Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Katie Burke: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. It's your host, Katie Burke. And today on the show, I have two very special guests that I've been… They don't know this, but I've been wanting to get them on the podcast for a very long time. And we're actually sitting in their home, and I'm very happy to have you all here. I have Joe and Donna Tonelli, both hunters, collectors, historians. Donna's a writer as well, books and magazines, so anything they know about decoys and ducks and hunting, they know it. All right, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Okay, y'all can interrupt each other, but we'll go back and forth with the questions a little bit and then and y'all can kind of go where your story meets together. You can pick whoever wants to talk about it, but I always like to start whenever someone's new on the show, kind of like your intro into the outdoors, like all the way back as a kid and like how that developed. So Joe, if you want to start, like, how did you get into hunting and who was it that taught you and all that stuff? And then decoys as well.

Joe Tonelli: All right. For me, it was a family tradition. I can remember being six, seven years old, my father, grandfather, and uncle coming back to the house with pheasants. Rabbits were a big thing and ducks. There wasn't many geese. And my grandfather was a big time hunter. My dad hunted and my uncle. Now, I did not get into duck hunting until I was about 12 years old, 11 years old. I'd see my grandfather come home with ducks and geese and my father So when I was about 11 years old, they started taking me hunting and I, when I, they shot a Mallard Drake and I just looked at it in my hand and I brought it home. I think I, I just took it in the bedroom with me and almost slept with it. I just was fascinated with ducks, ducks, ducks. Now, my family, we were lucky, we lived in Spring Valley, Illinois, and that's right on the Illinois River, and there were numerous duck clubs in the area. My father and uncle hunted with Frank Drennan and Wally Drennan on Lake Snatchewine. And they had pretty good hunting there, really good, back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I started going down there and hunting, and then I got hooked up with a guy by the name of Murray Crowder, who was the Sears and Roebuck's field tester. And Sears and Roebuck had a club down on Lake Snatchewine in the clear hole, and I got to go down there as a guest, and by the time I was 13 years old, I was guiding down there and we'd go to school and Friday afternoon I'd get off of school and my dad would drive me down. They had a clubhouse and Sears would send salespeople and reps and their customers down there and we'd take them hunting. And it was a good time for a young boy, and you were down there with all these older guys, and they treated you with a lot of respect and the calling. Duck calling, I learned a lot of it from the Drennans, especially Wally Drennan, who made the select tone duck call. And he was pretty famous and entered a lot of contests with his wife, Pearl. From then, it just escalated. enamulated with decoys and ducks. And when, again, getting back to Murray Crowder, I was, I think, a freshman or a sophomore in high school. He said, hey, could you find me some old wooden decoys? I'd like to get some for some of my customers and give them to them. I said, hell yeah, we'll look around. And wooden decoys in the 1960s were laying all over the place. I mean, you could buy them all day long for a buck or two a piece or trade plastics for them. And that's what got me into decoy collecting, was gathering these decoys by the hundreds. In fact, I must have had 500 go through my hands before I kept a one. And that's how it got started. And then it just escalated. The hunting I joined great clubs and belong to clubs and I've hunted in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Maryland, Mexico. It just goes on and on. And I've been fortunate and a lot of great people, a lot of friends. And the decoys have been a big, big part of my life and my wife. And she's the best thing I ever collected.

Katie Burke: Do you remember the first one you kept? The first decoy you kept?

Joe Tonelli: Yeah, it was a Purdue Hen Mallard Sleeper. I think I had it laying in the trunk of my car and she seen it. This was after we were married. I never kept any till we got married and we got married young. It was not the smart thing to do. I worked out okay. No, 18, 19 years old and all I cared about was decoys and duck hunting and we got married and we didn't have much money but she said I want to keep this hen's mallard sleeper and I still got it and so from there it just escalated and then of course I got to know more collectors and more collectors and the decoy shows and the auctions and it just boom.

Katie Burke: What was it about Donna that Purdue, was it a Purdue, is that what you said?

