Episode 47 - The King of Sparkleberry Swamp, Toy McCord!

We are delighted to swap stories, and mainly listen to one of the best to ever chase ducks. Toy knows more than most about how to hunt ducks in South Carolina and all over. We hope you enjoy listen to him tell stories about how they found them and how they hunted them. The bottom line is, you have to do your homework! Toy wasn't outworked by anyone. Talking with him was a real pleasure.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:59

I said gosh, we gotta go. It's gonna be daylight in a little while.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Lake multiple times, and you can't never tell where you can see him. I was on I was on the point of an island. I can see exactly where it was several years ago catching bass.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Come around the bin one day and there's a full in this in the middle of the creek, holding on to a little bush. He turned his boat over and it just sunk.

SPEAKER_03 1:32

Well, it's another Monday. That means another episode of Mostly Legal Welcome, and we're glad you found your way back to listen to another episode of us trying to untangle some great stories here. This is Stephen Dinkins, your host of the podcast, and I'm joined by uh my brother, Scott Dinkins, that's driven over from Chapin, along with Bubba Johnston, the Barracuda. We're back up at Dinkins Mill. We're glad to be back face to face and in person and getting a chance to really uh yeah, share some more stories and catch up on what's been going on. But I can tell you, we're very excited about this episode. We've got a guest that you're absolutely uh gonna love. Before we jump into that, though, and I'll tell you a little bit more about what's coming, I want Bubba to give a quick shout out to a listener of the week.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Yeah, our listener of the week this week is um a good friend of mine from Sumter, um, businessman in Sumter. His name is Will Shaw. He reached out to me the other day and told me that he has been listening, he enjoys the stories, said do not stop to please keep it up. So we'll we appreciate your support and listening. And if you would tell your friends so we can keep rolling with this thing, but we really do appreciate you listening and enjoying the stories. That's what we tell them for, because we'd like people to hear them and enjoy them and sit back and have a good time.

SPEAKER_03 2:39

Absolutely. Love it. Thank you, Mr. Will. Now, this episode, we have got a fantastic guest on here. I want to tell you, we've had some great guests already, and as we have talked to them, maybe after the the recordings have stopped, and we've said, who else could we have on this podcast? Give us some ideas of people we want to bring on to hear some legendary stories. And almost to a T, if they're an outdoorsman and they're from Sumber County or Clarendon County, almost to a T, they've all told us that we need to have this specific gentleman who's a legend of Sparkleberry Swamp. Before I give it away, I want you to know you're gonna hear some stories tonight that people would pay good money to hear. You're gonna hear how he's connected to all kinds of different uh personalities and all kinds of different stories when it comes to outdoors and specifically duck hunting anywhere in this Midlands area. Bubba, tell us a little bit more, introduce our guests, and I'll let you take it from here.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Well, like like Steven said, I am excited to about this episode. And and he's as Stephen said, time and again, this gentleman's name came up multiple times. Y'all need to have this guy, y'all need to have this guy. That's a fact. And and and I will tell you that truly when we say a legend, he is a legend in in the outdoor world, not only in the outdoor world, but but in the sports world too, and we're gonna hear some of that. I'm a little bit out well, I'm actually way outnumbered today. Um got two Carolina graduates, and and not only Carolina graduate, but a uh Carolina baseball and football player. And and just just uh like a true legend in the sport with Carolina. So I'm completely out legend, outnumbered over here sitting there as a Clemson fan. But today, y'all, we truly have um the privilege of having Mr. Tor McCord with us today. And I know he's been on several podcasts in the past, and we're excited to have him with us today and excited to hear about his story. So I'm gonna be quiet for just a second, and I want Mr. McCord, if you would, kind of tell us a little about, I guess you're living in Man and just a little bit about your family and stuff, and then we'll kind of jump in and and start asking you some more questions.

SPEAKER_02 4:35

That'd be fine. Thank you for having me, guys. Yes, sir. I I enjoy doing this, by the way. I I get a kick out of it. Love to reach out to other outdoorsmen and things like that. Well, anyway, I I'm um I have three children. All of them play ball. They went to Lawrence Manning Academy. It was TJ, who was my boy, and I had Shannon and Allison, which all three of them, by the way, do a lot better than I did when I was their age. Actually, if I'd known I was gonna live this long, I'd have put more money up when I was younger. But they do well, and and I I live in Manning, and uh I got a living, uh let's see, six, six grandchildren. Wow, congratulations. And young, yeah, and they and they're young, one of them's uh in college, the rest of them uh uh babies. So I'm okay there. And they all play sports, and they I was raised in an outdoor family. My father uh was an outdoorsman. Now, I did not know what the limits were until I was about 18 years old, 17. You know, we were. I like you already, Mr. Toy.

SPEAKER_06 5:47

My guy fit right in this crowd.

