Wolf Hunt

by Douglas Fodge


From left: Douglas Fodge (age 9), Russ Fodge, local farmer (name unknown), Mack Fodge (age 16), local farmer

It had been one of those summer days that often occurred in Texas. You know the kind; hot, hot, hot to the extent that it could cause mental confusion. City dwellers liked to talk about it being hot enough to fry an egg on a sidewalk, but since cement wasn’t available anywhere near us, even on the roads, we relied on other foolproof indications. One good indicator that the heat was approaching the century mark was when cattle waded into a stock pond during the day and soaked shoulder-deep in the water, but I didn’t really need this evidence. I was exhausted from hauling buckets of water in that heat to the hogs and dogs.

Daddy housed female hounds individually when they were in estrus, and since they were in large crates on long legs about eight feet in the air the females couldn’t exactly go for a stroll to the ponds for drinking water. Naturally, if the females weren’t secured they might mate with males of dubious derivation, and the resulting offspring were true marvels to behold. However, the real treat for me was watching the old sows when I poured water into their water trough and on the ground where once there had been mud. Naturally, in the hot sun their mud puddles had dried to adobe consistency, but after a few buckets of water soaked the soil and Ms. Sow’s snout had rooted a while, the hard-packed adobe was converted into mud. Inevitably Ms. Sow would turn toward me, smile and sink into her newly developed, cool loblolly. “As happy as a sow belly deep in mud” refers to the expression of satisfaction on a hog’s face on such occasions, and I can attest to the fact that it was, and probably still is, second to none in the animal kingdom.

These were the days during one of the worst droughts that Texas had suffered during recorded times, and from 1949 to 1956 nearly all of the 250+ counties in Texas suffered. Many experienced far greater devastation than we in the far northeastern corner of the State. I often attributed the very presence of the subject of this story in our county, wolves, to the fact that they were attracted from drier parts of the state because we had greater amounts of water and rabbits than others during those years. In any event, it was hot and dry, and the daily impact of the oppressive heat and drought was taking its toll on our family and on all our neighbors. Cattlemen had lost entire herds due to dehydration. Fortunately we still had some water in our stock pond, and the Big Pool was just across the fence on Mr. Reynolds’ property, for emergency purposes only.

After a day of toiling in the hot sun with those water buckets and all the other chores around a farm, mostly attended to by the older members of my family, all of us were bone-tired by nightfall. However, heat built up in the house during the day and went away with the speed of a sloth’s gait at night. Thus, one tossed and turned endlessly in attempts to escape the sweat that developed on any part of the skin that wasn’t exposed, and even exposed skin was hot. Early in the evening Mama suggested that I move to a makeshift pallet in front of the entry doorway in the front of the house. If any breeze developed I would be the first to feel it. This was about the best suggestion possible, and I readily accepted.

Even if a breeze never developed, I might be able to hear the whip-poor-will (Caprimulgus vociferous), hoot (probably Bubo virginanus) and screech owls (Megascops asio) voicing their opinions from the woods in front of the house. Birds were about the only animals that resided in this patch of woods since there weren’t any nearby waterholes for terrestrial species to use. After I settled and all was quiet, I could hear singing wafting over the treetops, and I guessed that it was probably the choir from the church on the other side of the woods. However, as luck would have it, the hoot owls cranked up loudly, probably at some interloper into their territory, and drowned out the bass parts of the choir, but even today I can close my eyes and practically hear the singing; man-oh-man could they sing. I even imagined that Suzy, my fishing mentor, was smack-dab in the middle of the congregation, if not the choir, and undoubtedly she was praying for rain to keep the bass alive in the many ponds she fished. In fact, all the black, white and brown congregations throughout the region had been praying for rain for months. I was too young to care much about the welfare of hogs, dogs, cattle etc., but big fish to catch was a matter of great importance. However, the concerted efforts weren’t making much difference as nary a drop fell for weeks on end.

That night we had every door and window open wide (the ones that weren’t jammed permanently shut due to settling of the house). However, it probably didn’t make much difference whether all orifices were open or closed as you could practically see the stars at night by just looking through the cracks in the outer wall or ceiling – this predicament sure made it interesting to stay warm during the wintertime or dry when it rained. After a seemingly infinite amount of tossing and turning on a hard floor, I finally drifted off to sleep. However, sometime in the wee hours of the predawn I was shocked awake by Daddy vaulting out of bed, about eight feet away, while simultaneously yanking on his hunting gear and talking loudly (many of the Fodge clan had powerful vocal cords and were capable of being heard above the roar of a freight train). He was asking Mack and Mama to get out of bed and help him. “Buck has jumped a pack of wolves, and we better get some other dogs out there to help him or the wolves will catch and kill him for sure.” During a quiet interlude, I heard Buck (or some hound, since I couldn’t distinguish their voices) barking on trail somewhere east of the house, probably less than a half-mile away. Almost as if they had awaited a cue, wolves started howling, and it seemed like their howls came from all four directions. Members of the pack were undoubtedly separated on different hunting forays for small game, or any edible game, and they were coordinating their actions to take Buck apart – boy did we have a surprise in store for them.

In short order, Daddy finished tying his hunting boots, and he asked Mama the whereabouts of his flashlight. Mama calmly explained (how she managed to remain calm was beyond me, but she did) “now Russie you know good and well that no one dared touch your hunting flashlight, and it is probably wherever you last laid it in the weeds or on the porch”. And, with that hint Daddy lunged for the doorway, announcing in flight that his flashlight was probably on the front porch where he had been sitting earlier in the evening. His first giant step landed partially on the pallet and in my midriff, and of course he stumbled and fell forward as neither was very firm footing. Although he was as agile as some of the animals he hunted, this unexpected problem resulted in his knee landing on my chest, and his upper body fell beyond me and through the screen door. His next exclamation was, “here’s my flashlight”. Then, he asked me if I wanted to go hunting with them, as he scrambled to his feet and rushed off the porch to go unleash some of the hunting dogs and tether others. This was Daddy’s way of making amends for having practically mashed me into the flooring. Since I wasn’t hurt too badly, I scrambled up and started getting dressed for some fun since there wouldn’t be much sleeping anyway, what with all the commotion that was sure to develop.

I had been reading about wolves in some of Daddy’s hunting magazines. These weren’t your modern-day Macho magazines, although there was the occasional story in them about fellows who hunted practically bare-handed for Mountain Lions or Tigers, but mostly they were very factual, almost scientific, descriptions of lots of things associated with hunting, including detailed information about the genetics of hounds and the latest information about veterinary medicine. Undoubtedly these magazines provided my first exposure to science. One such magazine was The Hunter’s Horn – everyone should buy a few issues for their personal library!