Donna Tonelli: I liked it. My interest, my background, I didn't know what a duck was until I married him. When we dated, he'd take me off to some little hole and he said, I'm gonna go work on the blind and I'd go with him. And when we got married, he was bringing home all these ducks, but he never brought them in the house. And I actually found them when I opened the trunk to get my groceries. That bird was laying in there. I said, this is beautiful. What are you going to do with it? Oh, I just bought it for $5. I'm going to sell it for $25. I said, no, you're not. I'm going to put it on the TV. And that's how we started collecting them. But my interest in When you get married, like I said, I knew nothing about ducks. Nobody hunted in my family. I grew up in a golfing family. But I was with Joe. He was my husband, and he was very special to me. So I found a way, excuse me, to blend my interests with his. I went out one day, he was sitting on a porch with a wooden duck that he was trying to carve. That was a thing the guys, the early collectors, they decided, well, they were going to try to make it up. And he was getting so disgusted. He said, God damn it, I can't do this. I said, well, I can. My dad was in woodworking business. I knew how to carve. And that's how I started carving decoys. And same thing with the writing. I found I like to write. And I found a special niche where I could get my stuff published.

Katie Burke: Yeah. So what do you think the learning, the carving side of it brought, like helped you understand about decoys when you learned, when you were carving them yourself?

Donna Tonelli: When I started carving and it was getting better and they had carving competitions. And when you entered a decoy back then, there couldn't be anything that was fragile or breakable. your bill couldn't be finely carved, you couldn't have raised carved wings, and they would actually have a cattle trough full of water, and your bird would be put in upside down, and if it didn't flip by itself, you were out. So I had to learn the math. learn how to do that, how to weight a decoy and so forth. And it just gradually went on and on. Then it got to the point where I wasn't going to compete anymore because I was competing with guys that had professional studios, had live ducks and pens, watching them swimming around. That's how they got their details. I was carving ducks in the garage and painting them on my kitchen table and it was pass the time for me to compete.

Katie Burke: Yeah, yeah, right. Like I more have talked to these guys who do the decorative stuff. They're either they have like their own like they have their own ducks or they are like such they're also like excellent photographers that they're sitting out there in ghillie suits getting like these crazy pictures.

Donna Tonelli: There was a carver by the name of John McKean helped me out here. Who was the decor carver?

Joe Tonelli: From where?

Donna Tonelli: That did, had the carving classes.

Joe Tonelli: Diplomasters. Diplomasters. In Chillicothe. He kept, he had a big warehouse and he had all kind of birds alive in there.

Donna Tonelli: Yeah. And he had a pond and he had, it was enclosed with background behind it and would have them swimming around it. Oh yeah. And I went and studied with him for a while. Yeah. And it was a neat experience, but yeah.

Katie Burke: I mean, yeah, you kind of have to get to know them while they're a little person. Especially now with decoratives, they've gotten to the point that they're like almost more… They look… They don't even look like… They're not a decoy.

Joe Tonelli: No, they're not a decoy at all. At the end, she wasn't making a decoy decoy. No, you're making… She was making a replica of a live duck. Yes. You know, so…

Katie Burke: Yeah, it's almost like a sculpture of that.

Donna Tonelli: The thing that convinced me to quit carving competitively, there was one bird, I can't remember the carver who made it, but it was a little bufflehead, had its wings expanded like it was landing in the water and floated on its tail upright. Oh wow. Yeah. That was my expression.

Katie Burke: I can't do that. That's like, yeah, no, that's insane. Okay, let's go back. Okay, so you keep the Purdue. Yeah. And then so now that you've kept the Purdue, when do you start keeping collecting more to keep? from there, just slowly?

Joe Tonelli: And I was motivated by money. Yeah, sure. I mean, now, it's hard to believe. I had decoys that I bought for $100, sold for $150, and one just sold, that decoy, for $150,000. I've had approximately 15,000 decoys go through my hands. Now everybody's gonna say, oh, but That's over 50 years, 55 years. You could go down the river, I'd say to her, let's go and get some decoys. And this guy hunted or that guy hunted. Here in Spring Valley, there were 25 guys that belonged to the West End Duck Club. They all had wooden decoys. And I lived in the great area. You had Snatch Wine Club, Princeton Club, West End Duck Club, Swan Lake Duck Club, Elgin Duck Club, all within 10-15 miles. Then you go downriver to get around Peoria, you have Rice Pond, Grand Lake, and so on. There were decoys. And the people, I met so many great people back in the 60s. You know, there was Frank Drennan, Wally Drennan, Buster Thompson, Doc Hall. Doc Hall run a big shooting club and day shooting and rented blinds on Snatch Wine. He might've had a thousand wooden decoys. So they were there and they were fun and fun to pick up. And I got, as I was a young kid too, I was only 19, 20 years old. Word got out that I was a source for decoys. I had all these richer people from the cities, business people, wanting to buy a Purdue, wanting to buy a Walker, and so on. So I was a source. We lived off the money. I kept some. I probably only kept one out of every hundred that I found, but it was a good time. It was fun collecting then. It's totally different than collecting now.