SPEAKER_02 5:50

We uh, you know, we'd go late in the afternoon and he'd say, let's get in the car, guys. We'd go and we'd go get stand around a pine thicket and shoot some doves late, or something like that. Uh we'd find a field. Back then, if you saw birds, you could go and hunt. You didn't, you knew everybody, they let you go. And so it was that we would wanted the whole time and we fished. He was a big fishman. So I was brought up fishing, and every opening day of deer season, I missed school, and we had a a note that said, please uh forgive them for missing school. They had buck fever. My dad wrote that down. Buck fever. They'd always say, Y'all always get buck fever then. Yeah, well, it's just one day. You know, but he actually did that. And so uh I was creeping a little bit then, you know, I was fudging a little bit then. And that was a great time, and so it was always it got in you with blood. And in the meantime, my daddy wasn't uh played ball, so I had to play ball, which I love to do. So I played uh basketball, football, track, baseball, played them all in high school, and played in college in Carolina, had a good time there, and um played a little bit after that, and uh coached a little bit, and it just seems like that that everything is just I was given given so much, and I I hate not to share it. And I've always wanted to help other people do some things that maybe I came up short on, and the reason being I didn't know how to do it then, we learned uh together, uh a bunch of us, uh how to do some things. I went to a baseball camp, young, met a gentleman by the name of Wally Jones, and something Wally is uh uh won eight or ten straight championships in Hall of Fame. So he's a buddy, so we we played ball at Carolina together, side by side also. And the relationships you make in the outdoor world, whether it's hunting, fishing, playing sports, that's relationships that will always be with you. I tell my children now, when you see your friends, write their name down, and you might not see them for a year, but call them up and say, hey, I was just thinking about you. And they'll be your friends 15 and 20 years from now, and you will come back around, circle around. It will come back. So always know it will come back. Now, um, I I work with Gamecock Chemical out of something. I'm a salesman. And uh I love what I do. I get to make see a lot of people, and just love what I'm doing. I've been very blessed. I'm talking too much about that kind of stuff now. What you got, Bubba?

SPEAKER_00 8:43

No, you're doing good. So let me just I'm gonna give you a little more, a little background on on how we got Mr. McCord here. But also, this man truly like he he downplaying a little bit, but he is as probably observant of wildlife as anybody I've ever met. And I've heard this a lot about him as far as like him watching ducks and seeing what they do and where they're going and how they react to a car and all that kind of stuff. Heard a lot of that over the years, and we'll hear some of that a little bit too. But he doesn't miss anything. When I was pulling in the driveway, a squirrel ran in front of the car, and I watched the squirrel and I said, I wonder if Mr. McCormick saw. And I didn't get out the car, and he said, When that squirrel saw you, he took off. And I said, Yep. And I've been on the lake multiple times, and you can't never tell when you see him. I was on I was on the point of an island, I could say exactly where it was several years ago, catching bass, catching bass over school. They were catching school, and I heard somebody kind of say, Hey, and over in the trees, Mr. McCorse's over there. He had a thing they were catching shell cracker. I'm not gonna say where the shellcracker be was, but he was over there in the trees and he was watching us out there bass fishing. And how he got here, he never quits, y'all. He never quit. Thomas and I went Sunday a week ago or Sunday two weeks ago down to Jack Creek, and we were gonna go fish that afternoon, and I was back in Atlanta, and I saw this car pull up, and so man was man never pulls up. And you see him pull up, and he pulls up a pair of binoculars, you know he's in on to something. And he's looking at his binoculars, kind of checking things out, and it was Mr. McCormick, and I walked over there. I said, Look, man, it's too early to be scouting for duck. But he's always been looking, and I saw him out there and everything. Now, you talked about your family, and I know you got two brothers. I I think it's two brothers, right? Donald and Jimmy. Donald and Jimmy. And Jimmy, Jimmy is probably, I think I mentioned to him on mentioned him on the podcast before. He's probably one of the best bass fishermen that I was ever ran. Him and he fished with a guy named Billy Golf, which was Moon Man, and then Donald too. But tell us a little bit about them, and because I know y'all were all out, did y'all age-wise, y'all hunting, fish together growing up and everything? Tell us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_02 10:47

Well, I was telling TJ another thing of my son about those times. I said, now, we try to look after Jimmy a little bit now. Jimmy's older than us. He he works to death, but he can still catch a bass. But Jimmy used to put us on his back and take us hunting, take us fishing when we were young.

SPEAKER_05 12:04

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 12:05

And then when when I got a little older and come back, I then I'd put Donald on my back and take Donald. And then Donald became a good outdoorsman himself. He Donald won some bass contests, real good, real good duck hunter. And um uh Donald is the president of our hunting club, Poca Taligo Hunting Club, they're between Forester and Greenville. Okay. And um, this is a deer hunting club. We dog hunt and and still hunt. And we had we enjoy that. He does a very good job at that. But it was all daddy taking Jimmy first, Jimmy taking us, and then we take each other as we grew up, and then the children the same way. We all three of us looked after the other's children coming. So that's how the family does hunting wise and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Very good. Now, I'm gonna I'm gonna go to a story that either I heard you tell or or I know you told it, but I can't remember whether you told it to us or it was on another podcast or whatever. But just because these guys have not heard this story, and I want you to tell a story about this kind of the family he was raised in. Now, there's a story about y'all going camping, and either the boat wouldn't crank or the boat floated off or something happened. Tell that story if you would, real quick, just a minute. That way y'all know that what kind of outdoors family we're dealing with. Come on.

SPEAKER_02 13:21

Well, about two days before the season, me and Jimmy and Daddy got in a boat at Randolph's, went cross the lake right before the season opened. This would have been when. Huh? This is the ages ago. Like 50s or 60s or it was in uh uh probably 60, 65, 66, it's somewhere in there. And um, so we're going to go scout and check the camp up. Well, we hit a stump, got hung on a stump, and water. We had a wooden flat bottom boat, then we got from Randolph's, had a five horsepower Elgin on it, went on the other side of the lake, hung on a stump about 300 yards from the uh the island over there, and and it was just water pouring in. We couldn't get it off. Dennis trying to rocket. He uh Jimmy had to get out the boat and kind of hold it over to the side to maybe angle it where we could pull it off. Now, this is Thanksgiving. Water's cold. And uh so he's freezing, Daddy's getting the boat, and then when he got it, he took an axe and he knocked the it was a petrified limb. When he knocked that off, then the water kept coming in. So we took a uh life jacket, he cut the life jacket up and stuffed it in the hole, and I had to sit on the hole. I'm sitting on this pouring in. But anyway, that was what we did on the campsite. I don't know if that's the one you were talking about or not.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

Well, didn't y'all, I thought, didn't y'all get they thought y'all were lost or something, or didn't the boat float away? Y'all got away.