Wolves came in many varieties, and we had the Texas Red Wolf (Canis rufus) in the 40s and 50s in East Texas, but we also had many coyotes (Canis latrans) encroaching from the west into Mr. Wolf’s territory. Male Red wolves could reach 80 pounds weight and the females weren’t far behind, but the coyotes were a distant 25-35 pounds, perhaps. Additionally, we had feral dogs-wolf-coyote hybrids in our area. Prior to the years of the drought, the Red Wolves, coyotes and feral half-breeds had been rarely found in Red River County, but by the early to mid-1950s they appeared, although I’m not 100% certain that any of the large wolves were full-blooded Red Wolves. Although they were considerably smaller than the Red Wolf, the coyotes were better adapted to their environment, and there were far greater numbers of them. The coyotes interbred with the wolves and the feral dogs to the point that soon the Red Wolf was all but gone and a hybrid variety of wolf had taken its place. Today, the only Red Wolves in existence are in zoos. The mid sized hybrids were plentiful, and they were even more capable of surviving in our area than the coyotes. They had some of the characteristics of all their ancestors, but chiefly they were mid-sized, displayed a range of hair colors, but many had the long snout of their coyote ancestry. Soon they were in such abundance that they became a problem.

Under most conditions, wolf packs had well-defined territories, but of course at the fringes of the packs they often interbred and fought over a variety of issues. Their range could be a radius of many miles, dependent largely on the amount of game and water and competition for these items. If game and water were scarce in their territory, they might cover as much as 20-25 miles during a night of hunting. It wasn’t hard to marvel at how well conditioned they and the hounds were.

Wolf pack ranges and foraging habits were well known to the hunters, and on any given night the hunters often drove or walked to a particular territory to let their hounds lose for a night of fun chasing the local wolf pack. The wolves, for their part, were mostly intent on finding something to eat and since there was plentiful small game but very little larger game, such as deer, the packs tended to split each night into small hunting groups. Their howling was a simple means to communicate with each other about the success of the hunt for food and other crucial matters. Thus, if one turned a pack of hounds lose in a wolf pack’s territory, in a matter of no more than an hour the hounds would cross the path of some hunting group, and a hunt was on.

When the increasing numbers of hybrid wolves depleted the rabbit populations and calves began to be killed, the farmers and ranchers took matters into their own hands, and their initial actions often didn’t involve hunters. They either purchased poison (strychnine etc.) and baited traps with deadly meats or bought specialized shotguns that could be baited and loaded with ammo. These devices killed lots of wolves and many a good hunting dog as well. Although hundreds of wolves were killed in this manner, and the people hung the dead animals on fence posts as warnings to other wolves, the hybrid wolf population thrived because the effect was a thinning of their population enough to allow all the rabbits to repopulate the territory. Moreover, few adult wolves were killed since they were too smart for such trivial entrapments, and this frustrated the farmers and ranchers. Eventually Daddy and other hunters were encouraged to bring their hounds to run the wolves off the ranches. Once the killing devices were inactivated they complied with the requests, and the wolves often did relocate because of the constant agitation from the hounds and hunters.

To an outsider, the rapid-fire preparations for a hunt involving just my family would have been outrageous, totally chaotic and full of sheer bedlam. Wolves howling, everyone feverishly racing to and fro, and Buck hot on the trail of something in the distance was sufficient inducement to have raised Daddy’s adrenalin level to a very high level, and the hounds reacted similarly and they were in a high-pitched fever to get going. Imagine the noise a pack of
hounds could make barking and howling at the top of their lungs and vocal cords in anticipation. To top it all off Daddy frequently blew his hunting horn to encourage Buck’s venture. [Blowing a hunting horn is not a lost art. Two Fodge men, nephew Lloyd and brother Robert, can blow a hunting horn properly.] I suspect Daddy signaled for Buck to hold the course and that help was on the way, but who knows what the devil Buck heard – he was intent on catching one of those wolves and boxing it’s jaws!

Buck probably needed a supporting cast, since he was an oversized Beagle, about 17” tall at the shoulder and perhaps 20 pounds in his prime, but he was full-sized in spirit and determination – a little salty dog. [Regulation Beagles came in two AKC size classes: 13” and 15”.] Buck joined the Fodge household via a trade between Daddy and another hunter, Tom Crow, family friend, foxhunter and craftsman of hunting horns, from Blossom, Texas (named originally Blossom Prairie by Davy Crockett). Daddy traded an untrained, young hound to Mr. Crow in exchange for Buck. Mr. Crow traded a good hunting dog for an untrained hound because he couldn’t catch Buck. Buck shunned the human hand as much as possible, but a couple of times he allowed Mama (no one else needed to try) to feed him and tend to his wounds – naturally, the rest of us watched from a respectful distance on those occasions. To bring Buck to his new home, Daddy had ridden the bus to Blossom, coaxed Buck on a hunting foray, and then the two of them walked the 6 to 8 miles to our house, taking a cross-country tour of course. Every time for years later that Buck’s former owner came for a visit he heard the latest exploits of Buck from Daddy (Daddy could flat out tell a good story, including mimicking all the voices of his hounds on trail and what they did in a race.). This prompted Mr. Crow to inform Daddy that he had traded the untrained hound for a yellow tomcat, and the tomcat was also useless. This was good-natured jesting, and although Mr. Crow was a trusted friend, no one believed the bit about the tomcat.

We occasionally had other Beagles, but of course none were quite like Buck. One other notable Beagle that got to go on a few hunts was Judge, although I can’t recall if he was on this hunt. Judge was about 9” tall, and he might have weighed 8 lbs (size of a toy Poodle), but his short legs couldn’t navigate the tall grass and weeds so he had to hitchhike – in one of the large pockets on Daddy’s hunting jacket. When the hounds treed an animal Daddy would set Judge on the ground, and he would proceed to bark orders in his deep bass voice to everyone in sight – hence his name. He always prompted lots of laughs, and once Daddy carried Judge to town to prove to other hunters that such an animal actually existed.

In contrast, Buck had a fine, chop-mouth and after I received some instruction I could recognize him even in a large pack of hounds. This time Buck was hot on the trail of something, and we all imagined that it must be a wolf. Soon there was a virtual army of supporting cast on the way. As each hound was unleashed it ran immediately in the general direction of Buck’s voice, and each barked about every time its right front foot hit the ground, so the sound effects were like a freight train roaring and clanging along tracks through the night. With about a dozen hounds strung 20-30 yards apart, this was enough to scare the fangs out of any wolf, or so I hoped.

Shortly thereafter we marched off in the middle of the predawn night with a low-hanging quarter moon on the horizon providing some dim light. Daddy walked by the moonlight, or sometimes carried a kerosene lantern, in an effort to save the batteries in his flashlight. Naturally he could see at night, as did Mack, but I stumbled and fumbled my way along in an effort to keep apace. Mack had a couple of big males (fightin’ dogs) on leashes, and they practically pulled him along, all 135 lbs with rocks in his pockets. I believe that Mack was about 16 at the time, and I was perhaps 9.