Katie Burke: So, okay. How are you figuring out who you're going to sell them to? Even when it's just, you know, like $5 or 25, like, I mean, again, it's a different time. So how are you finding the buyers for these early?

Joe Tonelli: It was, it was in 62, three or four, there was a decoy publication called, um, decoy collectors guide, but a guy, a real nice fellow, Hal Sorensen started it from Burlington, Iowa. So I got a copy of that and there were some names in there. And the first guy, besides hell, was a spark plug guy. It was a real, he was a collector, dealer, everything. Will Pennington. He come around. He was sold water faucets or toilets or something. He traveling salesman. and he hunted a little bit, but he was a decoy nut, and he'd come through once every week or two, knock at the door, you got any decoys? Yeah, and we started trading. Then he'd tell me about this guy and that guy. And then 1966, I went to the first decoy show in Ottawa, Illinois. That's the first Midwest show. And out of that list, I think there was I don't know, what was there, 110 people there, Donna, and something like that? Not that many. No, maybe… More like 80. 80 or so, 90. There's only two of us alive out of that. Myself and Dave Spangler. And I've attended every show since 1966. And Dave attended them all except for the last two years because he's pushing 95 and again, I'm going to be 79, but I was, then I was 18 years old going through the thing.

Katie Burke: Yeah, that makes sense. So from there, I'm guessing from the show, then you've got, it's just word of mouth, really. What is it about this area and the Illinois River style that people were really just searching for? And why were there so many decoys here?

Joe Tonelli: First of all, there's all the ducks that were here. Bell rolls, Frank Bell rolls used to do the surveys. I think it was 1947 or eight, right after the war, he was doing a survey, and I belong to Princeton Game and Fish Club, and they own 90% of Goose Pond. He surveyed one million ducks on Goose Pond. Now, I don't want to tell you how many were there this year.

Katie Burke: Yeah, I don't, I haven't, I have an idea.

Joe Tonelli: No, it's terrible. It's bad, yeah. And first of all, Goose Pond's only about A fourth as big as it used to be because of the siltation from the river and Big Barrel Creek. But the duck numbers have just dramatically dropped from there. That's why there were so many decoys here, and you had craftsmen here. Now, they made a lot more decoys in Maryland and Michigan and that, but they were big, kind of clunkier, and weren't painted as well. Illinois River decoys, hollow, the bulk of them, not all of them, but 90% of them, hollow. two-piece, carved extremely well, and painted in detail. Painted.

Katie Burke: So, okay, that's … Just to kind of … Can you describe or explain why they painted them? Because when you see some of these decoys, and I think a lot of people who listen are not necessarily decoy collectors. But the detail that Illinois River Carvers painted their decoys is significant, right? So why did they spend the time to do that?

Joe Tonelli: Personal satisfaction? Yeah. I mean, you had other areas doing it. Ward Brothers did it good. Elmer Kroll was the best. Far and away the best Elmer Kroll. And he took, he was making stuff in the 1890s that's just so spectacular. Talk about a decorative carver. Elmer Kroll was making stuff to win these contests now back in 1900. But Illinois River, you know, you started out with Elliston.

Katie Burke: Yeah, do you think that's what it is? Like, has Katherine Elliston just kind of set the standard?

Joe Tonelli: Elliston set the standard, and then along come Purdue, and then along come Graves, and earlier in that you had Scheinheiter, but Scheinheiter was just carving, and he had a guy by the name of John Franks painting, and they were painted superb, and they set that standard, Elliston.

Katie Burke: Yeah, and I also wonder, I never really thought about it, so like you're saying with Shineider and like of course like with Ellison, he has his wife Catherine. Do you think because they were, I mean this isn't the case with the East Coast, but because one was carving and one was painting, it allowed for the time

Joe Tonelli: I mean, I… Well, it helped. Yeah, I was like, they're not doing both jobs. Charlie Perdue, same thing with his wife. Yes. Right. They're not doing both jobs, so then… And you know, it was a living for them. Now, you know, Ellison lived down there by Bureau in a little house, and he was making these decoys, selling them maybe for $6 a dozen, and he had some bees, he had a large family, and it was a living for them.

Katie Burke: Was Ellison, I just don't know enough, but was he supplying to a certain gun club or was he kind of more?

