Joe Thomas isn't sure exactly when he started making turkey calls.

But he remembers picking up an old piece of wood on a farm about 15 years ago, and thinking it would make a fine piece of firewood. When he looked at it more closely, he realized it was cedar.

Then, it occurred to Thomas that he might like to try his hand at making a turkey call.

"It didn't work too good, and it was kinda bad-looking," Thomas, an avid hunter, says of the first call he constructed. "But then I thought I might go back and get more of that wood."

It was just the beginning. Thomas built several prototypes that didn't work, but he was persistent. "I kept messing with them till I got the right sound," he recounts. He spent hours perfecting his final design. When he was satisfied, Thomas took his turkey call for a test drive.

"This fellow down the road had some tame turkeys," he reports. "I went down there and they were in the barnyard, sitting around. I crept up to the side of the fence, and scraped on the call. The old gobbler responded 'obble obble obble' right back at me!"

With the stimulated tom's response, Thomas knew that he'd finally made a call that sounded, to a male turkey, like the love song of a passionate hen. "I sat and played with the call, and he'd go to struttin', and the more I worked on it, the more excited he got!"

Right away, Thomas' brothers and friends started asking for calls of their own. It took about three years for word to get out into the community. Thomas had made calls for all his friends and family; now, folks were offering money for their own J.N.T. Boss Hen Box Call. He started manufacturing ten or so at a time, and then he began wholesaling them to sporting goods stores all over eastern South Carolina. But a shop owner complained when he learned that Thomas was also selling the calls himself – for a lower price. Thomas decided to quit the wholesaling business. He hung a sign by the road in front of his Highway 90 home in the Nixonville section of Conway, above the big sign for his glass company.

"A lot of people travel this road in the summertime, and they'll stop and talk about the turkey calls," says Thomas. "I've sold them as far as Key West, to a guy who has hunted turkeys in every state in a Grand Slam – one turkey of each species."

Until fairly recently, Joe Thomas and folks like him weren't able to hunt for turkeys in any area of South Carolina, because populations of the eastern wild turkey had dwindled so much. In the 1950s, turkeys were trapped in the Francis Marion National Forest and released in the Piedmont and Foothills areas in an effort to repopulate the dwindling numbers. Similar action was taken in other parts of the state in the mid-1970s. As of 1998, huntable populations were found in every forest legacy area of the state, with an estimated population of over 110,000 birds. Every county in South Carolina now has a spring turkey hunting season, lasting from April 1st to May 1st of each year.

Prices for some handmade turkey calls run as high as $450; Thomas sells his for $50 apiece, when they're available. At the moment, he's got a backlog of orders dating back to 1998 – several of them from delighted customers who want to order calls for their brothers, their dads, or their buddies.

Thomas has fashioned calls of cedar, mahogany, poplar, walnut, and acacia, a wood from the Philippines. After he cuts a call on his band saw, Thomas applies five coats of polyurethane, sanding with steel wool between coats. Then he carefully "tunes" each call to accurately reproduce the various noises that turkeys make. These include the kee kee run, purring and clucking, and the fly-down cackle.

"It's like a guitar," he explains. "You've got to learn to play it. It's nothing but friction – two pieces of wood rubbing together." The calls are quite effective, once you figure out how to operate them. "I've never had anybody bring one back," says Thomas proudly.

He produces a letter from a Georgia man who used his new JNT Boss Hen to bag an 18 lb. tom. "He must have gobbled 50-60 times on the way in," the letter says. "It was the most exciting hunt of my life!"

Interested in a JNT Boss Hen Turkey Call? Contact Joe Thomas at 399-3931.