We had walked about a half-mile by the time most of the hounds joined Buck. They followed his voice and ran at full speed, but Buck had to stop and sniff the ground to locate and follow the prey. Since all were fairly well trained hounds they were not easily distracted, and if a hound consistently was distracted by some other game trail during a race, it soon became a candidate for the trading block. About another half-mile of walking, and we were on Mr. Sample’s property headed toward the Bagwell highway, and this turn of events caused some concern since automobiles and hounds chasing an animal didn’t mix very well. Abruptly, however, the barking of the lead hounds seemed to change directions, at first eastwardly, then toward the north and finally toward the northwest. Daddy told us to stop, and I liked that. After a few minutes, he exclaimed aloud “it looks like it might not be a wolf that Buck jumped or it could be a young wolf and he wants to get back with the main pack in the west, over beyond Mr. Pollan’s place. Mack, asked/added “maybe, but we heard a lot of wolves howling.” Daddy responded with a command, “Mack, I want you to take the two big dogs and head over across the Midway road just north of Red Hill and wait on the race to come to you. When they get close, I want you to turn the dogs lose, and they’ll catch whatever it is pretty quickly and kill it. Whatever animal they are chasing is circling around and will probably come straight at you.” This command was given with such certitude that Mack turned immediately and was out of sight in the dark in a heartbeat, the answer to his original question & statement somewhere in the partial ether.

Since he had from 1 to 1.5 miles of distance to cover and not much time to get there, Mack was in a hurry. One thing for certain, my family had plenty of stamina and a little walk of a mile or two was nothing to them as they often walked more than 10 miles on a hunting trip. Their walking was done with heavy clothing, boots, and perhaps each even carried a heavy hunting rifle and occasionally held a hound or two on a leash – no need for gymnasium workouts if you did that all your life. I had shorter legs than the others, and I had to struggle to keep up with any of them. Fortunately for the next half-hour we would walk a short distance and then stop to discern the direction the hounds were taking. During these interludes I usually shuffled about in the dark, since I was nervously looking over my shoulder because I was concerned that something was going to jump me from behind a bush.

We followed the race in a general circular arc and along the way Daddy occasionally yelled encouragement or tooted different signals on his hunting horn to the hounds. These also alerted Mack about our position, and he was undoubtedly nearing the designated spot by this time. I occasionally yelled along the way as well, but my yells were made when limbs and branches whacked me in the face or I stumbled over something, and there was plenty of opportunity for such. Daddy would have walked straight over the peak of Mt. Everest in order to keep apace of his hounds and track the details of the race. However, knowledge that the animal was racing toward the pack for protection was comforting to me because it meant that Mama Wolf probably wasn’t behind every bush I encountered.

Another half-hour of walking and it was perfectly clear that the prey was headed straight at Mack’s presumed position, and Daddy picked up the pace. It was all I could do to keep up with him since he was about 6’1”, and I was less than 5’ at the time, but I wasn’t going to stray too far behind. There’s no substitute for a fear-inspired adrenalin flow to increase one’s strength and stamina! About the time we got even with the Big Pool, just south of Mr. Pollan’s farm house, we heard Mack unleash the two fresh hounds and they began immediately to bark as if they were sight racing after the prey (that’s what I was told). Now he picked up the pace toward the sound, and although Daddy was about 50 at the time and smoked roll-your-own cigarettes around the clock, it was all I could do to keep pace. While I huffed and puffed to keep up, the prey must have been frightened out of its wits since it took the hounds on an extended tour up through the pines on Red Hill and then back around to the west and then north generally toward the original destination, or what I perceived as its original destination. This was good because Daddy slowed to a fast walk, and I caught up. By now the dawn was lighting up the surroundings, and I could see better, which was somewhat comforting.

Finally, the prey circled back west of Mr. Pollan’s house; such was its fatal mistake. I could hear Mack yelling instructions and encouragements to the hounds, and just about the time we crossed the Midway Road, the barking changed to baying. This meant that the hounds had surrounded the prey, and occasionally I could hear a hound let out a squeal. Soon we arrived on the scene, and the hounds had indeed backed the prey, an almost grown wolf, into the side of a dry creek bed. Its backside was actually protected by the steep bank of the dry creek and by roots protruding from a tree growing partially out of the bank. The hounds charged the animal from a span of perhaps 45 degrees, if that, and they were paying the price and weren’t making much headway toward capturing or killing the wolf. Naturally, Buck was in the middle of all this, but he was pretty cautious with his charges.

It was a riveting experience, and every time a hound lunged at the wolf, the wolf’s head swiveled that direction faster than your eyes could follow. I would hear the squeal of the hound as the wolf’s long pointed snout and jaws snapped shut on its head, ear, jowl etc. About the only moving parts in the fight were the wolf’s head swiveling to and fro and hounds lunging into the fray. Daddy concluded that there were too many hounds lunging at the wolf and that they were interfering with each other, and the wolf would eventually slash most of them. Thus, he and Mack began to leash hounds and tie them to bushes away from the fight to make space for a few hounds, including those Mack had leashed for the duration of the race. Once most of the hounds were out of the way, the smaller number of hounds continued the fight. Of course, Buck was still in the fray as he was impossible to catch, but he was pretty smart and kept out of the way of both hounds and wolf.

Since the noisy fight transpired within about 50 yards of the Midway Road, several farmers driving to Detroit heard the noise and stopped, and soon they crowded about to watch the fight. With more room to operate, it wasn’t really much of a fight since the hounds would charge as one, with about the same mentality of linebackers of a football team. They didn’t seem to care how much the wolf bared his teeth nor how deep the teeth sank into their flesh, they went for the kill. Eventually they wore down the wolf and then about as quickly as one could sing the first line of the The Yellow Rose of Texas, one hound grabbed the flank of the young male wolf, and when the wolf turned to pare this offense another hound grabbed the wolf by the nape of the neck, and in a matter of seconds the fight was over.

The rest of the hunt was centered round getting the hounds back home, fed and tended to. Daddy inspected each one of them and patched up their wounds, mostly with some kind of salve and kerosene. The hounds were tired from chasing the wolf roughly 5 or 6 miles and after a few licks of their wounds they went fast asleep, even in the hot weather. Such was the experience of a young fellow in rural Texas bereft of telephones, running water, movie houses, electricity, radios, TVs, and other modern appliances. It’s too bad that others have not had an opportunity to experience such events and activities.


This is a portion of Red River County, Texas showing the birthplaces of Russ Fodge and Sons. The purple line is the track of the wolf hunt. Before the mid 1950's none of the roads were paved, with the exception of US 82.