Joe Tonelli: Well, the Bureau County Clubs, yeah. The Mallard Club, he gave a lot, a lot of decoys there, a lot to the Snatch and Wine Club, a lot, lot to the Princeton Club. And then you had, then, then later on in the forties along comes a guy by the name of Charlie Walker and boy, he set put the bar up another notch. And he made most of his decoys for the Princeton Game and Fish Club.

Katie Burke: Yeah. And I'm, you know, and it's, it's obvious that these clubs offered the supply demand that allowed carvers to be able to make a living off carving, right? Like, yeah, it's because like in certain areas, it's not necessarily the same. Like, And it's odd, because you have really good hunting places in different parts of the country. And y'all may, you may have an opinion about this, but then you have no, sometimes you have no decoys from that part of the country as well.

Joe Tonelli: Ed- No, the Dakotas, nobody would carve decoys in the Dakotas.

Katie Burke: Nicole- Yeah, but there's ducks in the Dakotas.

Joe Tonelli: Ed- Now, Minnesota, Minnesota, yeah. Phenomenal hunting, phenomenal. And they, there was areas that made some good decoys. Now the best ones come from Heron Lake and you know Joe Mars and that where they were shooting canvas backs and that. And then you had John Tax and Moses and that. But the bulk of Minnesota decoys, they're painted black. Just black. Wisconsin had a lot of carvers. I mean a lot. And they made They made decoys from big clunky ones to some of the best carved painted ones in the world. There was a guy in Stoughton, Minnesota, Enoch Reindell. He made decoys so realistic and so beautiful that they're unbelievable. I don't know why he would do it, but he was a really just isolated man. No indoor plumbing, no indoor water. He'd go to the dump and get his clothes. He'd trap, he'd fish. He sat there and made decoys that just looked like a duck.

Katie Burke: And I guess, I mean, there has to be, like, we try to figure out, you know, the motivation behind why they're different in different areas. But then you have to just, I guess, eventually concede that sometimes they just like doing it and enjoy the good products.

Joe Tonelli: It's, you know, you haunted area. Yeah. Like the duck doesn't care, right? If you got a bunch of big blocks and painted them black, you could kill ducks.

Katie Burke: Yes, I mean, like the ducks don't really care. I mean, for the most part, I don't think they really care that much.

Joe Tonelli: I think the decoys were made for the hunter more than the ducks.

Katie Burke: Yeah, I agree. Because if the ducks want to be there, they'll be there. Right. So, let's touch on before like we get to too far. So, because we're talking about Illinois River and you can't talk about that without talking about the call. Well, we talk about Purdue and then the calls as well. So, it's one of the unique areas where you have the call makings also as good as the decoy making.

Joe Tonelli: And they have both. Well, you know, the calls started here with grubs in the… Diddle from over on the Mississippi River, and Charlie Grubbs. And then Gloto and Southern Illinois. They were the keys, and it progressed. Now, Perdue, Perdue had just made stuff for 70 years, him and his wife. A lot of guys didn't just make decoys. Purdue made decoys, calls, miniatures, paintings, and so on. And some of his calls are works of art. I mean, they look beautiful. They sound for you know what. They did not blow. Now, Diddle calls blue. Fred Allen calls blue. Purdue crow calls were the best crow call that was ever manufactured. His duck calls, no. And I've got a hundred of them, but you'll never win a duck calling contest with a Purdue duck call. You could win one with a ditto.

Katie Burke: Yeah, and I'm guessing that has to do with, like, they're hunting a lot of puddle ducks in this area, so that's why the call making kind of, like, blew up here, too. And then, of course, it trickles down.

Joe Tonelli: It trickled down to Tennessee and Arkansas. And they call more in Arkansas than probably anywhere.

Katie Burke: Yeah, and that's because it's timber, right? Because we've talked about this a lot because of where I grew up, we have in the Mississippi Delta, it's kind of devoid of any call making or decoy making. But I was like, there was calls there because, I mean, we were originally hunting in timber, it's just all been terraformed out for farming. there's still timber there that you would have. You have to call for timber, whereas you don't really even need a decoy for timber.

Joe Tonelli: A lot of places they don't use decoys.

Katie Burke: Yeah, they don't need them in Arkansas because once you get them in the trees, they're there, right? So you don't need to come down any farther. But okay, we digress. So let's go back to those early days when you're collecting. And so for the most part, you're staying in the area, right? So when do you start branching out of this area to find stuff.

