Grandpa and the chickens: Not a Christmas story

This post from my cousin, Bill Quick is some history worth passing on. He writes to his siblings born after Bill's mother died and his father moved to St. Paul, MN and married their mother circa 1943-44. He responded to my request to post it by telling a little more of the story involving my mom, Rita (his aunt), our aunts Roseanne and Josephine (all sisters of his mother) and our uncles (Jim and Gene, both rather squeamish fellows) and their gender opposite interests in their brother-in-law's chicken escapades.

Thanks Bill.
Cousin Ron.


Bill Quick, Olympia WA, February 21, 2010, at 8:24 PM

(Ron:) Please feel free to post it, even on the fence post at the next farm. I wrote this shortly after my father died in 1995. Reading it again brought back more memories. When we butchered chickens Rita an/or Roseanne might walk down the road and help scald, pluck, and gut chickens. When Josephine and jack lived across the road aunt Joe would sometimes help. I can't remember Gene or Jim ever volunteering. Clear evidence of superior male intelligence.
Those nail clippers that are made for dogs work great on chickens, but, you know, my Dad felt that those game cocks should be authentic.
Let me tell you, a four pound hen or an uppity rooster on a light fly rod is a real experience, but that is a different story.
Bill


Bill Quick, Olympia, WA Feb 20, 2010, at 1:53 AM

(Ron:) Reading your Blog reminded me of something I wrote when a set of caponizing tools was found in my father's things. The younger kids in the family never experienced W(hite) B(ear) L(ake) (,MN) and had no idea of Dad's one time fascination with chickens.
It follows,

Grandpa and the chickens: Not a Christmas story


Don, Janice, et al.

Finding the old caponizing tools in the house brought back all kinds of memories. We lived at White Bear Lake from 1939 to 1943. Dad worked at 3M, but raised chickens on the side. Any of you old enough to remember the gladiola and dahlia periods can imagine the chicken episode. Dad didn’t go into hobbies halfway. I’m sure it was done to make a bit more money, but it was also a hobby. We had hundreds of chickens.

Most of our chickens were Leghorns or White Giants. A Leghorn can go from chick to a pretty good fryer in ten weeks or less. They are a great meat chicken for market and I think most of the “fryers” in the market today may still be Leghorns. They used to go to market between three and four pounds. The White Giants were chunkier chickens with heavier breasts and were pretty good layers. They would reach five or six pounds, but took longer to reach weight and more feed.

Both of these varieties could be good layers and Dad kept as many as he needed to produce all the eggs he could sell. Every morning Dad would take a stack of egg cartons to 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing) and sell eggs on the side. During the war any kind of supplemental food production was encouraged. Eggs were hard to find in the market. I think all of you have heard the story of me getting in trouble with Dad for feeding the chickens fresh cut grass. Anyway, it turned the whites of the eggs a delicate green and customers really complained. The chickens loved fresh cut grass, but I didn’t enjoy the consequences. I don’t remember any of you kids getting seriously spanked-I think Dad softened with years and more experience. As for me, he spanked and used a switch. Of course, I may have provided somewhat more reason.

At that time raising chickens wasn’t nearly as controlled and mechanized as it is now. Our chickens roamed free and had a shed where there were laying boxes and rows of perches for at night. In really cold winter weather the chickens might be shut into the hen house. A lot of chickens produce enough heat that they can cluster up and survive if they have water and adequate feed. The hen house was totally unheated-poor chickens! Eggs had to be collected several times a day in winter or they would freeze. Occasionally a hen would get “broody” and decide she wanted to sit on her eggs. They could really develop an attitude. They would fight tooth and nail to resist being removed from the laying box and showed no hesitation about attacking 5-9 yr. old little boys-or anyone else for that matter. If one were really slow and sneaky you could sometimes slip a hand under a hen and slide out a nice warm egg without risking loss of your arm.

Dad candled all of our eggs. We are talking about dozens a day, or at most a couple of hundred, not thousands. If held in front of a strong light one can see double yolks or other defects. A box of double yolks could bring a premium as a novelty. They were few enough that we usually ate them. I always thought it was a treat to get a double yolk egg fried sunny side up.

It was during this period that Dad began to develop his talent as the only guy around who could make a flawless twelve egg omelet. He used a big cast iron skillet that was fairly deep. I cannot remember when he stopped doing that. He would occasionally do a big omelet even after we moved to Lake Phalen. Keep in mind that with hundreds of eggs there are always some with cracked shells, distorted shells, or odd markings that made them unmarketable. We ate our failures. We ate a lot of eggs. Dad experimented a lot. We made our own mayonnaise. There are a lot of ways to use eggs!

A hen may begin laying eggs at just a few months of age. After a few weeks of laying “pullet eggs”, a good hen would lay almost an egg a day for two or three years. The size of the eggs depends upon the breed of chicken, the maturity of the hen (they get a bit looser with wear), quality of feed and relative tranquility of their life. When their productivity begins to wane the faithful servant is rewarded by becoming a stewing hen or pet food. In modern egg production facilities each hen has it’s own pretty sterile cage and every egg is counted automatically. Dad had his own technique for checking a hen’s productivity. If the oviduct would admit only one or no fingers, the hen wasn’t laying eggs. If the oviduct would admit two fingers she was producing pullet eggs. Three fingers indicated a productive hen. I really don’t know if this technique had any validity, but Dad seemed to prize it and it fascinated our neighbors.