SPEAKER_02 14:59

Oh, that yeah, yeah, that happened too when we went back and camped, and it was it was in the days when this was uh when the water was real, real low. We um got up one morning and look, where's the boat? The boat was gone. Then we saw the boat on a little island out way out in front. And we had to figure a way to swim and wait and get to it. And Jimmy was dole us. They went to him again to get it off, but the boat was gone. And so what daddy was trying to side out what we needed to do, for if we couldn't get to the boat, we were gonna walk from the island back to the back side where the canal was. Well, you know, there's some deep water over there too. But anyway, Jimmy got to the boat, and the paddle was still in the boat, and we paddled back, but the boat was gone. But if we did get back, and we got off, and each time that happens makes you learn something new. We started tying the boat up and throwing an anchor out, things like that. So that that happened, that's that's just one of many.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

Lots of adventures. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 16:04

Well, I know Bubba is has heard the most stories. He'll be able to lead in and ask you to repeat several more, but but there is a uh a story that I wanted you to clarify. It involved uh the duck commander himself. Another big duck hunting family, another big duck hunting family, of course, from Louisiana and a lot of TV fame, uh Phil Robertson. But I heard a story about Phil being in Clarendon County for for a speaking engagement, and I think you had a uh an introduction with him. Tell me how that went. I did.

SPEAKER_02 16:32

Um he it was at uh at the Wildlife Center and and Phil was there, and he was selling his duck calls before he talked, and nice guy, by the way. Yeah, really nice guy.

SPEAKER_05 16:43

Super nice guy.

SPEAKER_02 16:44

And uh he and and and again, he played football in college too. So I kind of hit on that, you know, and he played quarterback. And, you know, we don't like to lose, so I know what's in his mind. I know he's doing the right thing, and he has done as good as he could do, and everything he's ever done. Well, he's sitting there selling um uh duck calls, and I was with a young game warden from uh Clarendon County named Billy Down, Downer, and Bill's done real well now in it. But anyway, he was with me, and um and they were up there selling the duck, the duck calls, such and such, so and so and so and so. And um, I said, Billy, watch this. I said, um, yes, sir, I I would like, how much is that duck call there? He said, such, such, so and so. I said, I'd I'd I'd like to use it. I said, I appreciate you being here. And I said, by the way, my name's Toey McCord. When I said that, he jumped up and said, Toy McCord, I've heard so much about you and his pockleberry swamp going, everything. I mean, it was really, that made me feel so good. And he, I mean, here's somebody that's naturally known, and he says that to me and jumps up there, and the young Billy says, uh. And uh, I bought a duck call. And he's and uh I've talked to him a couple times after that on the phones and things like that. But he was nice enough to acknowledge me and all those people, hundreds of people that were there.

SPEAKER_03 18:15

So yeah, that that did work. Yeah. Well, that should give our listeners some sense of uh, you know, this duck hunting community, and it's a lot different now than it was in the heyday back in the 60s, 70s, even 80s. But uh the fact that Phil Robertson knew Mr. Toy McCord, knew that name, wanted to meet him, is it says a lot about your reputation for hunting those ducks in our area.

SPEAKER_05 18:35

I got a question for you, Mr. Toy. Um, and this is going to make you dive deep into your memory bank, so um it shouldn't be too hard, but we love to talk about firsts, the first duck we ever killed, or the first greenhead, or the first deer. Can you tell us about the first duck hunt you remember shooting your own duck on?

SPEAKER_02 18:55

The first one that I really remember, I was brought up peeling with wood ducks in the Black River Swamp, but we went to the lower lake, we parked somewhere where where the canal would be now. We must have walked for an hour, hour and a half. I mean, it wouldn't have a potholes out there. Water's low. I had a 20-gauge boat action, one shot. And uh Daddy wouldn't give me something to shoot three times, he'd just give me one shot. And he put me in a little pothole out in the middle of the field, and I I sat there and I missed two or three ducks, and I kept hearing them shoot further on up. So finally I took it upon myself to go to them. I got out and walked, walked, and I pull up to this open water and a corner, and I could see Daddy and them out in the flat shooting with the decoys out, and I'm with a gun and no decoys, anything. I'm standing there and I look up, something caught my eye. I look up, and there's a duck cupped on top of me. And I'm standing in the wide open, round the edge of the water, and I said, BAM! And that duck folded up and hit. It was a mallard hen. And that duck must have weighed five pounds, and I wouldn't let anybody else touch it. And when we left the hunting, they carrying all the equipment and everything. They said, Toy, let's carry your duck for you. He said, No, I'm carrying my own duck. But that duck must have weighed five, six pounds. Now I wasn't but nine years old now. And uh that was that was my first real, real duck. Yeah. Uh and uh still go there occasionally. That's the same place.

SPEAKER_03 20:36

Now, I I don't know if you've had a chance to listen to many of the of our podcast episodes, but you know, our even our name, mostly legal, kind of had this genesis in the in the fact that we've all had some different run-ins with the law where we tried to do it right, but one reason or another, we didn't have a plug or we had one too many ducks, or some reason we ended up getting some kind of ticket from the DNR. And so we like to ask our guests when they come on, is there has it has there been a run-in? Is there if we went through the citation books in South Carolina, will we find your name on a ticket somewhere? Uh yeah, probably long go once or twice, maybe once.