Joe Tonelli: I got fascinated going to over there, Long Point in Ontario. I hauled out a lot of decoys. I get in the car on a Friday and what, maybe a couple hundred dollars. Yeah. And drive over to Long Point, Turkey Point in Ontario. And that was a great area. They made great decoys, hollow, nice, bottom boards. And I branched out over there, finding stuff there. And, uh, that's about as far as I went. And then I'd come back up into Wisconsin, finding decoys. You could find a lot of decoys in Wisconsin then.

Katie Burke: So how did, or it did it at all, how did the, I mean, I just think between Ontario and here and the, where you would find them change, did it change at all? Or were they in the same basic like hunt old hunters and stuff of that nature? Were you having any, were you finding any differences on where to look depending on where you are?

Joe Tonelli: You go around a lot of places and see a duck boat. Stop, go in, knock on the door, hey, I'm so-and-so, I collect wooden decoys, you got any? Yeah, there might be some in the barn, there might be some in the basement, might be some in the boat. And it was fun.

Katie Burke: Yeah, I was just like, okay. So I'm sure you have plenty of good surprise find stories of those days. All right. Any of them stick out?

Joe Tonelli: I, I, I, her and I, one day, Peoria, Illinois, a guy says, you got to go and see this old man, Scheinheiter. Now that was, there was Charlie senior, Charlie junior. This was like what, 66, Donna? Yep. So I go and it was hot. And, uh, I go and knock at the door and I said to him, um, Mr. Shiner, yeah, I understand you got decoys. Yeah, I got all you want. If you got money, yeah. So I go in the back and in the garage, there I look up and there's those damn one dozen Scheinheiter geese. 11, one of them with the foot and one floater. And I said, are they for sale? He said, yep. A hundred bucks each or a thousand, you can have them. I looked at it and I thought, oh man, how am I going to do this? I really wanted them. I never heard of a decoy selling for $100 in 1966. I just come from the decoy show. The most expensive decoy there was like $45, $50. So I said, can I pick out three? Yeah. So I picked out three, wrote him a check for $300. I come back, Donna's sitting in the car with a baby and I think she was pregnant too. And I, she said, well, those are beautiful. Would you pay for them? I said, $300. She said, we got $32 in a checking account. I said, yeah, but I got, this is Friday. I says, I got till Monday afternoon to sell a couple and get one for free. Boy, I got on the phone and called and called and I called Sorensen, I called this guy, I called that guy. I finally sold two of them for, I think, $125 and had one. So I went back, got another couple. I sent one to Bill Mackey for $100. He says, it's not worth it, kid. I'm sending it back. Those decoys, again, today. And it's like, one just sold. Yeah, $150,000, one. Yeah, just one of them.

Katie Burke: And they, I mean, they're special. Oh, they're great.

Joe Tonelli: I wish I would. They're one of the birds, there's about 15 decoys I sold for over the years for various reasons, mainly because I needed to, that I really wish I had back.

Katie Burke: Yeah. Any one more than the other?

Joe Tonelli: That's Scheinheiter. And I had a, a Purdue straight mallard, no, a Purdue pin green winged teal sleeper. I don't mind that one because I traded that for part of a hunting club. So I got my money's worth out of that.

Katie Burke: Nicole:"You got a lot more fun out of that."

Joe Tonelli: Mark:"Oh yeah, the hunting club. The duck hunting is more important to me than the decoys." Nicole:"Right." Mark:"But you can enjoy the decoys year round. Duck hunting maybe two or three months out of the year."

Katie Burke: Nicole:"Right, yeah. So do you have a favorite?" Do you have a favorite? Of course.

Joe Tonelli: Yeah, she does. I don't.

Katie Burke: The crane. The crane? Tell me about the crane.

Donna Tonelli: Where'd we pick that up? You went to see… Crane Lake. Crane Lake, down south. I went there to buy decoys. I was sitting, yeah, I was sitting in the car. And he came, he came out, he had bought decoys from the guy. And the guy came out from the garage. He said, here, I found something. You might want this. And it was the body. The head comes off of that. And Joe said, well, that's great. Where's the head? He said, well, I don't know. It's in here somewhere. So Joe went back in, and they rooted around and found it. That head is mitered on. It comes off completely. The bill is walnut. The legs are walnut, so they wouldn't break. And if you look close on the tail, it's carved, and in between, there's copper-inserted feathers.

Katie Burke: Yeah, I was seeing, I can see, like, there's like a little curl off there, and I was like, it can't be that thin. That's copper. It's copper. Huh.

Joe Tonelli: That's cool. That was used at the Crane Lake Gun Club, and they had to come off, they carried it out to use it, slid it back on so it wouldn't break.

