Name/Title
Junior Robinson of Southland Custom CallsEntry/Object ID
PTC0012A0001Description
Junior Robinson was born on November 4, 1945, in Alabama. He married the love of his life, Linda, on June 1, 1968. His maternal grandfather, Alvern Davidson, loved turkey hunting and built turkey calls. He would be an inspiration for Junior’s eventual callmaking. “If I were older at the time, I would have learned more from him,” said Robinson. “Grandad was a master worker; he built box calls of a couple of different styles, a couple of striker boxes (scratch boxes), slate calls, and also snuff can calls.
He killed his first turkey around the time he got his driver’s license, at the age of 16. It was on a fall hunt at a wildlife management unit, and when he got back to his truck with his turkeys, a game warden, Lee Bonner, was waiting for him. Robinson recalls the warden saying, “I will give you a break, but it is too late in the day to be hunting the management area. You have to be out by noon.” Lesson learned, the two would become great friends, sharing many breakfasts. Warden Bonner would later use Robinson’s Southland calls.
Robinson hunted in the spring and fall. “Growing up, we’d hear 6 or 7 gobblers a day. Now hearing a couple is a good day,” said Robinson. There has been a lot of clear-cutting on the ground he used to hunt successfully. He hasn’t hunted the last couple of years due to health issues.
He got into callmaking in 1979 and built calls for 43 years. Robinson told me, “I enjoyed the journey. I started with mouth calls and still make a few now and then. At one time, we had more than twenty models of mouth calls. I started out making them for friends and used the money for gasoline to go turkey hunting.” He credits James Olt of P.S. Olt with helping give his new Southland Callers a boost. “His first order was for 6,000 mouth calls,” emphasized Robinson. He reinvested that money in his callmaking business and took early retirement from his job as purchasing agent for Crown Textiles.
As part of the growing wild turkey hunting industry, he made many good friends and memories. “Ben Rodgers Lee and I were good friends. He would stay weekends here, and we’d hunt together,” Robinson fondly remembers. “I hunted with Dick Kirby, Paul Butski, and Billy MaCoy. Very special people to me. We all learned from each other. I was fortunate to meet a lot of different people.” He was also good friends with the outdoor writer Steve Price. He believes they collaborated on as many as 90 articles in hunting magazines, including Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, and Sports Afield.
Robinson would have different business partners through the years, although he always had a majority interest. Doug Camp bought into the company circa 1986. “He bailed hay for a living and thought turkey callmaking to be more attractive,” Robinson chuckled. “I had the woodworking and woodturning equipment, and Doug was great at Sales. He was a nice guy; he traveled to shows and sold for us.” After Camp started Camp Callers in 1991, Luther Goldman bought in and worked shows, and then, after that, Johnny Mitchell. Special people.”
There were many he credits with making the business successful. “Braden Rial was eventually over all of our Sales. We had people who represented us across the years, like Jim Pollard. Mike Pentecost worked for several years in Sales and would help in the shop, gluing up calls. Robinson said he helped him over the years as much as he could, even as Pentecost began his own Woodhaven business. Tim Cosby, the Alabama Game and Fish Commissioner, was a big turkey hunter. He also made strikers, including some for Southland Callers. Robinson said, “Major league baseball player Charlie O’Brien was another who sold calls for us.” He recalled O’Brien cheekily saying, "I like baseball next to turkey hunting.”
Southland Callers would become Southland Custom Calls. “We had sales into big box stores like Wal-Mart; it was almost more than we could handle,” admits Robinson. There were many different types of calls, including mouth diaphragms, box calls, pot calls, tube calls, pushpins, and locator calls. “When we made calls, we would make about 500 and then see how that model would do. If it didn’t do well, it was replaced,” Robinson said. “I was always gifted to understand turkeys, and to design and build a call. Donnie Gallahar and J.R. Hollingsworth were local guys who built for me. Our calls were built one at a time; even with having a CNC, our style of building was not a full production model.” For calls he signed, he did it on the natural wood before any lacquer was applied to protect the integrity of the signature.
Other products and partnerships helped make Southland a success for decades. “Mossy Oak represented us and vice versa,” Robinson shared. “We had a vest in Jim Crumley’s Tre-bark as well, the Light and Cool vest.”
Eventually, on (date), Robinson sold the company to Jason Bussey. Robinson said, “Joe Hamm, who had retired from Alabama Power, and I then formed another company, Hunter’s Addiction. We sold from New York to Arizona.” When Robinson physically couldn’t do as much, they closed it down. Now, despite a bout with lung cancer, Robinson spends his days doing gardening and yard work, or at his 180-acre farm. He has had to forego turkey hunting for the last couple of years. He jovially admits, “I’ve killed my fair share of turkeys. I guess I’m just not as mad at them as I used to be!”
“If I had it to do over again, I’d do it the same way,” he told me. Robinson is fiercely proud of the calls his companies made through the years. He stated that his motto was, “I never wanted to make a call I had to make an excuse for.”Create Date
June 2, 2026Update Date
June 2, 2026