SPEAKER_02 21:10

Uh but I I'll tell another, I'll tell another story on that. Um we scouted about three days before the season one time and saw some ducks. So I'd go full daylight, sit and we watch the ducks, we watched the ducks, and then uh we said, uh, we're gonna hunt these ducks, be sure everything's okay. Now the water's about eight or ten foot deep, but what he's done. They were just staging. But they were they were they were mallers. Okay. So we um sitting there, and then the day before the season, the afternoon before the season, a plane flies across in circles and goes off. And then uh excuse me, before the plane came, uh a boat came up and they said, uh, there's too many ducks in. It must be, this place must be baited. I said, well, sir, if it's baited, it was me and Greg Hurlong was with me. If it's baited, we don't want to be here. So we just found these ducks and you know, and I mean they have to have scuba gear on to dive to the bottom. It was six, eight foot deep. You couldn't stand out there. And um, but then come the plane. The plane circled. I said, well, call the guy in the plane, tell us, can we hunt or not? The guy, they circled twice, then he came back and said, We will not be back, which means we can hunt. Okay. So we sit in there, and uh here come another group come in out hunting with us. There's about six or seven of us going to be, and we spent the night in the boat. And that morning we sit not worried about a thing, didn't see any other boats. We killed some ducks, then we heard a motorboat coming. And a guy pulls up right into us, and it was a game ward. Said, y'all boys, y'all know y'all hunting over bait. I said, No, sir. They told us that we could come, everything was clear. And he said, Well, such and such went anywhere. Um one of the people with us was uh a very prominent citizen. And he knew that game warden, that game warden knew him. When he spoke, he said, they told us that uh it was okay to hunt. So now we're all nervous as fire now. You know, we we didn't have the limit. We we we done good though. But um the so when the the citizen said something to the Game More, the Game War picked his walker talk up and said, They okay here. And we were. We had done nothing wrong. Right. And then he left. The guy with me said, I believe I'm ready to go. I said, I'm ready to go too. And then my brother Don says, I'm going with y'all. We packed that one. We went out of there. But that was a game warden that was wanting to mess with us. Yeah. And he'd made a comment in front of a a politician a little later on about he had us caught such and such. And when that politician finished with him, he didn't say no more about duck hunting for a long time.

SPEAKER_05 24:25

Now we've talked a lot about Sparkleberry and the Lower Lake and areas. Oh yeah. Where's your favorite place to go out of South Carolina?

SPEAKER_02 24:37

I love, I love Louisiana and Mississippi.

SPEAKER_05 24:40

I love that. Why is it that the place you choose?

SPEAKER_02 24:44

Yeah, well, it's just because it looks like the swamps, things, and stuff like that. Tell me I love timber. I love timber. So I I was in the place we hunt there. Now, we've hunted in Texas. We've hunted Oklahoma. We've hunted in Arkansas. We've hunted Missouri a little bit on their fringes and stuff like that. And uh so we just like to go. We like to like to hunt different places. So I've hunted all those. Have you been up north any beyond Missouri or Kansas? I went to Canada for 20-something straight years before COVID.

SPEAKER_03 25:17

Okay, 20 straight years. 20 straight years, yeah. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 25:21

And um, we'd hunt Saskatchewan.

SPEAKER_03 25:23

Okay, maybe somewhere near Moose Jaw. Well, yeah, right close to that. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 25:28

Quill Lakes. Oh, we hunted all over the Quill Lake.

SPEAKER_03 25:32

Scott and I had a chance to go to Canada years ago and we were kind of Did you enjoy it? We had a great time. We loved it. I don't know. I wish I think money and family and children is probably what kept us from going back. But uh it was a great time. And I remember Moose Jaw being a place that was a little bit of our satellite, isn't that where the hotel was, and we kind of go out of there. But uh but we put a lot of miles on that rental truck, but we had a lot of fun. I got friends that still go.

SPEAKER_02 25:54

I haven't been since COVID. And um, but my uh brother and I would go, and my son went with us one time, and we would take friends, and that's a lot of birds. Now I understand the birds aren't there, they've moved to other provinces, other areas, but you can still kill your birds. Now, the great thing about that, if you went late in the year, they were beautifully plumaged. Early in the year, they not. And we didn't like shooting them like that. So we would shoot early in the year, we shoot a lot of snow geese.

SPEAKER_03 26:27

Okay. And it was liberal limits. Yeah. But it was a lot of fun. Those snow geese, though man, and they're a sight. We can't even hear the dick calling so much.

SPEAKER_02 26:36

And it'd be hitting me and a drove would come in and everybody with us could shoot. So we'd be doing pretty good on this road and they'd be falling all over you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:43

Oh man, you gotta dodge them.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

What amazed me up there was how late you can shoot. You know, around here you gotta stop early. Around there, I I told the story before when we were up there shooting, we were shooting a little pothole or whatever in one of the little prairie things, and I mean it was pitch black dark. Fire was coming out the end of the barrel. Ed Burnett was with me, and I said, Yeah, we got to quit. He said, We got eight minutes. I said, You kidding me? He said, No. We had eight minutes still to shoot it, it was pitch black dark. I was amazed up there at that how late we could shoot. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_05 27:12

You took somebody who was paying attention, knew what time it needed to be.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

Well, I mean, I was just trying to be legal. I'm always edging on the on the side of being all the way legal. So am I. That's that's all I got.

SPEAKER_02 27:22

You killed enough up there the limits, you could kill eight mallers, eight ducks, you know, twenty snow geese, uh, eight Canada's or something like that. When you get that limit, you've done pretty good. You can stop. A lot of shooting. You got to leave six. Five or six of you hunting, that's pretty good. Then you got to get rid of them. You've got to have people to take care of them, you know, and then you got to bring some back and all that, and that's that slows you down sometimes. Did you ever make the drive all the way up there? No, we we went into um other Minnesota and maybe. Gotcha. Drove across one time, but we flew in.

SPEAKER_03 27:58

Scott and I have had a chance to drive up to North Dakota a couple times, and it was it's a it's a haul. There's a lot of stories that just go along with the trip before you even get to hunt. Just trying to get there.