Katie Burke: Right, yeah, that makes sense. Do you have a favorite?

Joe Tonelli: Rindels, the Perdue's, Walker's, I like Walker's because they're used at the Princeton Game and Fish Club and I belong there and I belong, I'm the oldest living member there now.

Katie Burke: How long have you been a member there?

Joe Tonelli: Since the late 70s.

Katie Burke: Okay, how's that changed? I'm sure significantly.

Joe Tonelli: Well, first of all, there ain't one not 120 at the docks. I mean, like I said before, we had a million there in 1945. When I first joined, we had two, 300,000 there. Now we're down to 50.

Katie Burke: Yeah. And what do you shoot? Has what you're shooting there changed as well?

Joe Tonelli: Yes. It used to be predominantly all Mallards. Last year, 26, 700 ducks we killed, maybe 400 mallards, and a couple thousand green-winged teal, wood ducks, and gadwall. The mallards have changed tremendously.

Katie Burke: They have, and there's more and more coming out about it. But yeah, it's so funny, the gadwalls have been filling up a lot of people's bags.

Joe Tonelli: Well, gadwalls and green-winged teal have been taking up the slack. If you go to North Dakota, that's all you're going to shoot.

Katie Burke: Really? Yeah. I've only hunted in Mississippi until last year, just because I was spoiled, honestly. I hunted like 15 minutes from my parents' house and, you know, I'd stay at my parents' house. My mom would cook dinner and I'd go hunting and come back. And then when I had kids, she would help take care of my kids while I hunted. So I just never really went anywhere. And I hunted in Maryland and I was like, We shot Gadwall, so I was like, this is not what I… Where were you at, Maryland? Right by Easton, like right in that area.

Joe Tonelli: You shot Gadwall? We shot Gadwall.

Katie Burke: Not divers? No. We were in those little compound ponds.

Joe Tonelli: Oh, right. Yeah.

Katie Burke: Cause it was early. It was early season. So we didn't shoot divers, but I was surprised for Gadwall of all things in Maryland.

Joe Tonelli: No, they got them there. They got a lot of teal. I go out there by Cambridge and LeCompe, that's all divers.

Katie Burke: Yeah, that's, yeah, because I was, well, because I was a little nervous. I've never hunted anywhere. I was like, oh, it's going to be divers and I don't shoot divers that much. Maybe I won't shoot well. And then we come out there and it's Gadwall. I was like, well, and they were shooting terrible. And I was like, well, this, I can shoot Gadwall all day. I shoot them all the time. They're crazy. They just bomb in whenever they feel like it. Sure. Well, they're an easy duck to kill. Oh, yeah. The only thing is they just don't decide to come in until they're ready. And then when they're ready, they just show up. At what point, when does your collection start to kind of accumulate to something bigger? Like, you start to keep one out of, you know, forever, right?

Joe Tonelli: Well, you know, I always like old things. If somebody goes, you ask them, you got a duck decoy? Yeah. If you got a duck decoy, you got a duck call. Yeah. If you got a duck call, you got a gun. Yeah. Then you might have an old shell box. Yeah. And it, that escalated like that. And I collect a lot of other things. I mean, I collect Indian relics and I collect fish and lures and I collect gunpowder tins and I collect shell boxes and fish decoys, which are only used in Minnesota. And that's another story how I got into that. And we'll get into that somehow.

Katie Burke: Put a pin in it and come back.

Joe Tonelli: Yeah. But that's how I got collecting everything. And the Native American stuff I collect, I was always fascinated with Indians. Because we lived here, there was a great area called Starved Rock, where the Indians got starved. And there was a lot of Indian mounds around in the area, which 40, 50 years ago, you took a shovel and a spade and dug them up. Now you can't do that today. You cannot even supposed to pick them up.

Katie Burke: So you can't pick them up here?

Joe Tonelli: You're not supposed to, yeah, you can pick up arrowheads and things.

Katie Burke: Yes. It's like where I'm from in like Tallahatchie County, you can, we have mounds and it used to, along the river, which probably same here, they would have spots where they would stop when they would go on their hunting. Right. And the, well, the farmers that when they plow the field, you just walk the field and you can pick them up all day.

Joe Tonelli: You go out in the fields, I still do, after it rains, after it feels been dissed under. or just hit with a cultivator and you'd find them. But I've found a lot, ruined some by digging the wrong ways, but that's when you were 12, 13, 14 years old, you didn't know any better.

Katie Burke: Okay, so with that, my question, like, let's go back even younger. Did you always collect things, like as a little kid? Did you acquire stuff all the time?

