The Duck Commander Family (13 page)

8

B
Y WISDOM A HOUSE IS BUILT, AND THROUGH UNDERSTANDING IT IS ESTABLISHED; THROUGH KNOWLEDGE ITS ROOMS ARE FILLED WITH RARE AND BEAUTIFUL TREASURES.

—P
ROVERBS 24:3–4

K
orie:
Willie and I lived in an apartment at Harding University right after we were married. It was just a little one-bedroom apartment, but we loved it. We had the best time decorating it with all of our wedding gifts. After living in the apartment for a semester, we decided that we were wasting money by paying rent every month. We really thought we should buy a house, so we started to look around. Of course, Willie and I were both still taking classes, so we didn’t have the money to buy a house by ourselves. Fortunately, my father agreed to help us with the down payment and cosigned the loan for a house. He helped us get our first house, which really meant a lot to us.

We ended up finding a little starter home in Searcy that was still being built, so we were able to pick out the flooring, carpet, and paint color for the walls. The house was only
about nine hundred square feet, but we were thrilled to own our first home. We paid about $47,500 for the house and sold it for $60,000 when we moved back to Monroe, so it ended up being a pretty good investment. We had a few other married friends in college, and they would come to our house on the weekends because we were the only ones who owned a house. Willie would cook for everybody, and it was a lot of fun.

I was a year ahead of Willie in college, and I was able to concentrate on school while he worked and took classes. Willie had lots of jobs while we were in college, including working at a bowling alley for a while. If you know Willie, whenever he gets into something, he doesn’t ever just do it halfway. He immediately thinks he’s going to become a professional at it. So for a while, he wanted to be a professional bowler. Then, after college, he took up golf and was convinced for a while he was going to be a professional golfer.

After I started playing golf pretty regularly, I paid for a lesson from an instructor. The guy had been a professional golfer and even won the Arkansas Open.

“I’m thinking about being a pro golfer,” I told him.

He just looked at me and said, “No.”

The guy hadn’t even seen me swing yet and he was already telling me no.

“You haven’t even seen me swing,” I told him.

“You ain’t got it,” he said.

Eventually, I was able to get my handicap down to four, but that was about as close as I ever got to the PGA Tour.

Korie:
Willie and I worked together for a little while as telemarketers, and it was the worst job ever. We were in this crowded room with a lot of other people on phones, making cold calls to raise money for leukemia research. At the end of every night, they would show you how much money you had raised. Willie would always raise a ton of money, but I could never get anyone to donate. I was stuck with calling people in New York, while Willie was calling people in Alabama. Nothing against Northerners, but I don’t think they are as nice to telemarketers as people in the South. Either that or Willie was just better at it than I was! I think we had that job for about two weeks. It was so horrible.

Willie also worked as a janitor—he likes to say he was a maintenance supervisor—for a real estate agency, and he went around fixing broken windows, trash disposals, and things like that at the company’s rental properties. Willie also worked at an ice cream plant and had to spend most of the day in the freezer. He hated it. He never has liked to be cold.

When I was working at the ice cream plant, Phil came through Arkansas on his way to a speaking engagement. It was the first time Phil had been to Harding University, so he
hadn’t even seen our new house. I was really pumped that my dad was coming to town because I had a club basketball game that night, and Phil had never seen me play while I was in high school. I went and asked my supervisor at the ice cream plant if I could have the night off since Phil was coming to town. He told me no. I was like, “Screw it. I quit.” I hated that job anyway.

It was the only time Phil ever saw me play basketball, and I scored thirty points in the game. It was worth losing the job over. I had a lot of fun playing in the intramural leagues at Harding University. I was the athletic director of my fraternity, so I was allowed to play on every one of our teams if we didn’t have enough players. I always played on the A team, but I could play on the lower teams, too. Once I scored seventy-four points on the D team because no one else on the team could really play, so I took just about every shot in the game. I kept begging the coach at Harding University to put me on the school’s basketball team. The coach was in his first season, and he was also my badminton teacher. I made a deal with him: If I beat him in a badminton match, he had to put me on the basketball team. I beat him like a drum, but he still didn’t put me on the team. I’m still mad at the guy for not holding up his end of the bargain.

