Lori and Chuck Buck.

f there is one secret behind the phenomenal success of Buck Knives, it is this: Four generations of Buck corporate leadership – including current chairman of the board and former CEO Chuck Buck – have acknowledged God as the company’s “senior partner.” That strategy never lets them down. Through wartime, economic recessions and a potentially business-ending accident, the “little company that could” rose to be the undisputed world leader in innovative knife manufacturing.

“There’s a lot of reasons that Buck Knives shouldn’t be here, but it was all kept going by faith,” says Chuck Buck.

Since 1976, Buck Knives honors God by inviting every customer who purchases a knife and who may be “troubled or perplexed and looking for answers … to look to him, for God loves you.”

Product packaging for each knife includes an insert explaining that God is the company’s senior partner. “Of course, to us, besides being senior partner, he is our Heavenly Father also; and it’s a great blessing to us to have this security in these troubled times,” the statement says. Al Buck wrote the outreach message in 1976, following an event that changed his son Chuck’s life forever.

A Chuck Buck-autographed Buck folder with the multilingual package insert proclaiming God is Buck Knives' "Senior Partner" and proclaiming John 3:16.

Chuck later added John 3:16 to the insert to honor Christ, his Savior, but also to honor his grandfather who used to stamp John 3:16 on the outside of every knife package before the company mailed the knives.

“My grandpa, Hoyt Buck, who made the first Buck knife back in 1902 in Leavenworth, Ks., was raised in a Christian family,” says Chuck.

Chuck’s father, Al, and grandfather, Hoyt, set an unwavering example of what it meant to follow Christ for each successive generation of Bucks. Chuck was not to fully grasp that lesson until much later.

Chuck handed the company's CEO/president reins over to his son, CJ (Chuck Jr.) in 1999, but he still maintains an active role in the business as the chairman of the board and current family patriarch. He and CJ, along with a “family” of dedicated employees, ensure that Buck knives continue to maintain their edge of superior quality. The company backs that with a 4-Ever lifetime warranty.

Answering a call

The history of both the Buck family and knife company is the stuff of legends. A clear, providential thread runs throughout. Though Hoyt Buck, as a blacksmith’s apprentice, discovered the blade-tempering secret at the age of only 13 that formed the basis for technology the company still employs today, it was decades later, in the early 1940s, when he started making knives in earnest.

Daisy and Hoyt Buck in front of the Idaho church that Hoyt pastored.

Hoyt was pastor of a small Assembly of God church in Mountain Home, Idaho, in those days. A nearby U.S. Army Air Base was training pilots to fly B-21s just after the United States entered World War II. “A call went out for weapons for servicemen, so he made 2,000 knives in the basement of the church for servicemen at the air base,” recalls Chuck. “I’ve always thought that was neat because the knives came from a Christian background.”

Hoyt and Daisy Buck not only provided knives for servicemen, but they also boarded and helped find extra rooms in neighboring farmhouses for wives who came to Mountain Home to visit their pilot husbands.

After the war ended, Hoyt and Daisy relocated to San Diego where son Al was living. “My dad was very busy when my grandpa came to San Diego,” Chuck says. “He was a lay pastor at a little church, but he did a lot of studying. His primary work was driving a bus when Grandpa talked him into making knives with him.”

Al Buck, Chuck’s dad, gave him responsibilities that would groom him for his own future role in the knife-making business. The three generations worked hard, but one thing always came first. “My dad made sure we all went to church. I was one of four children. Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night choir or any other night there was a revival, we were there. Most of the time, I slept on the back row,” Chuck recalls, with a grin.

Chuck remembers his dad as “a strong man of faith. Dad was in prayer every morning, along with reading Scripture. He constantly prayed for the family, for the business. My mom, who was the baby of her family, was a great Christian, as well. But Dad was the one who made all the decisions.”

A faith tempered by fire

One of the family’s most painful experiences was losing Chuck’s 19-year-old sister, Ruth, to complications from diabetes in 1953. “It was really tough on my mom and my dad,” recalls Chuck. “He prayed and prayed for her. She lay there, telling Dad, ‘Don’t pray for me, because every time you do, I’m up there and the Lord is walking toward me, and he turns around and goes the other way.’ Dad didn’t realize that. So he prayed that the Lord would take her home, and she died.”

Back in 1941, when Hoyt Buck first started making knives, prayer had had a life-changing impact on Al Buck – and the future of the company. Working at a meat-packing plant in San Diego, Calif., Al got his hand caught in a meat grinder while cleaning it. The accident all but severed four of his fingers. The doctor planned to simply amputate the damaged fingers.

CJ and Chuck Buck in front of Buck Knives' plant at Post Falls, Idaho.

“Dad asked the doctor to do his best to try to save his hand, and he said he would rely on God to do the rest,” Chuck says. The Buck family and their church prayed during the long surgery. Al Buck's hand was saved, and he regained nearly full use of it. “There would have been no chance that Grandpa could have kept the business going if my dad had lost the use of his hand after that accident,” Chuck says.

