With the death of Neil Cost on May 29, 2002, at the age of 78, the turkey hunting world lost the most renowned of all callmakers.

I was also fortunate enough to personally know this extraordinarily skilled craftsman whose callmaking earned him national acclaim and to have the opportunity to write a foreword for one of his three books.  A resident of Greenwood, SC, for the final decades of his life, Cost began making and selling calls sometime in the late 1950s under the Gob-El-R name, but his emergence as perhaps the most prominent of all turkey callmakers dates from the early 1970s and closely paralleled the rise of the National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF).  Cost and the NWTF enjoyed a symbiotic relationship that was mutually beneficial.

Cost was born in Fort Sill, OK, just before the onset of the Great Depression and he spent his childhood there.  His formal education was limited—he completed the ninth grade—but the “Old Gobbler,” as he came to be known, was about as astute and savvy a person as you are ever likely to encounter.  In 1943, while still a teenager, Cost was drafted into the Army.  He served in the Pacific and fought at Kwajalein and Okinawa.  He was badly injured, lost vision in one eye, took shrapnel wounds over much of his body and to the day of his death, carried shards of metal in his stomach.  In 1947, not long after the war’s conclusion, he married his first wife.  After his discharge, the couple settled in Galveston, Texas.  In the years that followed, Neil worked first as a civilian employee at Fort Crockett and then as a gasoline jobber in his native Oklahoma.

In 1950 he again entered military service and saw active duty in the Korean War.  He was once more wounded multiple times, earning the Bronze Star and five Purple Hearts.  One of those injuries, a grenade blast, obstinately refused to heal.  Eventually Cost was evacuated to Texas and treatment there was successful.

Upon discharge from Brook Army Hospital, Cost became a National Guard advisor and eventually had a tour of duty in Germany and a second one in Korea.  When he left the military, he had accumulated 22 years of service.  Back in the states, Cost settled in Greenwood, SC, where he worked for more than a decade with the U. S. Postal Service.  By happy coincidence, the area was a turkey hunting paradise.  Cost had hunted turkeys from boyhood when the grand birds were a welcome addition to the family’s table during the lean, mean times of the Dust Bowl and the 1930s, but relocation to the place where he spent the remainder of his life marked the real beginning of his serious devotion to all things turkey.

While Neil’s early experimentation with callmaking came prior to his leaving the Army, it was the Greenwood years, and most notably the period of upwards of two decades between his retirement from the Postal Service and his death, that saw him begin making an impact on the turkey hunting world in significant fashion.  Altogether, his callmaking encompassed some 50 years, a period during which Cost wrought wonders in wood as he produced finely tuned, highly innovative and lovingly crafted box calls.  Appreciation of his genius and demand for his calls closely paralleled the wild turkey’s great comeback story.  In Cost’s own special way, he was an integral part of that story.

From his first footsteps into callmaking in the late 1950s through the emergence of what he called “The Gobble Shop” and his Old Hen boxes in the 1960s, increasing links with the NWTF and growing fame in the 1970s and 1980s, emergence as the dean of American callmakers in the 1990s, and finally forward to what he termed his “Last Hurrah” at the advent of the 21st century, Cost was a fixture on the turkey callmaking scene.  By the time of his death, he was widely acclaimed as the “Antonio Stradivari of callmakers,” and his accomplishments garnered Cost a number of richly deserved honors.  The NWTF Chapter in his hometown of Greenwood was named for him.  The NWTF’s museum in Edgefield, South Carolina, has a permanent display featuring his calls.  More space is devoted to his accomplishments in Earl Mickel’s book, Turkey Callmakers Past and Present, than to any other callmaker.  He was honored by the state of South Carolina for his artistic creativity, and as I wrote in the foreword to the second of a trilogy of books by and about Cost, he was “a craftsman for all of turkey hunting’s ages.”

Mention of books connected with Cost inevitably leads to the fact that his impact as a callmaker is chronicled in far more detail than that of any other craftsman in this field of endeavor.  Sometime in the 1990s, realizing that Cost had achieved iconic status and that his life’s story, his artistic efforts and his methods of crafting calls had generated widespread interest, two of his fans approached him with a proposal for a major literary project.  Those individuals were Scott Branton and Ray Berryhill, and their linkage with Neil resulted in the publication of three books, production of audio tapes and a host of related endeavors.

The first volume, entitled Making Turkey Callers in the Gobbler’s Shop, appeared in 1999.  As was the case with each of the books, it included preliminary contributions aplenty (a preface by Earl Mickel; a foreword by the then-CEO of the NWTF, Rob Keck; and material from both Branton and Berryhill).  Neil Cost Talks Turkey came out the following year.  It is the longest of the three books, running to 240 pages when the preliminary material is included (prolific author John M. McDaniel wrote the preface, this writer contributed a foreword, and especially notable is the introductory chapter from Branton and Berryhill, “Neil Douglas ‘Gobbler’ Cost:  A Biographical Profile.”

The concluding volume in the trilogy, appropriately entitled The Last Hurrah, came out in 2002 just a couple of weeks before Cost died.  It includes a preface by Gene Smith, longtime editor of the NWTF’s magazine, Turkey Call and a behind-the-scenes factor (as an editor and proofreader) in the Cost trilogy; a foreword by Brian Lovett, the editor of Turkey & Turkey Hunting magazine; and once again, material from Branton and Berryhill.

It should also be noted that the dust jacket and title page for each of the books lists Cost as the author but says “with Scott Branton and Ray Berryhill.”  That sums the situation up pretty accurately, for I suspect that most of the textual material was produced through interviews with Cost that were subsequently transcribed (and probably polished and “cleaned” up quite a bit, because Neil was wont to be more than a tad profane at times).  Indeed, portions of the first book make this interview/transcribe/edit approach quite clear in that they consist of a series of questions and Cost’s responses to them.

