The Duck Commander Family by Willie Robertson, Korie Robertson

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 mountainthat 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.
    The way you got to the hostel was on an elevator through the middle of the mountain. One night, we got back to the elevator about eleven thirty P.M., after exploring the city, only to find that the elevator closed at eleven P.M. We had no idea what to do. We certainly didn’t have enough money to get another hotel room for the night, so we went back into the town and asked around to see if there was any other way to get up there. We found out there was a staircase that would get you there eventually, but it was a long walk up the mountain. We didn’t have any other choice. We walked what seemed like forever. At one point, we passed a guy in a trench coat, just sitting by himself on a bench on the trail. We were totally freaked out. Well, I was, at least. We finally got to the top about two A.M. We ended up sitting outside under the stars and talking once we got there, and we thanked God for keeping us safe. It ended up being really fun and romantic, but I was scared to death walking in a foreign city up a creepy trail in the middle of the night.
    When I finished school at Harding University in 1995, we moved back to West Monroe. Willie still had a year left of school, so he enrolled at Northeast Louisiana University (which is now the University of Louisiana at Monroe) and he took a jobworking at Camp Ch-Yo-Ca. Willie probably could have gone to work part-time for Duck Commander, but he’d helped Phil make duck calls when he was a child, so at this point he really wasn’t interested in doing it again. Duck Commander was still pretty small, and Jase and their friend Bill “Red Dawg” Phillips were already working there. Duck Commander couldn’t afford to take on another full-time employee, but Willie still helped out at Duck Commander from time to time, especially during hunting season, and we would always go to SHOT Show—the big hunting-industry trade show—with the whole family every January. Willie would drive a seventeen-passenger van to SHOT Show and would work as their driver.
     
    W ILLIE WAS DETERMINED TO MAKE SURE THE CAMP AT LEAST BROKE EVEN FINANCIALLY EVERY YEAR.
     
    Willie really did some unbelievable things with Camp Ch-Yo-Ca, which was a nonprofit and seemed to lose a lot of money every year. Willie was determined to make sure the camp at least broke even financially every year. He studied kinesiology at Harding University and then went into the health and human performance program at Northeast Louisiana. The program required him to take some business courses. Willie took the camp’s deficit from about $150,000 to $5,000 in a couple of years. The kids would come to camp for about six weeks during the summer, but Willie started renting the camp’s facilities to churches and youth groups during the off-season. He started a program for schools to bring their classes to the camp for nature hikes, and he even added tennis courts, hiking trails,and other amenities. He was very creative in finding ways to create new revenue for the camp. Willie learned how to operate