Despite regaining the use of his hand, Al Buck had not bothered to learn how to actually make the famous Buck blades. Hoyt still supplied that expertise. When cancer struck Hoyt in 1958, however, he and Al realized that would have to change.

As his father lay in the hospital, Al practiced grinding blades and took each one to show his dad. Hoyt critiqued them and sent Al back to improve upon his craftsmanship. Finally, he got the hang of it and Hoyt realized he could die in peace, the company’s future secure. He passed away the following year.

Knife-making was hard, painstaking work in those days. “What it took him 30 minutes a side to do, we do today in 30 seconds for both sides,” Chuck says.

Meeting the Master

Chuck’s turn at taking the helm of the company was not to come until 1979. He would face his own crisis of faith before then.

Though Chuck was grateful for the godly role models he had and was in church all the time, he says, “I never really met the Master until my marriage crisis later in life (in the mid-1970s). I was unfaithful. I felt I was losing Lori, my wife. I wasn’t going to say anything at all to her. I was going to go to my grave with it, but I told her about a year later. I just didn’t want anything between us.”

For Lori, this revelation was a horrible nightmare. “She kept telling me she would never do that to me, that she loved me and loved God,” Chuck says. He fervently prayed and asked God to forgive him. “I knew he did. He promised ‘if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us’ (1 John 1:9). But I still had to deal with Lori.”

Lori asked Chuck to go with her to visit her mother as she faced the pain of his betrayal. It took three excruciating months, during which Lori experienced deep, debilitating depression, before she could forgive her husband.

“The Lord gave her a picture in her mind of God’s heart – a big red heart – and in front of it was a cross. She saw me kneeling in front of the cross on one side, and herself kneeling next to me. She could see the power of God healing her broken and crushed heart. And she could see forgiveness from the cross for me,” relates Chuck, his voice cracking with emotion. “From that point on, my whole focus was on a strong faith, like my dad and my grandfather had."

Chuck speaks at sportsmen’s game banquets and prayer breakfasts around the country each year. He usually relates the story of how God restored his marriage to a roomful of reverently silent men. Afterward, a few men always come up to him, some with tears in their eyes, telling him he just told their story.

“Being able to share a story of staying together lets them know there is hope. It’s amazing how many people have been in similar troubles, but there is always hope,” Chuck says. “A lot of times, people just give up and end their marriages. But I think if they really want it to work, the Lord will give them that strength to hang in. Now, it’s amazing the relationship Lori and I have. We are absolutely one. We have so much fun together.”

Impacting real lives

Chuck, Al and CJ Buck standing behind Hoyt Buck's anvil.

Today, Chuck Buck is the iconic face of Buck Knives that grateful knife owners and fans love to interact with at trade shows or other venues when he is on the road. A huge crowd of admirers frequently surrounds him, patiently waiting for him to laser-autograph their Buck knives of all shapes and sizes.

Chuck gets lots of interesting mail, too. An angry nonbeliever once wrote him to complain about the evangelizing message he received with his knife. “You can’t tell me that. I’ll never buy another Buck knife,” he wrote. Chuck wrote him back, thanking him for his frankness and reminding him “the Buck family is interested in helping others meet the Lord.”

The man wrote back to Chuck, saying he still didn’t agree with what Buck was doing, but that, “I must be a pretty nice guy as the company chairman, taking time to write him a personal letter. He told me he was so impressed, he went out and bought two more Buck knives.”

Another favorite letter was from a Christian who fell under conviction for cheating the company out of a new knife five years earlier. “He had sent back an older Buck that had been sharpened so many times it looked like a toothpick,” Chuck recalls. “His friend told him if he put the knife in a vise and snapped off the blade, the company would send him a new one. That’s what he did. And we replaced it for him.”

The man’s letter said every time he opened his work drawer, he’d see the knife still in the box, unused. “It was like he’d stolen it off a store shelf. He included a $34 check, and asked me to let him know if that wasn’t enough to cover the knife,” Chuck says. “I sent his check back and told him I was blessed by his letter and wanted to give him the knife.”

By far, Chuck’s favorite letter was from a woman who had planned on committing suicide by slitting her wrists. She went to a hardware store to buy a knife. “It turned out to be a little black-handled Buck. I believe the angels guided her,” Chuck says. “She read the message and didn’t go through with her plan.  She wrote that she’d felt a warmth within her going in all directions. That revived her. She went back to church. She told us to just keep putting that message in our knives.”

Other businessmen occasionally ask Chuck for his advice on how to make God their “senior partner.” Says Chuck, “I tell them we just run our business on Christian principles. We try to be very fair with our employees. We don’t cheat on our taxes. When we make a promise in our advertising, we make sure we honor it.”

For the legendary Buck family, there is no other way to do business.