STRUT

Scotty Maddux Scotty, Kristie and Yantci Maddux

I was born in Gadsden, Alabama and was raised in a little “Mayberry” type town in north east Alabama called Sardis City. I still reside there today. For as long as I can remember, my father, Joe Maddux, my brothers Tim and Barry Maddux, and myself were hunting anything that was huntable. We owe everything that we have accomplished in the outdoors to our father, who at times had to have extreme patience with us in our young inexperienced years. Hunting turkeys was no exception. I fell in love with this bird before I fell in love with girls! My dad had a M.L. Lynch model 102 box call that I would play with for hours. One day he bought me an instructional cassette tape that demonstrated all the turkey sounds. It had examples of the sounds recorded live in the wild then these two guys would try to imitate them with their calls. I soon found myself trying to make a yelp using only my voice. Driving everyone crazy with my yelps, clucks and purrs around town, I soon could do some pretty good calling by just using my voice which I still use today when I hunt.

I have been hunting turkeys now for 30 years, and to hear that longbeard sound off on a crisp, spring morning still gets my heart pounding; It just never gets old!. Ten years ago I became interested in making my own turkey calls. I designed my first box call but putting it on paper was much easier than building the real thing. I had no tools to work with and thought of having it sourced out to someone else. I never did this but hung on to my drawings.

I decided to take a small 12’x12’ storage building and turn it into my call making shop.

Greg Mills, a good friend of mine and a good call maker himself, once told me, “It doesn’t matter how flashy and impressive looking your calls are but how they sound.”, He said, “You got to experiment and try different combinations of wood types to perfect the sound your looking for. Scotty, you got to put the turkey in your calls.” Keeping that in mind, and using more advice from Greg, I learned how to orient the grain of the wood to give my box calls the correct friction thus producing a great sound.

Making calls was one thing, but the field test would prove to be the icing on the cake. Good friend and hunting buddy, Darron Rice and myself took a trip to Jackson County, Alabama to try out the calls on a hunt. We parked the 4-wheeler down by a creek and gave a howl hoot. Sounding off from a distance about 200 yards up the ridge on a bench, we heard the old boy sound off. We didn’t hesitate to move on him so we got on his level on the bench. We worked this old gobbler for about 30 minutes. He came right to our calls and Darron took him at about 20 yards.

I wish everyone the best of luck.....Thank you.

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