Remedies for Treating Screwworm Larvae

by Douglas Fodge



We had chased the bull calf all over the pasture until we panted like one of Daddy’s hounds on a hot day, but still the calf couldn’t be cornered and caught. I suppose he suspected that he wouldn’t like what we had in store for him that afternoon! We had discovered that the calf had a bad wound on his belly, probably on his naval, and the wound was teeming with the maggots (insect larvae). A frothy, bloody discharge appeared on the surface surrounding the wound, and up close the stench emanating from the open site was pretty strong. If left to the designs of the screwworm larvae, the calf would soon be a part of history. We had to do something, and fairly rapidly at that, and there was no time to wait several days for the arrival of a Vet, moreover we had little or no money to spend on his services.

Screwworm larvae represented the parasitic stage in the lifecycle of a fly (now named Cochliomyia hominivorax), and prior to about 1960 they, and close kin, caused severe damage to domestic and wild animals, and infrequently people (most frequently the nasopharynx tissues), across Texas and much of the south. These flies were nearly twice the size of the common housefly. More than 100,000 species of two-winged fly species had been identified by the 1950s, and several attacked animals. Myiasis was the veterinary term for a fly strike, and each species of fly had a slightly different mode of attack, a different life cycle and a different range of occurrence. Some flies attacked rabbits (Cuterebra sp or Dermatobia hominis), others deer etc., but if any of the troublesome species laid eggs near open wounds on animals, the eggs had plenty of rich nutrients for their needs. Of all of the species, the screwworm fly was the worst one because each individual female fly could lay perhaps 500 eggs, and the eggs hatched shortly thereafter.

The eggs quickly changed (metamorphed) into larvae and migrated into a wound. These beasts had strong mandibles for chewing that were complimented by an enzyme-laden digestive system, and they were capable of destroying an animal, inside out. Wounds did not need to be elaborate and could be caused by anything from a scratched insect bite or a thorn’s penetration of an animal’s skin, no matter how slight it may have seemed. An animal’s navel or a thorn penetration (holes) usually concealed the extent of the problem, but surface wounds could easily be enlarged from simple scratches to large holes by the larvae. It was rumored that screwworm flies carried infectious bacteria and viruses, and perhaps other things as well, but the big problem with them were the larvae. Left unattended, screwworm maggots could kill an animal in less than 2 weeks, and during that time thousands of the larvae would mature into pupae, leave the wound and burrow into the topsoil where the fly’s lifecycle was completed. This species was an obligate parasite (to complete their life cycle the larvae could only develop in wounds of animals). Fortunately, by the mid 1960s, screwworm flies were eradicated as far south as Central America when the USDA (U.S. Dept. of Ag.) released X-irradiated, sterile, male flies. When these males mated with females, their offspring did not lay fertile eggs and the life cycle was stopped in its tracks.

Navels were particularly vulnerable sites for screwworm flies to lay their eggs, and the bull calf was a prime example of this since his navel was teeming with the maggots. After about 15-30 minutes of chasing the calf, we finally cornered and downed him. Daddy tied the calf’s back feet together and sat on them, and I lay across his front legs and held his head on the ground. I don’t know who was worse from the chase, the calf or me, but at least I wasn’t about to be worked on, and he was. I suppose that had a Vet attended to the calf’s miseries, he would have used sterile, stainless steel instruments to make the corrective measures that were necessary, but we didn’t have any of those. Daddy had his pocketknife, and it certainly wasn’t sterile, but neither was the wound.

With the knife Daddy cut a small hardwood limb and removed the bark and limbs from it. Then he fashioned a small hooked point on one end of the tapered stick. This foot-long stick was used to dig the maggots out of the wound, and since there were hundreds, if not thousands in the wound, the process to snare the maggots one-at-a-time and pull them out of the decaying flesh was lengthy, estimated at 30-45 minutes. Although the screwworm maggots would have eventually killed the calf, maggots of some other species have been used, even in modern times, to clean out a wound leaving it almost bacterial- and fungal-free. However, the medical community used maggots raised under aseptic conditions for this practice, rather than allowing some flies to blow the wound! After fishing maggots out of the wound, Daddy decided that he had cleared out enough of them to take the next step in the treatment process.

Any time we treated an animal for screwworm infestations, we were concerned and uncertain that all the maggots had been removed, much less any other contaminating microbial species. Therefore, the next procedure was aimed at killing any leftover maggots and preventing a second infection before the wound healed. On a farm there were plenty of other marauders (blowfly species of the genera Lucilia, Calliphora, Phormia, and Chrysomyia ) awaiting the attractiveness of an open wound, and any number of them were capable of introducing infectious agents to the site if they got the chance, although these flies were not obligate parasites and did not need to lay eggs in wounds to complete life cycles. Out of his pocket Daddy produced his omnipresent bottle of inexpensive disinfectant (coal oil, kerosene), and he doused the interior and exterior surface surrounding the wound with this solution. Coal oil was used to disinfect anything that needed to be disinfected on our farm. Then he smeared (Product 66, a Balm or Salve of unknown commercial sources) a tarry product about one-half inch deep on the inside and outside of the wound. The balm was composed of things to disinfect the wound, and it had a black, thick consistency, and I doubt that anything could penetrate it. For all I know, it may have been asphalt, but it didn’t have the consistency of asphalt and didn’t need to be heated before use. Since we didn’t have suturing materials, the calf was let loose, complete with an open wound covered thoroughly with this product. The calf recovered pretty nicely, and when we sold him that fall he brought a decent price.

Maggots did not have lungs, but they needed oxygen for survival. Since there weren’t lungs to inspire the air and oxygen, the maggots relied on a series of tubes (spiracles) located on their posterior surface to breath the air. These tubes carried air to the interior of the worm, and if any substance clogged the spiracles the maggots would be suffocated. I am confident that Product 66 killed maggots because it clogged their breathing apparatus, and they suffocated in the process. Many farmers used any oily substances that were available, ranging from axle grease, motor oil, mineral oil and even cooking oils to coat the interior of wounds that contained screwworms. According to my cousin James R. Miller, Uncle Jack often mixed some sulfur with Vaseline, and used this mixture to treat cattle for screwworm infestations. Since it contained sulfur, it probably also inhibited microbial growth in the wounds.

