"Son, you want to raise chickens."
No, I didn't.
Another of Jack's hobby ideas was for me to be a chicken rancher. He was serious. He bought me books on the activity. This would be a 4-H project. I'd get a merit badge and he'd get eggs and chickens on the table.
An aside: I was in a 4-H club. Its focus was on electronics. I made a toolbox that was supposed to hold all of my electronics equipment. It was a simple plywood box with a hinged lid with a hasp we could lock it with. I never used it. It would have been pretty useless for tools. There was nothing in it to keep it organized.
I had mixed experiences in my 4-H career.
One year I went to a statewide 4-H competition where I demonstrated making an extension cord. To make things go smoothly, my 4-H leader had me precut the insulation at the proper places. In the demonstration I simply pantomimed the cutting. I removed the insulation from the wires on one end of the cord, fed it through the plug and tried to tie the Underwriter's knot that keeps the cord from being pulled out of the plug.
I tried and tried but the wires were too short for the knot. After struggling a long time (and after the judges told me to relax) I realized that I was working on the wrong end of the cord. Because there were different plugs on the ends of the cord, one end's wires needed to be shorter than the other's. I was working with the wrong end. I went well beyond my allotted time. I didn't win an award.
Electronics wasn't the only thing I did for 4-H.
I kept bees. For some reason, they gave me credit for entomology. I wasn't studying bugs. I would have thought that beekeeping would have been a 4-H category of its own.
And I cooked. I won a blue ribbon in the county fair for the biscuits I entered in the 4-H category. That let me send some biscuits to the state fair. No ribbons came back to me.
Chickens.
5 comments:
You should read The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald, about life on a chicken ranch in the Olympia Mountains of Washington. I didn't know about the chickens. I'm sorry about all you had to go through.
I'm surprised that barnyard animals were allowed in your part o' town.
I don't remember a lot of the things you've been reminiscing about, Chuckbert. Maybe memory loss is a blessing!
And I don't think barnyard animals WERE allowed.
He wanted to buy some chickens with me, too. We got the catalog of fancy breeds. I don't think we came very close to ordering them. My friend June had a couple fancy hens. No roosters, though. She lived on Arizona Ave.
What a good dog Chris was!
Livestock could be had in town? I really came that close to being a chicken rancher? I was hoping that zoning would have saved me had Chris not arrived.
I am so glad for Chris!
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