Korie:
Of course, Willie and I never had any money as married college students. At one point we had to borrow some friends of ours’ washer and dryer to do our laundry. To thank them for letting us use their washer and dryer, we took them
out to Shoney’s one night for dinner. Willie and I cooked in every night; we rarely went out to dinner because we were on such a tight budget. The waiter brought us our bill that night and it was like forty dollars. I didn’t even know you could spend forty dollars at Shoney’s! Daddy had worked with Willie and me on keeping a budget. He taught us to write down all of our expenses so we could see how we were spending our money. If we ever had to borrow any money from Dad, he always wanted to see a plan for how we were going to pay him back. Daddy really taught us some valuable lessons about money. We budgeted about sixty dollars a week for food. After paying the bill at Shoney’s, we had about twenty dollars left for the entire week!

Whenever Willie and I went to the grocery store to buy food for the week, there was always a big argument at the checkout lane. If we had any money left in our budget, Willie would want to buy baseball cards or a
Star Trek
book. He has always been a big collector. I wanted to buy a magazine like
People
or
Entertainment Weekly,
and we never had enough money to buy both. We’d fight over who was going to get to spend our disposable income, which ended up being about three or four dollars a week. These are some of the things you fight over when you get married at eighteen and nineteen!

When we were newlyweds, our favorite meal was chicken strips and macaroni and cheese. We would buy a big bag of frozen Tyson chicken strips and fry them in a Fry Daddy. When they came out we would season them, then dip them in butter. Willie would make these special sauces for the
chicken strips and we’d always have a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese with them. We rotated the chicken strips with chili dogs and, of course, fried bologna sandwiches, and that would be our meals for the week. Sometimes we would even splurge on thick-cut bologna. Willie tried to get me to eat fish sticks, but I’d never eaten them in my life. I just couldn’t stomach eating frozen fish out of a box.

When we were taking classes, we’d come home between classes and eat lunch together every day. We would cook lunch and then watch
Matlock
together and see who could guess the killer. Willie bought a little white truck from one of our professors for seven hundred dollars. The best part about the truck was it still had a faculty parking sticker on the wind-shield. We were so excited we could park the truck in the faculty lots when we went to class. Because we were married, we could even write excuses for each other when we were sick. Willie always seemed to catch a cold during March Madness and on the opening day of baseball season.

During our last year at Harding University, we spent the summer in a study-abroad program in Florence, Italy. It was an unbelievable experience and was our first time really being away together. We traveled all over Europe on a Eurail pass. We didn’t have any money for hotel rooms, so we would just sleep on trains and wake up the next morning in a new country. It was so exciting. As part of our studies, we had to visit certain museums and write essays on the art we saw. I was
an art education major, so I loved every bit of this part of our trip, but it was a totally new experience for Willie. By the end of the trip, he said he had more culture than the yogurt section of the grocery store!

Willie and I are both pretty directionally challenged, so we spent most of our time lost. We would jump in a bus that seemed to be going in the right direction and end up having to walk for miles to get back to town. We were both super skinny from all the walking when we got back, despite the good Italian food we ate while we were there.

We had the best time, but there were a few scary moments, as well. One night we were sleeping on the train heading to Barcelona, Spain. We were traveling through the south of France and a group of thieves were on the train. Willie was sleeping with his feet on the door, so every time they would try to open the door he would wake up and they would run off. One time, he didn’t feel the door open and the thieves grabbed the backpack of one of the girls who was traveling with us. Willie jumped up and started chasing them through the train! They dropped the backpack, but Willie kept chasing them through a couple of cars. I was standing there thinking, “What’s going to happen if he catches them!” Luckily, Willie had that same thought, gave up the chase, and came back to our car. He didn’t sleep the rest of the night; he just sat up and protected us. What a man!

Another exciting but scary adventure happened in Salzburg, Austria, where we were staying at a youth hostel named Stadtalm Naturfreundehaus. It was at the top of a mountain
that surrounded the city and had the most beautiful view. It had bunk beds in the rooms and only had one bathroom that everyone shared. You had to put coins in the shower for the water to come out. It only gave you like two minutes of water. I remember calling down the hall to Willie to bring more coins. Two minutes wasn’t quite long enough.