Cattle weren’t the only animals that suffered screwworm infestations, and on other occasions we treated various farm animals that had an infected wound, usually started as a small cut. One special animal that we treated was one of Daddy’s priced foxhounds that suffered either a cut or scratched the skin on his scrotum. We suspected that it occurred while the dog tried to clamber through a barbed wire fence, but as talented and well trained as Daddy’s hounds were, they couldn’t talk, and we never knew what happened. Sure enough in a few days after suffering this indignity, flies of some species laid eggs near the wound and within hours the foxhound, and we, had a big problem. However, catching one of Daddy’s hounds could be difficult even when they were healthy, and this one avoided us for more than a day before we finally caught him. Some of Daddy’s hounds were practically wild animals, and I recall vividly one prized Beagle, Buck, who lived at our house for 12 years, eventually dying of old age, and Mama’s hand ever laid on him during the 12 years, and she caught him only twice after he had been injured in some hunting incident and didn’t run away from her. By the time we caught Daddy’s foxhound with the infestation, the maggots had already done considerable damage. As rapidly as possible, we repeated the procedure that we had used on the calf, and the hound recovered after a few weeks. Eventually the hound was carried on hunting trips and he began to hunt at a level up to his previous standards.

Following the foxhound’s successful show of vigor in the hunts, Daddy began to wonder if the foxhound had suffered permanent sterility (castration) from the larval infestation. As soon as a female was available, Daddy penned the foxhound in a kennel with a female in estrus to test his virility. In due time, we had evidence that the foxhound was fully recovered. The female gave birth to a fine litter of healthy pups, and many of them became fine foxhounds.

While the field surgery procedures described herein were gruesome and seem primitive by modern standards, others in the region practiced them just as we did, and similar procedures are still used today in many areas of the world. They worked almost every time. Nonetheless, screwworms took a major toll on cattle ranches and farms across Texas and the region, and as mentioned previously, screwworm infestations often went undetected until it was too late to save an animal. Experts in modern Vet Schools have estimated that an outbreak of screwworm flies, similar to those of the first half of the 20th century, would cost the US cattle industry upwards of nearly $1 billion per year, not to mention the impact that such an outbreak would have on other animal production industries. While such an outbreak is unlikely, should such an occurrence happened, I take comfort in the knowledge that one procedure would be available to help save animals, at least for those of us old enough to recall the treatment.

Ice Cream On A Sunday Afternoon

by Douglas Fodge



The peach trees were almost collapsing under the weight of fruit, and I was licking my chops in anticipation, but not just for ripe peaches. The entire extended family was waiting for an invitation from Aunt Evie (AE) and Uncle Carl (UC) to sample some peach ice cream over at their home. Ice cream at their home was a warm weather routine and a fine social event, but they usually made ice cream with bananas in it. That is, until local peaches started ripening. Now, mind you, I ate ice cream at lots of other local homes, but theirs was tops on my chart. At the time I didn’t have a clue about why I liked theirs better than other ice creams I ate, but I am finally beginning to understand.

UC and Daddy were brothers and AE and Mama were sisters so we had almost a double-whammy set of parents, and three double-first cousins thrown in for good measure. Casual observation pointed out the differences more than the similarities of the four. The major difference between Mama and AE were size and temperament; otherwise they had lots of similar interests and motivation levels. Both women loved music, reading and could lecture on many subjects with little provocation. Neither of them tolerated foolishness very well, but both had great a sense of humor and fine intellects. On the male side, physical appearances were slightly apparent since Daddy had smooth facial skin, but UC’s face was wrinkled to the maximum extent possible. Had all of the wrinkles been flattened, UC’s face might have been at least half-again its size. However, the depth of each wrinkle was an appropriate reflection of UC’s kind and gentle nature. It wasn’t so much that Daddy was unkind or not gentle, but he was so absorbed in his hobbies of hunting and fishing that he was sometimes unaware of things around him – focused, focused, focused on catching the game, spare no life or limb. Daddy trained hounds and possessed general hunting skills that were second to none of his local hunting buddies. He had little interest in anything mechanical or electrical although he was a decent gardener. In marked contrast, UC had zero interest in hunting and fishing, but he constructed mechanical garden tools. This was before you could run to Home Depot and buy them. He built something with lumber regularly, and all devices worked well for the intended purpose. For example, UC built the house where I was born, assisted by Daddy. Both men and Uncle Bob, their younger brother, were skilled musicians, and I remember hearing all three of them whistling tunes while they worked, and they whistled on key at that. Mama and AE could also whistle pretty well, but they primarily sang hymns when they worked. The women had more formal education than the men, but all were smart. Ice cream making was one of those areas where AE and UC made their mark, at least as judged by me. Theirs was the best ice cream in the region as far as I was concerned, but then no one ever accused me of possessing discriminating taste buds or having unbiased opinions.

For most of the kids, the consumers, ice cream was merely a delicious frozen treat, and they paid scant attention to the process involved in the making. We were usually too busy eating ice cream and playing card games or croquette to bother with such details. However, I recognized even as a kid that the ice cream I ate at numerous other homes around our community just wasn’t up to snuff (acceptable quality). My interest in this subjective conclusion resulted in a lifelong curiosity and prompted an occasional investigation to attempt to explain why I thought their ice cream was better than others. The investigation got rolling when I was in college and has continued intermittently through the years. Partly having to take physics classes and eating homemade ice cream ‘round the world, much of which didn’t live up to their standards, fueled my investigation. Most homemade ice creams had too much fat in them and were not light and fluffy – things I expected in ice cream when we ate UC and AE’s product.

AE & UC’s prowess in making ice cream was probably self-taught, and I’m pretty sure he couldn’t explain any of the physics, but AE might have given it an A for effort. Had a food technology textbook been available UC probably wouldn’t have read it since he had really poor eyesight and didn’t care that much for reading. For example, after their offspring left home as adults, Jim Curry or I often traveled with UC when he made trips to new customers. UC drove a truck, and due to his poor eyesight he wanted someone to go along on the first trips to help find and read the signs. These were the days prior to modern freeways with well-lighted signs. He could have read the signs, but he wore really thick eyeglasses that weren’t amenable for darting your line of sight all over the place, especially at nighttime, to find the signs. Afterwards, he didn’t need to find and read signs as the route was memorized. Making homemade ice cream didn’t require 20:20 vision, but to make it time-after-time to the same consistency required fine powers of observation, tasting skills, and a good memory of what did, or did not work well. They certainly mastered this.

To manufacture homemade ice cream an emulsion, foam and dispersion must be formed among the ingredients. If you got all the parts working properly, then you produced an ice cream that had tiny ice crystals, the appropriate amount of dissolved air, and thoroughly distributed and stabilized fat globules. These three areas done properly gave ice cream the appropriate mouth feel and texture. Theirs was the only ice cream I sampled locally with this characteristic. Some years ago I started examining recipes for homemade ice cream, and recently I obtained the following recipe (from Vivian Fodge Patterson, one of our double-first cousins) that was used by AE for preparing their homemade ice cream:

“Mother mixed ½ gallon of whole milk, 1 ½ cups of granulated sugar, a pinch of salt, 3 well-beaten eggs, 1 tsp of vanilla extract. They usually made Banana Ice Cream, and she sliced 3 bananas, added those and then filled the ice cream bucket about 2/3 full to allow room for expansion. Daddy always used blocks of ice because it was harder and didn’t melt as quickly as pre-chipped ice. He chipped the ice block with his ice pick as needed and added the ice and rock salt around the freezer bucket. When the ice cream mixture could no longer be turned with the hand crank, he covered the entire assembly to let it harden for a while. Done with this part, he sat back under the shade tree, rolled himself a Prince Albert tobacco cigarette and relaxed while the cream finished.”

