John K. Flores: Man spends a lifetime tuning wildlife calls

Lundy’s was a sporting goods and hardware store located on Main Street in downtown Durand, Michigan. Like many small businesses, the big box outfits forced them to shutter their doors long ago.
When I was a teenager, I used to go into Lundy’s to buy shotgun shells and other assorted things for the field, plus get the latest fish and game report. I recall one conversation like it was yesterday.
I went up to the counter and asked for a box of 12 gauge 3-inch magnum number 6 shot, shotgun shells. To which Mr. Lundy replied, “What the heck are you hunting with that?”
“Pheasants,” I replied.
“Pheasants!” Lundy said incredulously. “You’re going to destroy them with that load.”
I explained that I was missing a lot of birds and the 3-inch magnum had a whole lot more shot per shell and I needed all the help I could get. You don’t get interactions like that at Academy Sports + Outdoors.
Of course, Lundy was right. The load was way too much for pheasants and I wound up purchasing a box of 2-3/4” standard load shells.
The counter, where Lundy held court each day, also had a long glass display case built in. It held a variety of things like binoculars, fishing reels and game calls. Many of those calls were Faulks Game Calls packaged in small red boxes with white and yellow lettering. There was also a little clear plastic window that allowed you to get a little peek of the wooden call.
More than once, when I went by Lundy’s I stared through the glass of the display case looking at those calls.
Over a half century later, against the low background noise of a humming wood lathe in an adjacent room, I watched Art LeJuene put the final touches on a duck call that he’s adjusting the reed on. Once he gets it just right, with a rawhide mallet he gently taps the barrel onto the keg that holds the voice trough, reed and wedge.
Well-satisfied with the way everything looked, LeJuene raised the call to his lips and blew out a raspy series of mallard cadences that all waterfowl hunters know by nature. The sound filled the small cinder block and wood frame building where four generations of Faulk family members have produced game calls.
The 78-year-old LeJuene rolled the call around in his weathered and wrinkled hands, then turned in his workstation chair where he was now facing me.
There is a glow in his countenance and a smile in his eyes when he says, “Now you try!”
As an average caller, sheepishly I smile back and reluctantly took the call from him.
This is like doing a singing audition in front of a panel of judges that included Whitney Houston, Elvis Presley and Taylor Swift.
Sensing my timidity, LeJuene, sounding like a commercial says to me, “Ducks are like people; they don’t always sound alike. These calls are easy to blow; we make them that way. If you can make any sound at all, it’ll come out sounding like a duck.”
He goes on to tell me that he doesn’t sell that particular call. “I make them for my friends,” he says.
That was all the confidence I needed to blow out a basic quack, followed by a hail call, with a final series of chuckles.
When I finished with the last of my, “tuk-a-tuk, tuk-a-tuk, tuk-a-tuk-tuk-tuk,” LeJuene smiled. I knew I had sounded like a duck is supposed to, thus making a good account of myself.
LeJuene’s family moved south of Lake Charles in the early 1950s, when their father purchased a 320-acre parcel of farmland off La. 14. Times were hard then.
LeJuene was one of nine children growing up, and unable to finish high school as his family eked out and made a hard scrabble living farming rice. LeJuene says he had to quit school and go to work so the family would have enough money to survive; something that’s hard for most people to imagine today.
LeJuene says years ago that he would go hunting with his father, but it wasn’t for sport like today. They hunted for a reason he emphasized.
“It was for our winter meals,” LeJuene said. “Without ducks to be able to kill through the wintertime, you’d be in bad shape back then. Now you can go over to the grocery store and go buy what you want. Back then, we didn’t go to the grocery store, we raised everything for ourselves.”
LeJuene talked about how they didn’t have combines to harvest rice like today. Instead, a John Deere D Model tractor pulled a threshing machine that separated grain from the stalks and husks. The straw would be left in large piles that LeJuene and his father would hide in to kill ducks.
LeJuene said, “I made my first hunts when I was 5 or 6. What Daddy would do is wait until the ducks would come, where we were threshing, because some of the rice would fall on the ground. The ducks would come there to eat it and he would wait until the sky was black with ducks and then he would shoot 3 shots. We’d pick up ducks by the sack full.
“That’s not what you were supposed to do,” LeJuene continued, “but that’s what we had to do to be able to have enough food in the winter.”
In the late 50s, LeJuene and three of his brothers joined and served in the U.S. Military during the Vietnam era.
Hired in 1968 by the late Paul “Dud” Dudley Faulk, LeJuene has literally tuned over a million calls for Faulk’s Game Calls these past 56 years. In fact, making calls is the only job LeJuene has ever had since his discharge from the United States Navy.
In every corner of the shop, there is something with a light layer of sawdust collected on it.
What may be cluttered shelves and floor space to the onlooker, it’s a small piece of paradise for the duck hunter or woodworking craftsman who visits. Even the faint musty smell of old wood and lacquer mixed with years of Louisiana humidity isn’t offensive.
Everywhere, there is something that intrigues your senses.
A CNC machinist would marvel how Dud Faulk and LeJuene modified lathes, drill presses, sanders, molding machines, and jigs over the years to make Faulk’s iconic calls. Down to the boxes they are shipped in, each call in its simplicity is an exquisitely handcrafted piece of work unmolested by today’s computer driven technology.
LeJuene, who has never played a musical instrument, said, “The machinery, everything we’ve bought over the years, has been altered. I can show you a press that was made for bearings we modified to make calls. There are no gauges for adjusting things like the reed. This is all done by ear, by sight, and just, I don’t know how to say it, it’s just something you know is right and sounds right.”
Faulk’s Game Calls wasn’t the first commercial call making company in the U.S., but the company’s history goes back to the mid-1930s when the late Clarence “Patin” Faulk, the family patriarch, started making calls.
Though his hands are as steady as when he was young, the years have taken their toll on LeJuene. Recently, LeJuene suffered with larynx cancer and says he wasn’t supposed to talk again.
If cancer wasn’t enough, while he was in the hospital being treated, hurricanes Laura and Delta hit Lake Charles. His house and workshop were destroyed.
LeJuene, who has been married for over 50 years, sits back in his chair by the tuning table.
He now speaks with a gravelly voice from cancer treatment and talks about God and in past tense about the good life that he has had and enjoyed.
He hands me the call he makes strictly for his friends. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude and receive it with thanks.
The man who has tuned a million calls isn’t ready to quit. On the contrary, he still shows up for work and is always ready to help someone with their call and won’t charge them a dime, he says.
“I tell ya, I’ve been through my share, but if you live right, you don’t have nothing to worry about,” he says. “There’s a reason why I’m still here. I’ve had a good life and enjoyed life. And I’ve enjoyed working over here at Faulks.”
John Flores is the Morgan City Review’s outdoor writer. He can be contacted at gowiththeflo@cox.net.