WALKER: Chicken stuff
At the same time I send my weekly column to The Telegraph, it gets emailed to a long list of interested readers. At least, I hope they are "interested," and I know that many of them are very interesting. There are judges, lawyers, lobbyists, a nationally known gospel singer in Dallas, Texas, legislators, family members and just friends. It's a good group and I get good responses from them.
To my mind none of the readers are more interesting than Jim Minter, former sports writer for the Atlanta Journal and later editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Jim, who Dink NeSmith says "was our Google before there was Google," often responds to my columns. His responses are always good, but the one I received last week after my column having to do with carrying chicken feed into hot, smelly chicken houses was, to my mind, a classic. I must share it with you, and here it is:
CHICKEN STUFF
"The only thing between our house and our neighbor, Frank Reeves, was a one-acre cotton patch. (Frank's son, Walter, is a garden-advice guru on Atlanta radio, TV and in the Journal-Constitution).
Frank raised chickens, or rather hens, in three long houses. He sold eggs for a living. You might not know this, but hens at some stage quit laying eggs, or maybe take a vacation from laying. I don't know exactly how this works, but a chicken expert can stick his hand up a hen's rear-end and deduce whether or not the hen has quit laying. That's when you do the culling, taking out the hens who have quit doing their egg duty.
The problem, at least the one for me, was that you have to do the culling when the hens go to roost.
On too many nights, just as I was finishing eating and looking forward to listening to "The Lone Ranger," I'd see Frank Reeves making his way through the cotton patch to our back door. I knew what he wanted.
"Can you get Jimmy to help me cull hens?"
The way you cull hens is in total darkness. Frank plucks one off the roost, sticks his hand up the rear-end, passes the hen to me with instructions to put it into either the "keeper" pen or the "culled out" pen. As he hands the hens to me in the dark, the hen arrives flapping in my face. I'm talking 100 to 200 hens on any given night. About half of them mess on you when Frank passes them back.
Sometimes, Frank would give me a quarter.
My chicken culling ended in 1944 when Frank was called into the Army. Before leaving he made one more after-supper walk through the cotton patch to our back door. This time he was carrying his prized 12-gauge double-barrel shotgun. He wanted to leave it in my custody for the duration, or forever if he didn't get back. It was a nice reward for hazardous duty.
These days, organic vegetables are the rage among a generation who don't know chicken doodle about chickens.
I prefer my tomatoes fertilized by 10-10-10 rather than chicken manure.
Culling hens tops my list of things I'd rather not do.
Grandma and Papa had chickens — which, at that time, would have been called "yard chickens." Later, in an attempt by restaurants to command exorbitant prices, called "free range chickens."
What I learned from my grandparents' chickens were two things. First, these fowl probably were the examples used by my grandfather — though unwittingly on his part — to introduce me to information about procreation. You know, "the facts of life." On this subject, I was as dull as the chickens about which I write. Papa, in a limited way, explained the differences in the rooster and the hen. And, he told me that you could not have "biddies" (baby chicks to you Yankees) without roosters. Also, he smiled, ever so slightly, when I attempted to break up "fights" between roosters and hens. Slowly, I began to sense that there was something going on about which I needed to know more."
All my memories aside, if you think Jim Minter's writing is as good as I do, I hope you will help spread it all over Middle Georgia. It will tickle lots of folks and should improve the productivity of our farmer's fields. Chicken stuff, you know!
Larry Walker is a practicing attorney in Perry. He presently serves on the University System of Georgia Board of Regents. Email: lwalker@whgmlaw.com.
This story was originally published December 5, 2015 at 9:11 PM.