SPEAKER_02 28:08

There's some there's some guide guides hunt up there now. Used to be back then there wasn't any. You know, and the the people we made a lot of good friends. Like I said, one of my buddies continuously still goes, but it used to be you can hunt anywhere. Now, I mean they would let you, you'd or you'd ask permission, and they uh happily let you hunt. Yeah. So we spent a little time with them, you know. Uh with my accent, I had trouble talking to them because they'd wanted to hear me talk. Yeah. Instead of talking to me. But anyway, uh, I enjoyed it and I would love to go back maybe one day.

SPEAKER_03 28:44

That's great. Now I want to play a name game with you just for a little bit uh and make another connection. If we flip back to the fishing side, I know that duck hunting is your is your love, but you're a great fisherman too, and you talked about your brothers being a great fisherman. I had a chance to go down to Venice. In fact, the last couple episodes we talked about my trip to Venice, Louisiana, but I met a guy down there that you know really well, Harold Wilcox. Oh my gosh, yeah. And I got to fish with Harold down in Venice, and he was quite the character, a lot of stories, and I told him that uh I knew of you and that I had friends that knew you. We were trying to get you on the podcast, and because we're gonna try to get Harold on in the next few weeks. Well, as soon as we can arrange it and with his own.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

You know, he was the principal of school too now before he retired. Yes. And I was teaching at the school. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 29:26

I didn't realize that y'all were working together, colleagues as well. I know you're both outdoorsmen, but he lived about eight miles apart. That's great. That's good. Good fellow. Oh man, he's full of stories just like you. I mean, he's been doing it a long time. Call him Bustle Muffar. Bustle Muff Harrow.

SPEAKER_00 29:42

So I got a question for you. Going to We talked about your first duck or whatever. I know you had a lot of them. And let's go with spark. Well, well, first of all, I'm gonna ask one. How about Picala? Did you did you get in on the Piccala hunting back in the day? My daddy, of course, Tommy Johnson and Will Davis, they hunted Picala a lot too. But uh he he talks about how amazing Picala was by it.

SPEAKER_02 30:02

So they'll just Will Davis was was sitting one day, we were hunting, we went in there back up, Allard Brogdons on the uh right off on something highway. And it is the first or second time I'd been in there. And one friend took me in there, and there was like four of us, and the ducks were circling, and uh, and somebody was shooting them on the circle every time. And I said, Golly, if they just let them come on down, we'll get them. And uh it was Wayne. Wayne? Yeah. Wayne was got wet, tow his waiters, was sitting on a log. He was about in eighth grade or ninth grade, and I sat there with Wayne a while, and then Will came up, introduced himself, and we all stood there, and we really had a great time, killed our limited birds, and there were absolute thousands of birds. They would come out the sky, they'd be a single or a pair, with circle. When you come back around the next time, they'd be 15. Then the next time they'd be 75, and then they just they could see all the way across the swamp, and birds just keep piling. You might have four or five hundred on you when they came in. And now, you know, uh, I was shooting a 20 gauge with low-powered eights that day, because that's all we had left with bird shell. You know what? I didn't have, and I shoot a 12 gauge, but I was shooting that 20 gauge, and I'd kill a few. I wasn't wearing them out. But they went.

SPEAKER_03 31:28

I'm sure that lead was still legal at the time.

SPEAKER_02 31:29

Oh yeah, yeah, that's when lead was legal.

SPEAKER_00 31:32

And well, and and daddy told me, and and I know you watched this a lot too, he said in McCallum, they used to go in there, they were in high school or whatever, and they'd go in there and went out. I think they went over behind um off of Miss Graham's, I think that was Will's Ann or something over there. And so he said, though, you'd have to wait on them to get there, because they were coming from the refuge, coming to the refuge, said you have to wait on them to get there in the mornings. They wouldn't be there to start with.

SPEAKER_02 31:52

No, you'd mess up early and shoot at the wood ducks, a lot of wood ducks. You shoot your shells at wood ducks, and then about 8:30 quarters, nine, you look, out there and you see it's lines. There's just lines of them coming. And but they're not there at daylight. You got to give them an hour, hour and a half. Something like then they leave in the refuge and let it come. What was the draw for them to come off the refuge of the lake? It was a it was a regular swamp that was flooded. Okay. The water was backed up and flooded. They timbered in there too. So there was some open timbers which caused the water to back up also. All kinds of berries, all kind of seeds and everything. You'd slip up on a big drove and you kill some, they'd the crawl would be just full. All kind of little stuff. So they just loved it. Magnet for those big birds. Yeah. It was natural, all natural. Then in the evening, they'd get up and go back to the Federal Refuge, which at that time we had over 100,000 ducks right there at Santa on the Federal Refuge. Now, at the same time, there was ducks getting up going to Sparkle Bear. In the waves the same way. So that tells you how many ducks we had. We had a pile of them then. A pile of them. Then all of a sudden, they opened a new refuge, I think, up on the east coast somewhere, and that stopped a lot of birds from coming. I mean, I don't blame them. I mean, you know, we just did started getting fewer and fewer in the swamp. And the swamp looked the same, but we were getting fewer birds there. And then we started hunting Spockleberry a lot more. And the birds get up, they'd leave the refuge and go up in the swamp. And the same birds that sometimes come up, come up one side of Pax Flat, go all the way up to Sparkle, come around the other side, and go right back to refuge. And you could sit there at Jazz Creek and watch the same drove come and go. Come and go.

