drunk and I’m getting drunk right now. You ain’t putting the Bible on me.”

Smith left the bar, and Phil went back to drinking.

One night, Phil was arguing with the bar’s owner and his wife. He was drunk and threw the woman across the bar and beat both of them up pretty badly. When the police arrived to break up the melee, Phil slipped out the back door. Before he left, Phil told Kay she wouldn’t see him for a while. Then he stayed in the woods for several weeks while the authorities were looking for him.

Phil left Kay behind to clean up the mess. The bar owners eventually agreed not to press charges against Phil, but Kay had to give them all the money they had earned while operating the bar. She was broke and unemployed. She moved our trailer to a spot close to D’Arbonne Lake near Farmerville, Louisiana. Kay got a job working in the corporate offices of Howard Brothers Discount Stores in Monroe, Louisiana, which, ironically, was owned by Korie’s family. Our lives were beginning to intersect when we were just babies. God had a plan.

Kay was handling payroll and employee benefits. Phil finally came home and got a job working in the offshore oil
fields in the Gulf of Mexico. Kay was happy our family was back together again.

During the time that Phil was working at the offshore drilling sites, Kay had to put us in a day-care facility while she worked. I was only three years old, but even then I was always trying to impress my friends. One day I decided to do something that had never been done before—climb up the slide backward. I shimmied my way up the slide while the other children oohed and ahhed. Once I got to the top, I turned to raise my hands in victory and to prove once and for all that I was king of the playground. I made a minor tactical error, however. That slide was slippery, and I fell eight feet to the ground right on top of a tree root. The teacher called my mom, who rushed me to St. Francis Medical Center, where they found I had shattered both of the bones in my thighs. One of the bones was splintered all the way from my knee to my hip.