Each of the three books was produced in limited, numbered and signed editions of 1,500 copies; or more precisely, such was the case with the first two volumes.  By the time the final work in the trilogy arrived from the printers, Neil was on his death bed and unable to sign it.  A few individuals did visit him in the hospital and obtain his signature.  Today, and this is something of an index to Cost’s legacy, the books have become prized collector’s items.  The first volume fetches north of $1,000 while the second and third volumes both bring hundreds of dollars.  That’s pricey, and the disparity in prices is interesting inasmuch as each of the three is available in exactly the same number of copies.  Any way you look at matters though, the books are difficult and expensive to acquire.  Matched number sets demand even higher prices than randomly numbered volumes.  In addition to their detailed coverage of Cost and his approach to callmaking, the volumes have other notable attributes.  These include a fairly useful bibliography of books about turkey hunting (this was expanded in each succeeding volume), numerous illustrations and a list of Cost-related products.

In Cost’s final years, and even more so for a brief period following his death, his calls were in incredible demand among the collector fraternity.  That’s understandable for a variety of reasons.  For starters, Cost was a masterful self-promoter, and early on he realized that establishing a carefully nurtured relationship with the NWTF could be financially beneficial to him.  In turn, the organization benefitted greatly from his generosity in donating calls for auctions and related fund-raising activities.  Then too, Neil developed a shrewd habit of including quirky inscriptions on each call he crafted.  These included information about the wood along with intriguing and often pithy thoughts of the kind only his fertile brain could produce.

There’s no doubt he got considerable mileage from being a close friend of Earl Mickel, and he was prominently covered in Mickel’s first book on callmakers.  Similarly, his callmaking versatility—Cost made many types of calls ranging from the boat paddles and “Old Hen” models, for which he is best known, to scratch boxes, singled-sided boxes, slates and even a few yelpers—was a factor in the man and his calls becoming so popular.

That popularity, along with a desire to provide a lasting visual depiction of the grace, flowing lines, functionality and sheer majesty of Cost calls, led to another, quite different book on Cost.  This was Michael F. Marks’ Neil Cost—Magic with Wood:  A Photographic Collection of Unique and Rare Turkey Calls (2004).

In a time-consuming labor of love, one that involved contacting dozens of folks who owned Neil Cost calls and then arranging to have them professionally photographed, Marks produced a lovely coffee table book.  It consists primarily of scores of color plates of individual calls, with each full-page plate accompanied by a description of the call.  Lamar Williams and Steve Mann, both of whom were greatly influenced by Cost and who are nationally recognized callmakers in their own rights, contributed introductions, and Scott Branton wrote a foreword.  The book was published in a numbered and signed limited edition of 1,500 copies.  Originally priced at $85, it has been out of print for some time and today, copies, on the rare occasions they are offered, sell for anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000. Some collectors have managed to get the same number for the Marks book as they had for the Branton/Berryhill trilogy, and a matched numbered set would add extra value.

Collectively these books have done a great deal to perpetuate Neil Cost’s legacy, and even though he has now been gone almost two decades, his name remains one of a household nature in the close-knit world of turkey hunting.  Yet focusing on calls and books about them should not lead to a conclusion that Neil Cost was one-dimensional or that beavering away in his shop was the sum of his existence in later years.  Far from it.

He was a passionate, highly skilled turkey hunter, and one year, after a bad injury and broken bones from a fall that should have left him hobbling around on crutches for months, within little more than a fortnight he was up and about, preparing for opening day at his beloved Rock House Hunt Club as was his standard practice with each renewal of the grand rites of spring.  Similarly, as I was privileged to witness on one occasion when he presented a seminar to members of the South Carolina Outdoor Press Association, he was an engaging and informative public speaker.

The value of Neil’s calls has dropped some in recent years.  That’s thanks in part to a decline in the feverish interest in collecting turkey calls, which reached its peak around 2000, but also a result of folks realizing he produced far more calls than most had assumed.  Certainly, the numbers of specific types or designs given by Earl Mickel are on the low side, as are suggestions bandied about regularly immediately following his death that “he might not have made more than 1,200-1,500 calls in his lifetime.”  My personal guesstimate, and it is nothing more than, is that Neil Cost likely crafted at least three times that number of calls over his long career.  Therein lies one explanation of why calls that were going on eBay and through other sources for four figures two decades ago now fetch no more than half their one-time prices.

Vagaries of values and changes in collector interest connected with Cost-made calls notwithstanding, he must be recognized as the best known of all the countless thousands of custom callmakers the turkey hunting world has produced.  It is not an overstatement to say that he was the catalyst, more than any single individual, who sparked today’s widespread and still growing interest in collectible calls.  That’s quite a legacy, but it isn’t the one that would have meant most to old “Gobbler.”  His fervent wish and ultimate goal for every call he made was a simple one—that it bring turkeys to the gun.  Cost made calls with one thing uppermost in mind—that they be used to hunt.  In that he succeeded in marvelous fashion, for every spring hundreds of hunters take to the woods with their treasured Neil Cost call in hand.   They would feel ill-equipped, if not naked without it, because they truly believe that the man infused magic into wood.

Jim Casada is Editor at Large and Books Columnist for Sporting Classics. The author or editor of numerous books, his next work, A Smokies Boyhood and Beyond: Mountain Musings, Memories, and More, is scheduled to appear this fall. To learn more about the book or to sign up to receive his free monthly e-newsletter, visit his website (www.jimcasadaoudoors.com) or e-mail him (jimcasada@comporium.net).