The Duck Commander Family (7 page)

Korie:
This was not the case in my house. If you stayed home from school, you were going to the doctor, so you had to weigh the pros and cons. We took school seriously. We were never punished for making bad grades or anything like that; it was just expected that we’d work hard in school and do the best we could. And we did. Mom would say that school and the after-school activities we were involved in were our “job,” and we were expected to give it our all. If we started something, we couldn’t just quit it because we didn’t want to do it anymore. We had to finish what we started. If it
was a sport, we were part of a team and had a responsibility to our teammates to give it our best.

Mom was big on our learning new skills, so I took everything from tennis to baton lessons, diving to piano lessons, and played every sport at least one year. I think it gave me confidence that I could do anything if I worked at it. I still impress my kids with my backflips off the diving board and gymnastic tricks on the trampoline, but the piano lessons never stuck. The best I can do today is “Chopsticks,” and I took piano for three years! I just wasn’t good at it. My brother, on the other hand, plays piano beautifully.

With our children, I try to find the happy middle ground between how I was raised and Willie’s upbringing. We expect our kids to do well in school and they all do, but there are times when we just decide to stay home. I figure the school gives us fifteen days a year for a reason. We might as well take them. Also, I want our kids to learn several different skills so they can find the thing they are good at and that they love, but I don’t sign them up for quite as much as we did when I was a kid. I remember feeling like we were always on the go and just wanted to be home more at times. So I make sure our kids are involved in at least one sport, but the other lessons we try to space out so we don’t spend our afternoons in
the car rushing from one event to the next. I like for them to have the time to just be home and to explore and sometimes even to be bored and learn to create their own adventures.

When I was growing up in West Monroe, you technically didn’t start high school until you were in the tenth grade. The ninth grade was still considered a part of middle school back then. We attended a middle school out in the country, but then everybody moved up to West Monroe High School in the tenth grade. When I was getting ready to go to the tenth grade in 1987, though, they were in the process of building a new high school. All of the kids from my part of the parish were allowed to choose whether they wanted to start the school year at West Monroe or go to the new school that was called West Ouachita.

Well, I decided to try out the new school since it was closer to home, and it seemed like the best choice. I went to the first day of school and checked in. I went to PE class on the first day, but we couldn’t play basketball because they still hadn’t put up the lights in the gymnasium. We had to sit there for an hour doing nothing. After about three days of sitting there, I said, “Screw this. I’m going to West Monroe High.” I realized I wanted to be in town anyway, so I just transferred schools during the first week of school.

After about a month, the principal from West Ouachita called our house.

“Willie hasn’t been to school for twenty-seven days,” the principal told Phil.

“Well, he leaves for school every morning,” Phil told him. “I don’t know where he’s going. I thought he was going to school.”

When I got home that day, Phil asked me where I had been.

“School,” I told him.

“Uh-uh,” Phil said. “The school called and said you haven’t been there in a month.”

“Oh, yeah,” I told him. “I transferred to West Monroe. I don’t go to that school anymore.”

“Okay,” Phil said. “I figured something was up.”

Korie:
Can you imagine a tenth-grader transferring schools without even notifying his parents? Willie just showed up at West Monroe High School and said, “Hey, I’m here.” He didn’t even think about telling Kay and Phil about transferring.

When I got to high school, like most teens, I was becoming more and more social, so my entire objective was to get to town and stay there. Phil and Kay lived way out on the Ouachita River (they still live there today), and it’s about a twenty-minute drive into town. Once I went to town, I knew I wasn’t going home for a few days, because Phil and Kay never made a special trip to pick us up.

We lived so far out of town that I rarely spent the night at home during the week during my high school years. I spent a lot of nights with my best friend, Paul Lewis, who is African-American,
and his dad would cook all this weird stuff. I ate possum for the first time at Paul’s house. I started eating the meat on my plate, and I was like, “Oh, my goodness.” It had these tiny little legs. Paul’s daddy had shot a possum and just threw it on the grill. It was nasty. Paul’s daddy would also cook turtles and raccoons. You could bring him just about anything you killed, and he would cook it.

I was running around town with Paul all the time. I think it’s safe to say I was the only white kid in his neighborhood. We were shooting basketball on the square one day, and a cop drove by and called me over to his police car. The cop asked me, “What are you doing over here? You don’t need to be in this neighborhood.”

“I know everybody in this neighborhood,” I told him. “I practically live here.”

Korie:
By the time Willie was in high school, his parents pretty much just let him do his own thing. Willie slept wherever he could find a bed and meal. He even stayed at our house sometimes, which was fun. We were just friends at the time, so my parents didn’t have a problem with it. He’d stay with Paul and with Mike Kellett, our youth minister, quite a bit too. Because Willie’s parents’ house was so far out of town, he and his brothers fended for themselves and were really, really independent. Willie didn’t get his driver’s license till he was seventeen years old just because nobody took him. He never told us he didn’t have his license, though, and would drive my mom’s van sometimes when he stayed at our house.
She didn’t find out till we were married that he didn’t have his license when he was driving her car. My dad about died!

Even though Kay and Phil let us run around town in middle school and high school, I don’t think it was neglect or anything like that. Phil just never let anyone tell him what to do or how to do it, so I guess he figured we’d be the same way. He doesn’t believe in going by what the world says you “should” do to have a good life or to be successful. Phil’s philosophy was pretty simple: just follow what the Bible says and you’ll be all right. And for the most part, we did.

I think my life was also shaped in a big way by what Kay and Phil and Pa and Granny taught each of us at an early age: be content with what you have and don’t worry about what you don’t have. Even in the lean times, there was a lot of love and laughter in the house. Some of my best memories are from when we had nothing. Who says you can’t live on love? I think we did. We were thankful for what we had, comfortable with who we were, and always confident. We were Robertsons, for goodness’ sake! And that meant something. When I was younger, I never believed I was different from anyone else—even if we were receiving free lunches.