THE STORY OF RESTLE DECOYS.    

Written by Mike Hoecherl

Contributing Editors : Justin Tracy, Chuck Hoecherl and Mark G. Budnick

Tommy Restle started carving decoys in 1947 in Maumee Ohio. Tommy was a local avid waterfowl hunter and carver that hunted the Maumee River around Fox Island, and the marshes of western Lake Erie.

                                                                           Mr. Tom Restle

Tommy Hunted with the likes of John Rockwood, Sam Hern and “Doc” Hruby; all well known waterfowlers from northwestern Ohio. He was the only person I knew who used an English Calling Hen as a training aid for duck calling and at times a live decoy. Tommy lived one block from my family and me. He made the decoys in his garage and hand painted every one while smoking his pipe and drinking his martini, all the while, telling stories and trying to teach the neighborhood kids how to blow a duck call.

I also remember the mallards that used to come in at dusk to feed in his back yard and his morning visits to the Phillips house on River Road in Maumee Ohio to watch the woodies and mallards come in to feed just outside their boathouse.

Tommy was a local sports hero and upcoming local legend. Tommy had quite a sports career in high school playing football next to Dick Kazmaier, a Heisman trophy winner at Princeton.

 Circa 1949 Tommy Restle suited up..ready to go !

Tommy was better at baseball than foot ball and was drafted out of high school to pitch for the New York Yankees. Tommy signed with the Yankees as a pitcher the night of his high school graduation. Tommy threw his shoulder out in the minors and never made it up to the big leagues, but I remember him telling me this story out in the garage. In football, I believe he was a running back or wide receiver at Maumee High School, Maumee Ohio. .

A fellow church member and hunting partner, Jack Blakeman, also of Maumee, Ohio got a job at Owens Illinois after the War (WW2) and was researching several different materials to use in the creation of plastic plates and cups, etc. One of the materials they were researching was expanded polystyrene.

In its original form polystyrene is a small clear plastic bead about the size of pin head. To use the product, steam and the clear beads are introduced into a large bin that circulates the beads with the steam. This was called pre-expanding the beads. The expanded beads now much larger and white in color are blown into a mold. Once in the mold more steam is introduced and the beads expand again in the mold and fuse together in the shape of the mold.

After Owens Illinois determined the pilot project was success and commercially viable, the scaled down version of the pre-expander and the steam injection tables and probes were to be thrown away and scrapped.

Things were chugging along; Jack was expanding the beads, using the pre-expander now powered with a 1/2 drill versus an electric motor and affectionately called chitty chitty bang bang because of the funny noises it made. Jack was making the bodies as well.

It was Tommy’s job to paint the decoys since he was the artistic one of the two. It was tricky at first to paint the new “foam” decoys because the paints at that time were all oil based and if put on to heavy the paint would melt the foam.

This all changed with the introduction of latex or water based paints in the 1960’s. Tommy coated the bodies first with latex paint and let them dry to protect them from the oil base color paints he used as the outer “DUCK” colors.

This to changed in time, with the introduction of automotive lacquers in the 1970’s, which now came in every color under the rainbow. Tommy now used what he called “fancy paint” as the colors duck hunters and ducks came to love so much.

Jack started having kids and had less and less time to hunt and spend making decoys so he slowly bowed out of the business leaving everything to Tommy.

During this time Tommy had, Latex paint, oil based paint and lacquers on his work bench. One day he spilled small containers of all three on his work bench. Being too large a spill for rags, Tommy threw sawdust into the mixture and said to himself that he would clean it up after it dried. Well, sometimes mistakes are the mother of invention. When Tommy tried to clean up the paint the next day, the paint mixture which was now absorbed by the saw dust and was hard as concrete. It had to be chiseled off the work bench. The light bulb went off in Tommy’s head, what a great material to use as a coating for the decoys. This was the story behind the extremely guarded secret of the now famous “Trestle Coating”. If fact most were sworn to secrecy about the coating until after Tommy died.

During the 1970’s is when I met Tommy Restle. All I did was follow that perfect sounding duck caller only to find out that is was Tommy’s pet English Calling hen. Over the next several years while I was in High School we used to hang out at Tommy’s, and help him sand the rough foam bodies getting them ready to coat, and let him teach us how to blow a duck call.

Mr. Tom Restle teaching new duck hunters the proper way to blow a duck call 

 But mostly it was his stories of an era gone by where ducks used to blacken the sky and where market hunting was in vogue. When one has been in a duck boat as many times as Tommy over decades of waterfowl hunting, it was only natural that stories, true or not, were told and young impressionable kids listened with opened ears and opened minds and believed them all.