Making good on a childhood memory

Lundies Sporting Goods was a little store located at the end of Newberg Road in the town of Durand, Michigan. No wider than a shotgun house, its worn oak floor had a slight bounce. When you walked in there would be a sound of bells that clashed like a tambourine, as the door closer pulled the door shut tight behind you.
The little shop was so chockablock with sporting goods stuff conversations sounded muffled making it seem almost church-like, where parishioners try to keep their voices down while the minister is preaching. During the winter, there was always the chime of the doorbells followed by the rhythmic stomping of feet by patrons getting the snow off their shoes. But the store simply had everything.
Being a small town, Lundies supplied the local high school with varsity jackets that hung in the front window right next to fishing tackle. Elementary school boys would look through the glass and stare at the jackets their big brothers in high school wore with letters affixed. Almost salivating the youngsters dreamed of the day they would be wearing theirs.
Shelves were stacked with everything from Converse “Chuck Taylor” All Star tennis shoes to life preservers. The store had two-cycle oil for outboards and shotgun shells and rifle cartridges for hunters. Along one wall there was a glass display case with odds and ends like pocketknives, compasses and wild game calls.
The idea that you could call a bird or wild animal intrigued me during my impressionable years. What’s more, the calls that particularly caught my eye were in an orangish red and white box with yellow lettering. Across the face of the box read the name, Faulk’s Game Calls.
That was 45 years ago. As fate would have it, this past January I found myself in one of those surreal moments before daylight while sitting on front bench seat of a 16-foot bateau with a fourth generation descendent of Faulk’s Game Calls founder Clarence “Patin” Faulk, Canaan Heard, at the helm.
Negotiating a boat trail in the Sweet Lake marsh, Heard, my wife and I, were about to make a duck hunt he invited us on. Following the hunt, we would take a tour of the Faulk’s facilities back in Lake Charles.
The weather was a balmy 60 degrees and misty wet with the ominous threat of some severe thunderstorms coming out of the south. Around Heard’s neck was a lanyard full of Faulk’s game calls made of cocobolo, cherry, and bamboo cane. Every now and then, they would clank together ringing like percussion claves. The sound of quality came to mind when hearing the mixture of woods.
Barely set up in the boat blind, the sudden drop in air temperature from the clash of occluded weather fronts predicted by the weatherman gave us pause. The worry lasted just long enough for lightning bolts to decide for us that duck hunting wouldn’t be prudent. The ducks would be safe for another day and instead of hunting it would be an early tour of Faulk’s back in town.
A 10-year Marine Corp veteran, Heard, 32, is currently working on his master’s degree in physiology at Tulane University in New Orleans, besides directing the company’s marketing activities. Because of vocation, Heard’s father didn’t hunt much. However, being the grandson of the late Paul Dudley “Dud” Faulk, who was a world champion caller, calling waterfowl is in his genes.
Heard, recalling his first duck hunt at the age of 5 said, “We were hunting at the end of Big Pasture Road south of Lake Charles. There wasn’t much happening and near the end of the hunt my grandfather, ‘Dud,’ who also was a bit of a prankster, says to me, ‘You want to shoot a duck?’ Of course I did. He helped me see the bird sitting out in the water, while my father braced me and I shot it. Well, I got to shoot a decoy and they all got the biggest kick out of me shooting it. I didn’t know better, I was a little kid and thought it was a duck.”
Patin Faulk began making calls and selling them in the mid-1930s. But, it was his son Dud who had the foresight in 1951 to incorporate his father’s business, turning it into one of the first commercial call making companies in the United States. Moreover, an international company today that sells upwards of 75,000 calls annually.
Recounting those impressionable childhood years, Heard says each summer they had to go spend a week at his grandparent’s house in Lake Charles. His early recollections spoke of a time when everyone smoked and the old men complained.
“When you opened the door, it looked like nightclub in there, Heard said smiling. “Back then everybody smoked and drank coffee while they worked. They’d be saying things like, ‘It’s too hot out,’ or ‘It’s too cold. They’d say, ‘There ain’t enough rain,’ and ‘The ducks aren’t going to be here.’ But, they’d listen to Paul Harvey and sometimes get mad at the radio. But, ‘Papoo,’ is what we’d call Dud and Papoo would tell us go run to the house and get this or that, so we would. We’d get to fold the boxes to put calls in. I guess I was 7 or 8 — maybe 9 — around that time.”
Heard’s maternal grandmother, Rena Faulk, still keeps the books and operates Faulk’s Game Calls with the help of her daughters, grandsons and several long term employees who have worked for the company many years.
Heard said, “We’d call my grandmother ‘Honey.’ After a morning of running in and out for Papoo, folding boxes and packing lanyards, we’d get tired and go lay down in Honey’s office. When we woke up, Honey would take us to McDonalds for breakfast.”
Nearly all of the lathes and milling equipment in the old shop are original pieces of equipment the company started with. There are several benches where burnishing and tuning calls is done. The musty smell of sawdust fills the air where the humidity of Louisiana weather mixes with the fine wood particles.
When I peered through those glass display cases at Lundies Sporting goods my pockets weren’t filled with a lot of money to burn. This past winter I was now up close and personal with that childhood memory. Whipping out a twenty-dollar bill, I finally made good on that nostalgic memory buying my first Faulk’s game a call — a Model SG-49L Speck call fresh off the production floor.
If you wish to make a comment or have an anecdote, recipe, or story you wish to share, contact John K. Flores by calling 985-395-5586 or by email at gowiththeflo@cox.net or go to his Face Book page Gowiththeflo Outdoors.