Now, mind you, we butchered our own chickens. I still don’t like cleaning birds or contact with a lot of wet feathers. We would have a big bucket full of boiling water by the chopping block. Dad would catch and chop. My mother and I and whoever else in the extended family who could be persuaded would pluck and clean. After a few minutes in a bucket of boiling water the wet feathers would strip off pretty well. Once naked a chicken could be gutted pretty quickly. Visitors would sometimes inquire about the white stake stuck in the ground somewhere in the vicinity of the chopping block. One of us would casually say that was the distance record. Then, in response to their puzzlement we would explain that Dad turned each of the chickens loose after cutting off it’s head. You know the expression “like a chicken with it’s head cut off”? Well, if you kind of threw the headless chicken onto it’s feet it would run wildly off; bouncing off things, changing directions, and flopping wildly. The stake marked the farthest any chicken had reached.

A ghastly sight, but to a young boy, and apparently to his father, it added amusement to a pretty unpleasant task. We butchered fryers regularly and they, too, went to 3M for informal sale.
We raised chickens, the people to our southeast raised chickens, and my great uncle Henry, my maternal grandfather’s brother, lived directly behind us, shared a fence line with us, and also raised chickens commercially. There were always loose chickens around. Part of this time we owned a Springer Spaniel named Ginger. She hunted and killed loose chickens with a passion- never penned chickens and never our chickens. That was the rub. She somehow could tell our chickens from Uncle Henry’s and the neighbors. The adult chickens were all banded and their owners could be identified. Protocol was that stray chickens were returned to their owners. They preferred the return of live chickens and took exception to Ginger. She had to go. We gave her to a farmer who thought he needed a dog and raised chickens. Really, there was no malice in this.

Now, back to Dad’s hobby habits. Since we raised chickens we had to enter the chicken world. We hung out around hatcheries to see how they functioned and to see what kind of chickens they were brooding. Even in those ancient days there were commercial hatcheries and most commercial farmers bought young hatchlings and raised them. Dad, of course had to try brooding his own eggs and a bit of cross breeding. We found that chickens were apparently more discriminating than we gave them credit for in selecting their roosters and they did a much more successful job of hatching eggs then any makeshift contraption we developed.

Everyone knows there are dog and cat shows, but did you know there are chicken shows? Not just the displays of chickens at fairs (yes, we had to carefully tour all of those as well), but honest to goodness chicken shows. Dad was fascinated by all the varieties of chickens. Not surprisingly, we ended up with a rooster and a few hens of lord only knows how many varieties of chickens. There were tall chickens with long necks, little Banties, white giants, black giants, Plymouth Rocks, Barred Rocks, Cochins… There were chickens with big crowns of feathers on their heads and chickens that looked like snow shoe hares with all the feathers on their feet. Some of these varieties produced weird eggs that couldn’t be sold-so we ate those too. Did I mention that new layers begin with little, so called pullet eggs which also aren’t very saleable so we ate those too. Some breeds, like Banties, naturally lay small eggs and we ate those too.

You know, I may finally be getting to the point of this story!
Remember the white giants? Well, if a male chicken is deprived of his gonads he becomes fat, lazy, indifferent to chasing hens and kind of a chow hound. They will grow to 10-12 pounds in a fairly short time and are notoriously tender. For a long time capons seemed to disappear from the market, but I am seeing them again. I’ll be darned if they don’t look just like our White Giant carcasses. Now, roosters don’t take kindly to this process so Dad devised a “surgery board” that secured a chicken’s legs and wings and pretty well immobilized him for any necessary procedures. Dad became quite skilled at this and we had a very low mortality rate- or so we tried to persuade the roosters. Surgery was done without benefit of anesthesia and none of the chickens really volunteered. It was amazing, I can’t recall a single chicken squawking during surgery. They might fight tooth and nail against being restrained, but they were quiet on the board. Their combs might flush from white to bright red and back, but nary a squawk. Thriving on success and repressed latent skills, Dad branched out into other types of surgery. We repaired broken legs, lanced abscesses, removed growths…. And then there was the Cornish Game Cock. We had a few gamecocks, of course. The roosters grew these wicked horns on the back of their feet. I suspect that they are just a modified back toe, but the spur might be an inch and a half long and taper to a razor sharp point. They fight with them and can inflict nasty wounds. Fortunately, Cornish Game Cocks are usually pretty laid back, but roosters are roosters. One of the game cocks developed an infection in a leg. Dad lanced and drained the leg at least a couple of times trying to save the rooster. The last time he tried to lance the leg the rooster got one leg loose and took a swipe at Dad. Dad was wearing a shirt, but the rooster created a razor type slice that started near the top of Dad’s breastbone, curved over to his left ribs, and back to near his belly button. It was a nearly perfect half circle and bled like the devil. It looked like someone had gone after Dad with a box knife. Dad carried that scar as long as I can remember. It grew fainter with age and was very thin, but I think the scar lasted all his life. Incidentally, the rooster survived the surgery and lived for some time. That the rooster survived Dad’s wrath was even more surprising.

So, kind of roundabout, that is the story of the caponizing tools.