SPEAKER_05 33:39

Now, Mr. Toy, we were talking uh just this week with a friend of ours, matter of fact, Wayne Ridgway, who's one of our sponsors on the podcast at uh Burrison Ridgway, and uh we were talking about tonight and how you were coming over, and uh Wayne's ears perked up. He said, He said, I know I met Mr. Toy, he said, he saved my life in Sparkleberry Swamp one day. And he told us a story and uh went into the details about how they'd gotten lost, and they last ditch efforts started shooting up in the air and and hollering, and you heard them, and you tried to figure out how to get to them, and they were in a place you couldn't get to them, and you said, Boys, I don't know how y'all got to where you are, but you're gonna have to swim out because I can't get to you. And they did, they swam out and they came back later and got the boat. But that got me thinking, that's probably not the only group that you have found and saved in Sparkleberry.

SPEAKER_02 34:30

Um come around the bin one day and there's a fella in this in the middle of the creek holding on to a little bush. He turned his boat over and it just sunk. Wow. You know, no flotation in it. I pulled him out and took him back. Now we've turned over also. This happened before. Yeah, and uh, but yeah, I'm running a bunch of people that's been lost. I mean, I go one day one guy was going, I said, Where are you going? Well, I'm going, I'm trying to get out of him. I'm just raining everything. I said, You really want, you really trying to get out of here? Yeah, I thought he might be just telling me not because I saw where he was. I said, Well, let me tell you what you need to do. First thing you do is turn around and go follow my bubbles out as far as you can. I came from the hill. You going the opposite direction, you're going up the swamp. Now, when I was a baby, we camped in in there and I walked away from the camp. When daddy took us up, we'd go in there every Christmas, spend the night. I walked away and I was jumping ducks and I was shooting at a double power 16. Got it for Christmas. Bam. And walked on a little more jumping up. Wasn't killing nothing, but jumped. Then I realized I did not know where I was. I walked across two little points, and um I said, well, I went back, I walked across two points. But that wasn't right. So then my blood changed. Oh, yeah. You know, you go from warm to getting cold, and my legs picked up. I'm walking fast like I'm running sprints, and I'm shooting at anything that gets up if somebody can hear. And I'm going through the swamp, and when I heard somebody holler, it was my older brother Jimmy. I said, Toy, where are you going? Jimmy, I'm trying to get back to the camp. Well, you're a mile and a half from the camp now. If you keep going, you're gonna be at the highway in Columbia. You gotta turn, we got to go this way. And I was totally lost. And I crossed two points when I went. I crossed two when I went back. But there was three where the other, it was actually, there was two came together. There was two points on one little island.

SPEAKER_05 36:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:34

It wasn't on there, and I missed the other. And there's a place up there where the water goes upstream. I got on that little creek. It turns and goes up. So I knew I was going downstream toward Pax. Well, I wasn't. I was going upstream upstream because that that creek did that. That's up in Sparkleberry and those ridges, too.

SPEAKER_00 36:54

The only time I've ever been truly lost in my life, based on the story, was up above Indigo, where the fireman camp used to be up there on the right. We camped, I was pretty young. Same deal in the afternoon we went walking back through the flats back there and looking for mallards, and it got dark or whatever. And I knew I was in trouble because going in there, I crossed water up to about my knees, and we went to come out in the dark. It can't start raining. I was up to my chest and I was like, This is this is not good right here. And that was the only time I've ever been really lost, like to the point that I said I'm gonna have to spend the night in there. We shot the gun, then finally, eventually, somebody shot back, and it took us, it seemed like forever finally to get out, but we got out, but it's the only time I've ever lost. But hearing these stories, there's a common theme right here that I've heard. You owe Jimmy your life. I'm gonna tell you that right away. He saved you about six times so far. No doubt about it, no doubt about it.

SPEAKER_02 37:45

I I it was just two weeks ago I reminded Donald that about something. I said, you know, Jimmy's kind of on the back burner now. He's working all the time. I said, but do you remember what he all he did for us? We would go into um, we would go into uh Pax Flat when I was at Carolina. After football season or something off, we had time off, which you don't have, by the way. When duck season came in, we'd leave, get out of class, we'd take off the PAX flat. And uh had a buddy Bob Cole, great guy, lovable guy, linebacker, a man too, on the football team. Me and him and Benny Galloway, we would go up there and get in there and put in the packs, go up, packs flat, cut into the swamp, go in there and well anyway, I knew how to do it, I'd done it a bunch. We'd shoot late, wood ducks flying over and shoot five minutes. You know, we'd go take a two-hour trip on five minutes to get two wood ducks, be tickled to death, come back. Well, Benny and Bob, they went up there by themselves one night. And the next that night they weren't there. The next morning I couldn't find them. They'd gone to Pax Duck, oh my gosh. They got in there and they went in circles. They went in circles, and they said, uh Bob said, we got to go to the right. Benny said, no, we got to go to the left. And they did that fall night, and they had a Pepsi Cola and a pack of nabs. And they slept in the boat, freeze, and then uh Benny tells this story. He says, Bob, Bob, get that moss. They got moss and put over them because it was so cold. And he said, You cover your foot up, cover your foot up. Bob said, Benny, that's your foot. That ain't mine. And the next morning they got out of there, and they didn't go by themselves anymore. And we'll put toilet paper on the limbs. Well, anybody knows when the water gets wet and the wind blows, you ain't got no toilet paper.

SPEAKER_00 40:37

That's what meth meal. That gets you in there and out of there. We filed a toilet paper that day at the above indigo. That might have been your toilet paper that got me lost. I learned why I wouldn't put the one piece out. That might have been your might have been um that's interesting right there to say the least. You but lost is a bad feeling. I mean, lost is a really bad feeling to know, man, this is we just we could be here.

SPEAKER_05 40:59

Yeah, when the sun starts going down, temperature drops is not a good place to be.

SPEAKER_02 41:03

Especially when nobody knows where you are because you don't want nobody to know where you went. Bubba's bad about that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:09

Really. It's not like the boys you're talking about were lost over there in Long Pond or Grove in the Flatford.