I calculated the amount of fat in AE’s ice cream recipe as being somewhere between 80 and 90 grams/gallon, about 2.5%. This estimate depended largely on the fat content of the whole milk she used, and in those days the fat content could have varied by as much as 20 to 30%, if not more, on occasions when they bought milk from individual farmers who owned Jersey cows. Compared to eight other vintage recipes for homemade ice cream from various parts of the USA, AE’s recipe averaged about 25% less fat and calories and had even less protein than others. Although the eight other recipes in my collection yielded low-fat ice creams, AE’s would have been ultra-low-fat, yet it had superb mouth feel and taste and consistently yielded better ice cream than any I have made.

Unless a commercial producer of ice cream used ultra low-temperature, high-speed extrusion equipment and air-injection systems, it would have been hard for them to easily make a commercial ice cream that was as high-quality as theirs. For decades ice cream manufacturers have used large quantities of whole milk, whole cream and eggs (principal sources of fat and protein in ice cream) to overcome the formation of ice crystals and to produce premium quality ice cream. Some of the homemade ice cream recipes required 9 to 10 eggs/gallon and used Half-N-Half rather than milk. This trend led to the current popular, premium quality ice creams such as Haagen Das or Ben & Jerry’s. For commercial companies, it was probably less expensive to overwhelm the mouth feel and texture by increasing the amount of stabilized fat globules in their products than to pay for the extra processing costs associated with preparing a high-quality, low-fat ice cream. Even today low-fat ice creams sold by premium brand companies aren’t really low-fat compared to AE’s recipe. If the answer was not in the recipe, then what contributed to the superb mouth feel and taste of their ice cream?

As far back as the 1960s, we have been spoiled by icemakers in refrigerators or by a 7-11 on every corner where we purchased chipped ice, or the equivalent of chipped ice. When we were kids there were few such options, at least in our small communities. We purchased ice from an icehouse, and it was either in blocks (25, 50 or 100 lbs per block) or chipped. In our community, the Martin and Norwood families sold and delivered ice to local residents. Generally, the blocks of ice arrived wrapped in discarded newspapers and covered with thick quilts. Once you got it home, the ice was stored in either an icebox or in a tub, and neither was refrigerated. Then we raced against time during the hot weather months to use it before the ice absorbed enough heat from the air and melted. Chipped ice, due to the huge increase in surface area of the chips, was warmer and this was due to the fact that it absorbed heat rapidly and melted much more quickly than block ice. A few times after I was old enough to help him make the ice cream, I went with UC to buy block ice, and he always mentioned to me that we were going to a particular ice house because they had the coldest ice. He never used chipped ice. We brought the blocks of ice home and started making ice cream as rapidly as possible. We chipped the ice as needed to fill the freezer space around the ice cream container, and this meant that the chipped ice he used was a lot colder than most used by others. UC also had a few other tricks that he used to top off the ice cream preparation.

As he added the freshly chipped ice and covered it with rock salt, UC stirred the mixture vigorously for several minutes, almost to the point of building a foam head on the mixture. This rapid churning had a direct impact on the lightness and fluffiness of the ice cream as it allowed a lot more air to be dissolved in the emulsified liquid before it started to freeze. I do not recall others doing this when they made ice cream. Another thing that UC did was also important; he preferred to use the hand-driven ice cream makers rather than electric models. Even if he used the electric models he often had rigged the equipment so that when the electric motor stopped, he could replace it with a hand-crank. Then, he continued to churn the mixture with the hand crank. Once the mixture froze solidly, turning the crank caused the entire assembly to turn. When this happened either Jim Curry or I, or someone of the younger set, were told to sit on the ice cream freezer to help hold it in place so he could continue to churn the mixture. The continued churning motion in the freezing mixture prevented the formation of large ice crystals (coarseness) in the last part of the cream that froze, that portion that is the most concentrated with sugar and fat globules. He also prevented air from escaping the product. Thus, part of UC and AE’s success undoubtedly was related to their understanding that he could overcome the low fat, protein and sugar content of the recipe if he kept turning the crank long after others stopped. If they used fruit in the preparation, then the additional churning motion was even more important.

In this day and age of behemoth football players and exaggeration of size in men, it is worth mentioning that UC weighed about 160 lbs (with rocks in his pockets), but he had an advantage over lots of his contemporaries. These were the times before forklifts were widely available, and as a truck driver delivering heavy construction lumber he had to unload and stack the lumber at a customer’s office, all by hand. Several of us can testify to the fact that it was a rare event when the customers provided someone to help unload the truck. One 2” x 12” x 16’ piece of freshly cut, moisture-laden piece of oak weighed perhaps 125-150 pounds, and 8” x 8” x 12’ posts weighed even more. The trailer was about 32 feet long and stacked with hundreds of these things. Thus, if a fellow unloaded and stacked a few truckloads of these every workday, what resistance could a little hand crank on an ice cream machine possibly offer? What better testimony to their intelligence I cannot imagine than their ability to independently determine how to consistently produce superb ice cream.

Salting Plants and Animals

by Douglas Fodge



Mr. Ed’s face was flushed and a halo of steam was coming off his head he was so angry. His anger was directed at us, and especially at Mr. C. Unknown to us, but discovered by Mr. Ed, we were pickling more than the cucumbers. All the fish, other animals and plants in the creek behind his house were dead, and that little creek was where we dumped effluent from the pickle plant. This was bad news for us.

The plant had dumped wastes in that creek for decades and nothing had ever happened to the fish. Something had changed because since time immortal freshwater invertebrates, minnows and perch had been killed by salt water. Always the briny effluent from the Pickle Shed had contained some salt, occasionally up to about 1.1 lbs of salt/gallon, or some lime. This caused much consternation for us, for local citizens and for the Texas Water Quality Board, the forerunner of the Texas EPA, and it may have been the straw that eventually broke the camel’s back. Prior to the observation of dead fish and plants most complaints had been about the odor emanating from the Pickle Shed.

What happened? Answer: we grew too fast and overlooked some things that would be obvious today, but weren’t then. Mr. C. was ideally suited to grow a business, but he could have benefited from having technical people on his staff. During the day he worked the telephone and visited with potential customers who dropped by for discussions and to “kick the tires”, and there wasn’t much time left to tend to technical matters, although he was trained as an engineer. Mr. C. had spent a career participating with marketers and promoters to grow a local brewery (Schlitz) into a nationwide juggernaut. Thus, the moment a visitor indicated an interest in a special product, Mr. C. knew how to get their business. Even today after 35 years of promoting ideas, product and process concepts, marketable products and of prospecting for new customers, I still am amazed at Mr. C.’s ability in these areas.