Joe Tonelli: I like guns. You know, I mean, I was a little gun.

Katie Burke: Did you just like pick up random rocks and keep them? No. I got a four year old who does that stuff.

Joe Tonelli: No, I think, I think it started with probably BB guns. Yeah. Okay. You know, I was about seven, eight years old.

Katie Burke: Yeah. And just started collecting them?

Joe Tonelli: Well, not so much as collecting them as owning them and shooting them.

Katie Burke: Yeah. So when did you get in the mindset of collecting things or was it you that got into the mindset of collecting?

Joe Tonelli: Keeping them after we were married. Yeah.

Katie Burke: Okay. Yeah. All right, so this one's for you. So when, with collecting, did you start getting into the historian and the research side of it, of the decoys?

Donna Tonelli: Late, actually. I started writing for, well, we had a little outdoor writer here that asked me to illustrate a little thing that he would do in a local paper. And we're sitting there having coffee one day, he said, you should be writing, you should be writing. I said, well, what am I gonna write about? He said, write about Joe Stux. And that's basically, but that, when we were picking stuff up, I was there in the car, I liked the stuff, I was enjoying myself. When we started doing the fish, I said, you know what? When we were collecting ducks, I was sitting in the car with kids most of the time. And I didn't go in and I didn't listen to these stories very often. With the fish decoys, I said, we're going around, we're doing the same thing with fish decoys in northern Minnesota, meeting the guys that made them and what have you. I took in a video camera, I'd videotape them, and I'd talk to them, and I said, I'm gonna share this history, keep it, yeah. because it's just going to get forgotten if somebody doesn't do it. Now with the decoys, I do a lot of research with the internet. I'll go in the historic, you know, ancestry, find out where they came from, where their family was, what they did. And it's all important.

Katie Burke: No, I agree. Obviously, I agree. Yeah. Yeah, so when you're getting this and you're collecting the stories, I'm guessing you just have, Jo, you have a knack of just remembering, not even realizing, but you have a knack of remembering these stories that you're hearing as you're getting decoys. Like, I don't know, I find I get more out of conversations like this than I do reading in a way. I don't know why, my brain just works better when I listen to it and hear people and like can recall the interaction. But because if you're not getting into the research, are you researching this stuff early? Are you just listening to people as you pick it up?

Joe Tonelli: I remember it. Yeah. If it was related to the hunting and ducks, I remembered it. I mean, it's just, it's like a photographic memory. I mean, and I could talk to these people and the old people and, and, uh, yeah. And you could, You know, so many people I knew are gone, hundreds that, yeah, I just remember that all. Not all, but a lot of it.

Katie Burke: Yeah. So this is a selfish question, but I don't know. I'm this way. But when you were a kid, if you can, did you enjoy like those kinds of stories from older people? Like, is that something you always liked? I would sit there was. Cause I have. Yeah.

Joe Tonelli: I've always. I'd listen to my grandfather and then he got killed, but my father listened to him. But a guy by the name, there's Murray Crowder, who was a sports writer, for Sears and Roebuck, and a field tester for them, lived two doors over from me, and he always was traveling. He made movies. Ted Williams come down and hunted with him, and I met Ted Williams. I was just in awe. I mean, I was 13, 14 years old, and there's Ted Williams, and I'm in a duck blind with him. I was in awe of it. And I, you know, it was like a kid who loved baseball sitting next to Mickey Mantle. Yeah.

Katie Burke: No, I get it. I mean, I was not necessarily just like, I didn't have a neighbor like that, but I always like would, I lived in a neighborhood where we were the only kids in the neighborhood. Everybody else is like, I get really excited when their grandkids would come visit. But I would still go over to their houses and just like sit in their kitchen and listen to their stories. I just, yeah, I think some people are just wired that way.

Joe Tonelli: Well, they tell you about the old days. To them, the old days was in the 30s and 40s, you know. Now the old days to me is the 50s and 60s.

Katie Burke: Well, I've been also like people in general like to tell their story, right? Like, I don't think, I think that's just kind of part of being human is you like to tell your story.

Joe Tonelli: And you know, there was a young people who like to hunt ducks are in a minority compared to other things they do.

Katie Burke: Oh, yeah. I mean, be a girl in the 80s.

Joe Tonelli: You know, this was before that's cell phones, computers and so on. That has changed everything.

