Legend Biography

Ask any hunter who makes the best game calls and chances are you’ll hear the name Primos. Will Primos, to be exact. As a 5-year old boy in Jackson, Mississippi in 1958, Will wanted nothing more than to tag along on duck hunts with the older boys in the family. When the day finally arrived, he was hooked on hunting for life. And a legendary journey that helped teach an entire generation become better hunters began.

In 1963, at the age of 11, Will crafted his first a duck call after a special day spent hunting in green timber with his Uncle Gus. “Uncle Gus was an expert duck caller, and I was absolutely enthralled hearing him make that call sing. That was my first experience witnessing the magic. And when I got home, I made my own call by copying my uncle’s.”

Will continued to hunt through high school and into college. “Anything that flew, crawled, walked or swam, I was after it.” Along the way, he tinkered with nearly every tool of hunting he could get his hands on. From duck calls to his own first bow if Will couldn’t buy it, he simply made it.

After graduating from college 1974, Will went to work in the family restaurant business. By then, Will had started turkey hunting. That Fall, Will’s life would forever change with a chance meeting of the owner of a local turkey hunting camp. Her name was Eleanor Roessler. Seeing his interest in learning all he could, she showed Will the mouth calls she had made by hand.
He went home and started making and perfecting his own calls out of tin beer cans.

By 1976, word of Will’s new mouth calls began to spread. “There was a sporting goods store in town called Hunt and Whittaker,” he says. “I was selling my double and triple frame reed calls for $20 apiece.” Before long, Will’s phone started to ring with calls from around the country. It seemed Primos mouth calls were getting a reputation and people wanted to their hands on them. “Some guy from Pennsylvania came hunting in Mississippi and bought one at the store and took it back with him,” he says. “He had a store up there and he wanted to carry them. Suddenly, I had a dealer in Pennsylvania.”

Demand for the calls grew and by 1979, Primos Yelpers had to a small staff of people making call to keep up with demand. Soon after, Will expanded the line. “I had a couple of friction calls, more mouth calls, and a call case,” he says. “A lot of little things.”

In 1983, Will took his first real step toward marketing his calls with a pioneering idea for the time: instructional audio tapes of actual hunts.
“I worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he says. “We kept growing and growing. I would travel any time I had time off, go promote, go to shows, go give seminars.” The strategy worked. The company reached a million dollars in sales, and still Primos kept working at the restaurant and putting money back into the company and building inventory.

“I just worked extra-long and extra hard to be sure everything worked right, and Jimmy did a good job with the company,” he says. Soon, Primos Yelpers became Primos Hunting Calls with a sales rep group, nationwide distribution and the legendary slogan Speak The Language