Our business expanded along two major lines: fresh produce and salting of cucumbers. We shipped fresh cucumbers to such places as Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, New Orleans, St. Louis and Chicago. On paper this looked like a good business activity, but we lost about 50% of our shipments from spoilage of the produce. After a few losses, Mr. C. stopped this activity and concentrated on other things.

To give the reader an understanding of Mr. C.’s ability to develop business, one or two projects stand out above the others. A Food Broker indicated that they needed pickles for relishes, but had a hard time acquiring enough quality raw materials. Ironically, each day we stationed men to hand pick and discard crooked (crooks) and knobby cucumbers (nubbins) that were in the farmers’ produce. We either threw the crooks and nubbins away or gave them to any farmer who could use them. Under Mr. C.’s leadership we weighed and paid farmers about $0.40/100 lbs for these previously discarded cucumbers. The farmers were happy to get paid for something that was a cull in the past. We pickled the crooks and nubbins like all the other cucumbers, and Mr. C. sold the product for the best $/100 lbs sales price that the company ever achieved. The business axiom that I learned: Turn Your Trash Into A Specialty Product For Your Customer. The other long-term notable result of this product development: a niece, Francis, received a nickname, Nubbin, from my brother Mack. Another business activity that expanded our effluents was the Muleshoe project, another story.

In a short amount of time, we were salting cucumbers from near and far, and this eventually resulted in the need to dispose of huge amounts of brine. For example, when we filled a vat with cucumbers, we dumped either bushel baskets or big sacks, weighing 50 or 100 lbs, respectively. For every 500 lbs of cucumbers (10 bu) dumped into a vat, we added 25 lbs of rock salt. When the vat was filled to within 6 inches of the top we added saturated salt water (brine) to cover them. The brine had two principal functions: to allow desirable bacteria to thrive and to preserve the cucumbers.

Osmotic action caused by the brine drew water and biochemicals out of the cucumbers. The salt-tolerant microbes, primarily bacteria of the genus Leuconostoc and Lactobacilli, used the sugars and nitrogen-containing substances for metabolism and growth, and in the absence of oxygen, they produced carbon dioxide, lactic acid, smaller amounts of ethanol and acetic acid as waste products of their metabolism. The last three waste products were the pickling agents.

If there were problems with the freshly filled tanks, they were of two prncipal kinds: a) the fermentation process did not occur or b) there was too much fermentation. The lack of fermentation was rare, but when the expected small amount of foam and the proper aroma did not develop, the solution was to give the vat a transfusion. We drained a large amount of the liquor out and replaced it with brine from 2 or 3 functioning vats. I didn’t know it at the time, but the bad vat did not have the proper bacteria in it, and that meant that they were not present on the cucumbers in the field. In contrast, the properly functioning vat had been filled with cucumbers from a field harboring the proper bacteria. At the time, I had a difficult time understanding what the word transfusion meant much less understanding the microbial ecology.

The second problem was too much fermentation, and in this case carbon dioxide built up beneath the cap to such an extent that it blew the cap apart. This happened more frequently than too little fermentation and occurred when cucumbers had excess fermentable substances in them; I guess the farmers really pumped them up with fertilizers. Usually these vats also had foam up to 3 feet tall on them. This wasn’t considered a dire emergency, but we usually removed 30-50 bushels of cucumbers as rapidly as feasible, put them into another vat, and recapped the damaged vessel. Neither of these problems contributed much to the effluent from the plant.

In all vats, we measured the saline concentration daily and gradually added salt until the content was nearly 16% salt, and then we maintained this level of salt until the product was shipped to a customer. As is obvious, we used a huge amount of salt in the operation. On our busiest days thousands of pounds of rock salt, one bucket and shovel full at a time, were handled by two full-time people! We bought salt in train car quantities, shoveled it from boxcar to truck and then into storage bins. My back aches with the memory of those ordeals. It should not surprise the reader to learn that we used stainless steel wherever possible to slow the rusting process, but nails, hinges, belt buckets, zippers etc. succumbed to the salt and decomposed in record time.

After a few months in the brine, the cucumbers were removed from the vats and shipped to customers. We then dumped the brine and refilled the vats with clean water and added about 25 lbs of lime to it to prevent mosquitoes and other critters from growing in it as the weather warmed. When the cucumber harvest began to arrive the next summer, we dumped the limed water, rinsed and scrubbed the inside of each vat until it was spotless. The vats had a 1.5” diameter bung in the bottom and another about 6 inches above the bottom to aid in release of the liquids. I concluded that the volume of fresh, salty and limed water that we released increased about 20-fold over the course of a 5-year period, and this meant that the creek and its inhabitants were constantly being bathed in solutions that were unfavorable for life. The unrelenting odor and the newly discovered effluent problems overshadowed many positive aspects about the Pickle Shed, but the bad deed had been done, accidentally.

The Pickle Shed provided multiple people in our community much needed wages and many of us acquired skills, unrecognized at the time, lasting a lifetime. For me, I learned the basics of doing business in a very competitive field, commodity agriculture. It’s often been said, and even written in some business books, that someone who can make a living selling pickles can make a living doing just about anything, I’ve given it a whirl in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, agriculture, hotels, trading and service industries, always reverting to things I learned at the Pickle Shed. Three important business axioms were: a) turn your trash into your customer’s most valuable product, b) location, location, location was the key to economic success in agricultural as well as in other industrial endeavors, and c) a good manager utilized the brains and brawn of all employees, assigned responsibility to them and held everyone accountable for getting the work done. I suppose the most valuable lesson learned was that skills may be learned in unexpected places and from unappreciated resources, including from people who are vastly less educated than you.

Top Gun Coon Hound

by Douglas Fodge



Have you heard the adage “Up a Creek without a Paddle”? That sums up nicely the situation I experienced. It was pitch black dark, and I was about half-way to the end of a branch near the top of a big oak tree and fury personified glared eye to eye at me.

Always be kind to animals
morning, noon and night.
For animals have feelings too
And furthermore, they bite.

