About the Author

Greetings hunters and collectors...

My name is Jim Fleming. I was born in Mount Claire New Jersey in 1958. Fortunately my parents had the good sense to move me south at a very early age. I was raised in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas. I developed an interest in the outdoors real quick... Texas is a great place for sportsman.

There were no sportsmen in my family, so I kind of had to teach myself. As a little kid I felt the need to be outside --- coming home from school and watching TV was not my idea of fun. Give me a BB gun and send me to the woods or a pole and net and send me to the creek, and I could entertain myself for hours. More often than not, I would arrive home for supper either soaking wet or covered in dirt. I can remember building home made traps to try and catch critters. From squirrels to birds and snakes to bullfrogs, I always just wanted to catch 'em.

My first experience with duck hunting was as a young teen. I had a 20 gauge, binoculars and a Honda Trail 70 mini bike. I would ride the surrounding ranches and farms glassing the stock ponds... or "tanks" as they call them in Texas. When I would spot ducks, I would circle around on the down hillside, sneak up, and jump shoot them over the levy. I did not know that there was such thing as organized duck hunting. I thought this was the only way to do it. I never knew any duck hunters, or ever heard any one talking about duck hunting, much less duck calls. Until I got to college I thought I had invented it.

In college I met a girl from Tennessee that told me her father and brothers went to something called a duck blind drawing each year. If your name got drawn you had your own personal honey hole to use all season long. What a concept, they turned pot shooting into a real sport!

That season I duck hunted with her brothers in Tennessee, and it was then and there that I saw my first duck call -- a small wooden instrument that enables a hunter to "talk" to ducks in their language. At that moment, I knew that I had to learn how to talk to the ducks.

Ten years later I had moved from Texas to Tennessee, with a hand full of duck calls on a string. Nothing fancy, just meat calls -- Yensens, Olts and Faulks. By that time I had started fooling around collecting old fishing lures. One day I got up early and went to a yard sale in Hendersonville, TN, and there on the pool table in the garage was an old tackle box. I didn't even open it up, just paid the lady and walked over to the side yard to see what I had just bought. There in the bottom of the box surrounded by old fishing lures lay two old duck calls. I picked one up placed it to my lips and gave it a whirl, letting everyone at the yard sale know I was happy about my purchase, and could also blow a half-assed high ball.

Some old guy that was there walked over to me and said that it looked like I had made a good deal. He informed me that the lady having the sale was the ex-wife of country singer Ray Price. That day was definitely "For the Good Times." The fishing tackle was all good stuff. The calls were real good as well, a 1950s vintage Cecil Leker call, and a heavily burled Trutone Blue Label call.

That was the day I became a duck call collector.

Over the years I have bought, sold, and traded a lot of calls. The best part about that has been the friendships I have made with fellow hunters and collectors along the way. I hope you find the book to be a useful information source, I hope you buy some nice duck calls, but mostly I hope it helps you make some long lasting friendships with like minded sportsman.

Sincerely,

Jim Fleming

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In 1992, Fleming began publishing Callmakers & Collectors Association of America quarterly publications and continued until 2006.

Fleming is currently the editor of the National Fishing Lure Collectors Club Gazette and operated Music Row Printing Company in Nashville, Tennessee. He collects both antique and contemporary game calls and antique fishing tackle.