CWTF 2017 Inaugural Member's Edition Magazine

ARTICLE WRITTEN BY STEVE SAVAGE
When I was asked to write an article about
the art of call making, I had to let out a little
chuckle. Thinking back decades to the first calls
I’d made and the materials I used, it was far
from being art. Out of necessity (I’d lose and
break so many calls) I started making calls, if you
could call them that. I made trough calls out of
paint paddles and flattened copper tubing, dip
cans and butter bowls with slate and aluminum
discs crudely glued on, tinker toy sticks and
wingbones for strikers. Heck, I even made a call
out of a business card holder! They were effective
but ugly. You see at this time in my life I was
consumed with the “disease” as my good friend
Dean Redbeard Mundhenke calls it. The disease
of turkey hunting. Every spring I was in the woods
at least 5 mornings a week, work or not, and
the crude calls I made were mere tools with no
meaning other than helping me get closer to my
goal of a limit of gobblers. Little did I know that
those crude calls were the beginning of another
symptom of my turkey hunting disease.
Not long after this time I started making
boxes and scratch boxes, and my feeling for
what a call should be was changing. I found
great satisfaction in taking the time to make the
calls sound and look good, and even greater
satisfaction when they started pulling gobblers
in. In fact, that’s all it took. Now, if I wasn’t turkey
hunting I was making calls and experimenting
with new designs. Yes sir, I had done found a
way to extend my passion for turkey hunting to
312 days a year. Sunday and Christmas, I’m not
allowed to say, play, call, build, hunt, or even look
at a turkey! Yes, I’m married.
I’m a box call maker, that’s what I know.
I had no wood working experience when I
started and by some miracle I still have most of
my fingers. Being bull headed and self taught
I learned through trial and error about what it
takes to make a box call work. So many things
can change the sound, pitch, and rollover (high
to low pitch of a yelp) on a box. The soundboard
or soundboards (one sider or double sider) on a
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