Katie Burke: Yeah and it's it's been you know as someone who grew up hunting with with my dad and it's always something special to me and now having to raise kids that want to hunt and you know it's definitely you compete with it but then they're also like I have found with like my nieces and nephews some kids just want it. They're just ready to hunt. My daughter, she's eh, but my son, he's biting at the bit to go. Yeah, he wants it. So I think as long as you make it available, but that's the problem, right? With duck hunting, especially as time has passed and there's less ducks, it's not as easily available anymore for them, right? And it's hard to take a kid, and this is where I don't know what to do about certain things, is like, when I was a kid in the early 90s, and I'd go duck hunting, there were lots of ducks. And now I take kids, and sometimes we don't see any. Like, it can be some bad days out there. It's hard. They're not getting the thrill of it like we did. Yeah. Now, deer hunting, of course, is easier, like with a kid, like that's pretty simple when there's a million deer. So they can get a little bit out of that, but it's hard to get them into the duck hunting when there are no ducks. First of all, and it's expensive. I'm lucky. I grew up and I am inheriting duck land. So yeah, I'm very privileged in that point. And my kids are, they don't even realize it.

Joe Tonelli: I mean, these duck club shares, Some of them sell 75,000, 100,000 to shoot 25 ducks a year. And how do you justify that? Well, I don't. Mine, it costs that much. Believe me, I belong to one that costs a lot to join now and another one that's up there. I don't know, but I was so obsessed. When I, getting back when I was a freshman in high school, I lived, two blocks from the high school. High school's here, I'd live behind in Glens Grove. Over the hill, there was, they called it Hallreik's Slew and that. And I had it leased. I'm 14 years old and I'm leasing 400 acres of land for Duck Hunt. And I got a whole bunch of buddies. It got to be, I was cutting school to go hunting and my father got on me and the teachers. I had hip boots, shotgun, call, hid in the woods. I'd be sitting there in study hall or in a class and that wind would start blowing. right over the hill, change the clothes and go hunting. Uh, the kids can't do that.

Katie Burke: No. And I even got to do that. And I probably was probably one of the last to do that. Like I, there was a many a time that I went turkey hunting and missed homeroom because I got on a turkey and I like ran in school and changed in the bathroom out of my hunting clothes. So, and have my shotgun still in my car. But yeah, obviously that would never happen now. But yeah, no, I definitely did it. And I think that's probably, we're probably done with that. But then, yeah, it's hard to say, especially with these clubs too, some of them have how many guns you can have to shoot each day, right? So how do you justify when all you get is three guns? What kid are you gonna take? How are you gonna figure that out? We kind of got out of that.

Joe Tonelli: I had my son, I took him hunting so much, carried him on my shoulders. He had a little double barrel 410. He'd stand on the bench in a blind and shoot teal coming by. And that went on for years and years. Now he's married, divorced and gone and he don't hunt no more. None of mine hunt no more. Really? No. No. My daughters, no. My son used to have labs. He used to live in South Dakota. He lived in Homer and Alaska hunting, but now, nope, it's over.

Katie Burke: That's surprising, because y'all still hunt so much. That's surprising. Uh-huh.

Joe Tonelli: South Dakota. Yeah.

Katie Burke: Because I personally like, and I said this to my husband at one point about, I told him to remind me, like, you know, my dad is, he'll be 70 this year. And I was like, remind me that every time he invites me to say yes, because there's only so many more of these we're going to get. So, like, make sure I say yes. Like, because I don't want to, the last thing I want to do when he's not here anymore is, like, regret for not going enough with him. Because, yeah, that's… And my sister doesn't hunt, though, like, and my brother, my brother does, but he's, yeah, he hunts a lot, but two out of three.

Joe Tonelli: But again, it's the cost and the return. It is. The return. Yeah. And you go out there, you're wet, you're cold, and you don't get any ducks. Yeah. So, yeah.

Katie Burke: Yeah, and we've had a little bit, And the Mississippi Delta y'all got hit earlier than us with the no ducks and then we get we still we're starting to last 10 years. It's gotten rough because we're right there with Arkansas. So, but it's definitely gotten to the point where Our duck season's not until January. I mean, we start in end of November, but nothing really happens.

Joe Tonelli: We kill ducks here, but not mallards. Yeah. And I don't know what the answer is.

Katie Burke: Yeah, I don't either. But we still get mallards, but it's not until January. Okay, that was the first part of my interview with Joe and Donna Tonelli. Be on the lookout for the second part later this week. Thanks to our guests, Joe and Donna, thanks to our producer, Chris Isaac, and thanks to you, our listeners, for supporting wetlands and waterfowl conservation.