SPEAKER_02 41:14

That's a bad place. Long Pond's a bad place.

SPEAKER_00 41:16

You can get lost over there in our.

SPEAKER_02 41:18

I mean, everything looks the same. You got to learn to read the water. You got to look down and and throw something out there and watch it float, and you know to go downstream. But that doesn't mean, I mean, that where the trussel is, but that doesn't mean you can get to it. You got the break right or left, and all the good duck hunters in Sparkle Bear and Pax and all, they've been lost before. Yeah, I promise you. In fact, you find good places that way.

SPEAKER_00 41:41

So speaking of Long Pond, and I've always wondered, and you might be the person that can give me the perspective on this, because I know I couldn't. But we fish in Long Pond all the time. Over there, and it's probably might be some of your stuff, but there's just tons of old duck blinds over there. Like old, you still see the the boards on the trees and stuff. But there's also three or four barrels, 55-gallon drums filled up in the trees. Did you ever shoot out of one of the barrels back in the day?

SPEAKER_02 42:04

No, I never climbed up the tree to shoot out of a barrel. But they put them out back in when I was a kid. They were they were all over packs flat, too, up in the barrels. I never climbed up there. But now I've I've got in a blind all over the water, off the water up there.

SPEAKER_00 42:19

Right.

SPEAKER_02 42:20

But I just take, tell the story, I take a bag of moss with me. Yeah. That's my blind.

SPEAKER_00 42:27

I just couldn't imagine. So what we're talking about is like over there in Long Pond, up these cypress trees. I'm talking about how high? 50 foot high? Yeah. I mean, up a cypress tree. They just they got nails and boards where you had steps going up, and then they got a 55-gallon drum screwed to the tree. And they would climb up and get in these barrels and shoot out the top of these barrels up there.

SPEAKER_03 42:48

I I never heard of that until I met Harold. And Harold showed me pictures of him in the top of these cypress trees in the cut open 55-gallon drum, and it was the craziest thing I've ever seen. So you do know that the the steps were wood.

SPEAKER_02 43:03

Wood steps, you know, and and you know that rot. Yes. And nails come out of it. And then them trees, they don't like, they're not like you going up great like that.

SPEAKER_03 43:13

A widowmaker. So Scott, they're up there in this barrel drum and 50, 50, 50, 60 feet high, and they're shooting down on the ducks. When the ducks would come in and light, they would shoot down on them. You would Harold say, and they're not looking for you. They smoke them.

SPEAKER_00 43:26

That's funny.

SPEAKER_02 43:27

Those are the good days. Now you can go in there and don't see one.

SPEAKER_00 43:33

So, so I know you hunted all over the place. One of my favorite places to hunt back years ago when there was a few ducks. And I I was late behind y'all, so I was 80s, 80, daddy was having me in 79, 80, I was nine, ten years old, I count stuff. But we used to hunt the ball hole too. You hunt the bog hole much on that side of the river?

SPEAKER_02 43:50

Yeah, that did. That was a great place to kill some widgeon. Used to love to go over there. We'd say, well, we won't kill many mouths, we'll get a wizon, we'll get a ball, Pete. Love to go over there and kill a lot of teal over there, too.

SPEAKER_03 44:02

Now, Bubba, there's been a ton of talk in this episode with Mr. Toy about Sparkleberry. I think because a lot of listeners that don't know much about Sparkleberry, where it is, and what exactly we're talking about. Give them a little rundown on what we're talking about when we mentioned Sparkleberry Swamp, what we think is world-famous Sparkleberry Swamp.

SPEAKER_00 44:18

Well, look, I'll let Toy do it, but I mean basically, and I'll let you give more detail. But basically we call that the Upper Santee, upper end of Lake Mayor and the upper upper end, which is kind of off of the Santee River. Between the Santee River and the Hill, basically, is Sparkleberry Swamp or whatever. When you get above, I'd rather say above the trussle, above the flats above the trussles where Sparkleberry Swamp.

SPEAKER_02 44:39

Just about where the Water River River and the Santee River come together. And that that and then out to the swamp toward the hill, uh toward uh Sumter Side, there's a bunch of aching ridges and stuff. And that comes on down with two or three of Snake Creek, Pine Island Creek, such and such go up in there, and and it it there's a couple clubs in that area now, too, yeah, on the hillside, but that's basically Spockleberry. Now, uh, when they flooded the lakes in the 50s, that backwater back up. And then and there was awesome amount of ducks. Yeah. Awesome amount of ducks.

SPEAKER_03 45:18

And you know, it's it's very unique, right? There's not a lot of swamp or river systems like that in the southeast. I mean, it's it's very uh different, and just for context and other for people that are listening that don't know, this is I'm guessing only 10, 15, maybe 20 miles south of the Congaree National Park that's on the Congaree River, right? Just upriver uh before it joins the Water Reed to make DeSantee. So pretty neat ecosystem that you don't find a lot of places. It's a big, wide, flooded swamp that, as you guys know better than me, it's as you said, easy to get lost.

SPEAKER_02 45:49

But uh, DeSantee River was a natural migration route from birds coming on going up a state, other states back down to the coast. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 46:00

And how many, would you say, 30,000 acres? How big Sparkabay was?

SPEAKER_02 46:03

It's a little better than 30. It was like 30 when they flooded it.

SPEAKER_00 46:06

Right.

SPEAKER_02 46:06

But it when it gets flooded on high water, you might have 50, so something like that.

SPEAKER_00 46:10

Double with the with the flood.

SPEAKER_03 46:12

That's a lot of land to get lost in for sure.

