Dan Thompson’s call to his family led him to making calls of the wild.
The soon to be 62 year-old Thompson is the designer and engineer of Dan Thompson Game Calls, a Rawlins-based business that “is doing just great”
“I know it can get better, but I am not prepared for it to get much better right now,” Dan said.
Dan’s versatile game and/or predator calls can be found at Cabela’s “right on the end aisle,” said Dan proudly. “It’s the best position in the store”. He also sells the calls on the internet and hopes to have his calls in over 400 stores with the year. Dan and his wife Wanda officially started the business in 1997, but its origin “is a long story over a lot of years.”
It starts with family.
Before making game calls full-time, Dan was a “Jack of all Trades”, working as a heavy equipment operator, a jet mechanic and a pipe fitter, to name a few jobs. During the summers, he would do what work was available, but in the winters he would relinquish jobs that forced him to leave the state and his family.
The duo, who have been married for 30 years, didn’t want to be away from their four children- Jamie, Danny, Ivy and Estrella. “If you have to work out-of-state,” said Wanda, “you don’t get to see your family bu one or two days a week, and that just wasn’t acceptable for us.”
“I didn’t grow my children up to see them month-by-month or six months-by-six months,” added Dan. “I wanted to see them everyday.”
Dan’s winter work was the first pebble in the pond that started the ripples of the business. “I hunted coyotes for an extra income in the mid 1960s, and I never seemed to have enough calls or they wouldn’t stay working,” he said.
The ripples grew in 1986 while Dan was hunting coyotes on the Red Desert with Dennis Rainey and stave Finney from Broken Bow, Nebraska. On the excursion, “the issue came up that we never seemed to ave enough calls, and they suggested ‘why don’t you make them?’ I thought that I didn’t have the means to do it, but I had a little hand drill and a jeweler’s lathe. “At first I was thinking about just making my own individual calls, and then I started thinking ‘why don’t I sell them?’”
His first call took four hours to create. “It was ridiculously slow,” he said with a smile. “Now, I can make one in about 4 minutes.”
Dan based his design off the Weems Wild Call. “I liked that call so much, but I never had any sources to find them,” he said, noting the business had closed. “…To me, it was just simple. It was a need. The idea is from the old Weems. It was an excellent call, but I didn’t want to copy it. I wanted to improve it.”
Living in Encampment at the time, Dan called his original creations “Encampment River Calls.” He still has the first three he made.
In his first year selling the calls in ’87, he sold “four or five”. He estimates he sold more than 8,000 calls last year (2003) and expects the business to continue. “It’s come a long ways.” When I look back and reflect on it, I wonder how I got through all the design situation problems, the lack of tools and the frustrations… I started out with the most humble tools that you’ve ever seen in your life.”
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From the humble beginnings of a jeweler’s lathe and a hand drill in the living room, Dan now has a shop behind the couple’s Rawlins home with seven various machines to help in production. “It’s a tall ladder to climb in Wyoming when you start a business here and you need to out-source things,” said Wanda. The duo has traveled to Missouri for packaging, had to get the mold built in Colorado, and “we thought that we were going to have our card backs for the packages done in Mexico… but we finally found a print shop in Laramie that does it for the same price.”
“There is a lot to it,” added Dan. “All the stores require clam shells, and UPC codes.” Getting Marty McMillen of Cabella’s to add the Dan Thompson Game Calls to the store’s inventory was a big step. “He liked Dan’s product’s right away and put us in the catalog first,” said Wanda. “Naturally we couldn’t keep up with the catalog… He (Dan) has production equipment now, but back then, oh my, we couldn’t keep up at all.”
“It was amazing” the first time Dan saw his creations on display at Cabela’s. “I felt a sense of accomplishment to be there … and out of all the stores, to be at Cabela’s, that is one of the biggest.” Dan and Wanda are ready to be back into the catalog, and have also been picked up by other outdoor stores.
Perhaps the greatest accolade for the Thompson’s has been their biggest pet peeve – people copying their products.
One company “has got my ideas incorporated in its call, but they only changed it by 2 percent, so they get 98 percent of my labor and my experimentation” on the couple’s most successful call, the Red Desert Howler, which took Dan 8 years to develop. “… It kind of offended me, but in another it made me feel kind of good because they thought enough of me to want to make one for themselves.”
The offending companies’ biggest change was to make the howler out of plastic instead of wood, which is fine with Dan and Wanda because they believe wood is far superior. The difference between wood and plastic is “sound, quality and beauty,” said Dan. Dan uses a variety of woods including ash, walnut, cherry, oak, maple and some exotics such as ebony.
As the business has grown, Dan has become something of a cult icon in hunting circles. He’s had visitors from England, and has been identified by strangers in Utah, saying “that must be Dan Thompson” when they heard him using one of his calls.
Dan’s products have been published in two books, and he has been featured in one movie, “Calling All Coyotes,” and mentioned frequently in another, “Calling All Coyotes 2.”
Dan has been working on a video of his own for 14 years. He said an instructional video on how to use his calls is on schedule to ne released this fall. He’s also working on an in-field video that he hopes to have out next fall.
His game calling business would have never even been an option if not for his father, the late Murray Thompson, who taught him love the wildlife.
“My Dad was a wolf hunter back in the 1920s and that is where all of this comes from,” Dan said. “He was a great outdoorsman. He taught us kids so much. We never realized how much until he was gone. “He was very proud of the game calls.”
The Red Desert Howler, and more calls from Thompson
The Dan Thompson Game Calls brochure lists eight products for sale. The most successful call is the Red Desert Howler. “The Red Desert Howler is the call that actually made Dan famous,” said Dan’s wife Wanda. “… Dan developed this howler, and it is the best howler out there. We get phone calls and emails from people all the time that tell us that it is just the best one out there, and we know it is.”
Other Dan Thompson Game Calls include the Long Range Standard, the Long Range Compact, the River Bottom Coaxer, the Pup Squaller and the Weems Replica. He has more designs planned, bringing his total line to 10 models.
The various callers “have a different distress sound,” said Dan. “Predators come to a call that sounds like an injured cottontail rabbit or a jackrabbit or fawn deer, and when they hear them in distress, if you can imagine a predator eating one, they are going to make all kinds of wailing and screams. That is what come to. They say that is an opportunity for dinner.”
The Pup Squaller was made “years ago and was improvised because I didn’t have a call.” He used a .223 brass that he cut off the head. “It sounds like an injured puppy, and that there is the maternal sounds that coyotes are also attracted by.”
A good game call “is designed to be used in multiple ways,” said Dan. “In other words, make it as versatile as you can, and wood is by far, we believe, much more useful, has better resonance than plastics and is more beautiful. It has a truer tone.”
The Red Desert Howler, which took Dan eight years to develop, is his favorite item to make and use.
“I like the versatility of the Howler… because I can do all coyote vocalizations of either puppies or adult coyotes. Plus I can do the basic prey species sounds – the cottontail rabbit, the jack rabbit, the fawn deer, cow, elk and calf sounds and deer grunts. You can even do a little duck sound or the sand hill crane.”
The duo also sells a reed kit for repairs, plus Randy Anderson’s “Calling All Coyotes 2.” Dan is planning on releasing a video on how to use his products in the fall as well.
Items can be purchased on his website or directly by calling Dan at 307-328-4079.
Article printed in The Daily Times
Friday September 17, 2004 www.rawlinstimes.com
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