SPEAKER_00 46:14

You can get lost, especially, especially when the water gets up over the ridges and stuff. When it's in the creeks, you can kind of navigate okay. But when it gets when it gets up high over the ridges and stuff, things change. And like he said, it water can flow in all different directions.

SPEAKER_02 46:28

When you go in there, you're looking at the base of the trees and the little limbs hanging over. Then overnight, water might come up four or five feet in there. Wow. You let the water out in the dams that they have big rains up upper state. So what you're looking now, you're looking at the top of the trees, the stuff that you recognize is underwater. Yeah. So you know, that's the tough.

SPEAKER_00 46:50

And what didn't now I know, I I believe I know this is right. For me, probably the best motor. Has ever been made ever in the history of motors with a 25 Mercury with the gears on the handle and everything. I think you ran 25. TJ's got them. But the two-stroke 25 Mercury is probably the best motors. A little bit cold nature, but them suckers were they bulletproof. They were tough.

SPEAKER_03 47:16

Like a lot of people are still looking for them, like to collect them and run them. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:20

Parts are getting a little more scarce for them now, but but they're still around. I still got one. We got on the War Eagle, we got one on the on the War Eagle.

SPEAKER_03 47:27

I've heard other other guys talk about that engine.

SPEAKER_00 47:29

Well, I mean, and the other part that I loved, which I thought was genius, the gears on the handle may be picking up decoys 10,000 times better. Back it up, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:37

Backing up instead of reaching back there, changing the gears, that's that's oh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:42

That that's the one of the major reasons you use it.

SPEAKER_00 47:45

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 47:46

Now, did you ever have any other scare in that swamp besides being lost? Did you ever hit a stump at a high speed or have somebody that you had to save that had, you mentioned the one guy you found whose boat had sunk, but any other scare where you or somebody in your party really was in a precarious situation?

SPEAKER_02 48:02

It took us a while to find him, but we were going into Spockle Bear and um went through uh I went through a little between two trees. My brother was following me. And uh I think uh Dave McGuinness was in the boat with me, and and Donald and Jimmy were in the back boat. Well, I there's a little stump that was right there on the at the corner of them trees, and I kind of dodged it, but Donald didn't see it. His mortar hit that, and when he hit it, he the mortar kicked up, he lost the mortar's handle, and the mortar hit a tree. The tree broke off, dead tree. And uh, when it broke off, his boat went straight up that and flipped straight over through Jimmy and Donald out. Wow. Thank goodness they had their flotation on. They bounced up like corks and climbed up on top of the boat. Well, I said, guys, we gotta go. It's gonna be daylight in a little while. Well, the guns went down. I said, Donald said, Well, we could take y'all back to the landing. Well, I'm going hunting. So I took him and Jimmy back. They went back to Manning, got another boat, got the got some more guns, came back and threw an anchor out where that boat was turned over. So anybody that went in that day, we had to go right by that boat. And um, then we met one of our buddies, uh uh John Hearst from Florence, was um coming out and they saw the boat after we finished hunting, and a couple of them jumped in the water and pushed the boat over, and we bailed it out, and it took us two days to get the guns out, but we got a magnet, went and it was bringing up shells and all kinds of stuff, but we did get the end up. I still go between those same two trees. Wow. But yeah, that was worried, that worried me. Yeah. And we'd spend the night a couple times. We would get out and go different directions, maybe just walking from the camp. Yeah. One night we couldn't find a guy. He got on a ridge and went the wrong way. Gone right up a mile up the ridge going away from us.

SPEAKER_03 50:06

But yeah, so we worried about that one. Well, I know that we could tell stories or listen to your stories rather uh for a long time. But we want to thank you for coming and sharing some of this with us, some of uh not just your experience, but your wisdom and getting to hear some of these stories. And I want to hear some more about the GameCock football and baseball. We're gonna we're gonna have you back and we're gonna can continue to dive into this memory of yours as it relates to sports, but but wildlife and sparkle berry as well. I want to thank you for coming on. My pleasure. On behalf of um Scott and Bubba, we want to thank our listeners. I think Bubba's got something he wants to shout.

SPEAKER_00 50:42

No, I think we're good.

SPEAKER_03 50:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 50:44

Oh, good.

SPEAKER_03 50:44

Well, we're gonna uh we're gonna, as we wrap up, transition to Scott to share with us a uh word uh for a few minutes, and then we're gonna look forward to seeing you back on another Monday for another episode of Must Illegal.

SPEAKER_04 51:00

Well, welcome back everyone to our word segment. I want to look at a passage in the Old Testament uh again this morning from the book of Lamentations, and the name itself, you know, doesn't really bring cheerful thoughts to one's mind. And so um there's a portion in chapter three I wanted to look at because you know from time to time we do hit we do hit you know kind of potholes in life or in circumstances, and we get down, we get uh busted up, uh, we don't think well, we uh don't act well towards others, we think poorly of uh our future, and we can get we can get in a dark place. And um anyway, uh these verses I think kind of reset us and point us in the right direction. It's uh from chapter 3 in Lamentations. I'm gonna start reading in uh verse 20. Um Jeremiah writes, My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. Verse 22 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, and therefore I will hope in him. The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. Now, of course, the famous hymn, Great is Thy Faithfulness, comes from these verses, and it's just a good reminder that uh things are temporary, days come and go, and the Lord's love is everlasting, and his faithfulness is never ending. His mercies that he offers to us are new every morning. And the morning's a great time to get up and kind of reset, remember these things, flush yesterday, and begin on the foundation that the Lord's love towards those who are in Christ Jesus is never ending. And uh so I just want to encourage you to keep your chin up, um, go back to God's word, uh, read it, um, pray, pour your heart out to him, let him be your comfort, let him be the thing that you begin your day thinking about. And um, and that's always been a great encouragement for me. I know it will be for you. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon on the next Mostly Legal Monday.