- John Gardner

This particular event happened during mid winter after I had played a Junior High basketball game on a Friday night. I was already bone tired since I had guarded a roadrunner and human chimera in the ball game. I had barely gotten home and opened the front door when Daddy struck a match and fired up one of his roll-your-own Prince Albert Smoking Tobacco cigarettes. This wasn’t unusual since he smoked every hour on the hour through the night and more frequently during daylight hours. Daddy (the conversation is generally accurate), “Boy, you ready to go Coon Huntin’ (raccoon, Procyon lotor)? I traded for a new Coon Hound, a Plott Hound, today and I want to test him out.” “What the devil is a Plott Hound, Daddy?” I asked. Out of the dark, illuminated only by the glow of Daddy’s roll-your-own, Mama chipped in, “Why Douglas a Plott Hound is just about the best Coon Hound that man ever bred. This one was so good that the man only needed to tie a $5.00 bill to his collar to make sure Russie got a good deal!” Daddy, “Ah, don’t listen to the Madam, Boy, she’s just upset that Joe might eat us out of house and home.” “Amen, Russ Fodge, you needed this hound about like I needed another hole in my head.” At least Mama wasn’t mad, and since Daddy was pretty smart he didn’t prolong his misery by firing off any retort. He had learned that he wasted his breath arguing with Mama since her verbal skills could best those of the most ardent evangelical preacher.

“Daddy, where are we going to hunt?” You see, I was already suckered into going hunting! “Well, I was thinking about going over to Mr. Cowan’s woods ‘cause I saw a lot of tracks and other signs of coons there last weekend.” While I wasn’t eager to walk several miles to the backside of Mr. Cowan’s property the exchange between my parents had piqued my curiosity, and I was about to bust a gut to see the new Plott Hound, Joe, in action. Mind you, around the Fodge household we acquired and disposed of hounds about as often as some people shopped for groceries so there had to be something special to get my attention. Joe qualified since I sure didn’t know anything about Plott Hounds. “I better change into my hunting clothes.”

By the time I had changed clothes and got outside, Daddy had rounded up most of his hounds and put them into makeshift kennels or leashed them to fence posts and bushes. As we were leaving Mama yelled out the back door, “I sure hope the two of you will be able to pack home all the coons that Joe is going to catch.” Over at our house, Mama was either ready to debrain Daddy with a frying pan (not too often) or was laughing so hard with him at his antics that she was about to cry (often), so I didn’t pay much attention to the teasing. With Daddy there were no betwixt or between situations, but it sure wasn’t boring around him. At least he had a great sense of humor and laughed as much at himself and the predicaments that he got into as we did. Good-natured teasing was all that kept us sane in those days. We practiced the following philosophy; you may as well laugh about events that happen since it is a lot healthier than crying. It probably works just as well today as it did then.

Joe was as big as Mama had hinted at, and I could have sworn he was a miniature horse, but he was a Kentucky/Tennessee bear dog and somewhat taller and a bit heavier than our other hounds and mostly black with brindle-stripes. Joe’s former owner had trained him to be a Coon Dog since no bears were available to hunt in our area. As an adult I marveled at the Beagles the Division of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) used to find illegal drugs in airport baggage until one day it occurred to me that I knew of equally interesting feats with hounds. Daddy often trained hounds to hunt only a coon, squirrel, rabbit, fox, wolf or quail (much less frequently), but coon dogs rarely hunted squirrels or anything else and this was primarily due to the fact that they were in constant training. In contrast, other hounds were generalists, and they hunted whatever game presented itself. Whether we hunted with generalists, specialists, or both, the hounds roamed near and far, and when one barked (Daddy recognized the bark of every hound in his pack, and when he retold the exploits of the latest hunt he could and did mimic the bark of each hound) he would say, “That’s Queen, and it sounds like she’s hot on the trail of a fox”. A hot trail equaled one that the prey had just made as opposed to a cold trail that might be quite old. Meanwhile all other hounds would be actively searching for something to chase, and the only commands any of them received were Daddy yelling or blowing his cow horn to give them directions. The ATF Beagles had a trainer standing 3 feet away and guiding them through their paces, and I’m sure he helped insure both their safety and then nabbed any smugglers. Had Daddy trained the ATF Beagles and been in charge, he would probably have turned about a dozen lose in the airport baggage area and signaled commands to them on his cow horn from a central location until the search was completed. The guards could have stepped back and watched. Travelers might not have appreciated his approach, but I’m confident that the job would have been done quickly. The hounds would not have been distracted and would have located illegal contraband.

Off we went that particular night as if we were on our way to put out a raging fire. We kept Joe on a leash until we neared the hunt area, and then we unleashed him for a night of fun. Joe, unlike Daddy’s other hounds, didn’t bark until he could either hear or see a coon, or at least it appeared that way. Most of the time we wondered where he went as he hunted until he found a coon before making even a whimper. Fortunately coons usually zigged and zagged and circled about their hunting area so there wasn’t much danger that Joe would wander too far away. Then, suddenly in the distance Joe would let out a caterwauling bellow of his deep-based voice, and a few minutes later he would start to bay at something, a sure sign he had chased a coon up a tree or into a den. He sent us an urgent message, “Hey fellows, hurry up, I have found Mr. Coon.”

Joe’s message was clearly understood, and we made a mad dash through the underbrush and found him on guard at a big oak tree. Mr. Coon has ascended to the farthest branch, and Daddy focused the beam of his flashlight on the coon, presumably to blind him. Up the tree I went, mostly groping my way blindly along from branch to branch, and if this wasn’t near the top of occupationally hazardous and unsafe jobs then it should have been, but I climbed trees nonetheless. We could have shot Mr. Coon, but that would not have been sporty enough. The flashlight may have temporarily blinded the coon, but he quickly determined that I was on the way up to his hiding place and started snarling, chattering and gnashing his teeth together as only a coon can do. Down below, the instructions and encouragement from Daddy kept pace with Mr. Coon’s warnings. Not to be outdone (after all it was his game we were after) Joe bellowed occasionally and a few other hounds, ones who had escaped attention before we left home, seconded his motion.

My responsibility in all this was to encourage Mr. Coon to jump out of the tree, but gentle persuasion never worked very well since he had a PhD in negotiation skills. Therefore, I resorted to more intelligent modes of action: screaming at the top of my lungs, whacking him with a broken limb or shaking the limb he was clinging to for dear life. Naturally, he knew that there wasn’t any safety on the ground, but eventually he lost his balance and fell out of the tree. I marveled at the fact that I wasn’t close behind, but I managed to clutch the bole of the tree with one arm the entire time.

When Mr. Coon hit the ground below, some 60-80 feet of free fall, the real excitement started, especially for me since I was temporarily forgotten. I never got to see many fights, but I could hear what happened, and it wasn’t always pleasant, and wasn’t humane as measured by today’s standards. Daddy usually allowed only one hound to fight a coon, and if that happened to be Joe then all I heard was the crunching of bones, followed by silence. If a smaller hound tangled with a coon, then we had action galore. This was especially the case if any water was available and that was often the case as coons hunted for fish and crayfish in creeks. Coons were skilled swimmers and fighters in water, and if possible they climbed on a dog’s head and held it under the water until the dog drowned. However, the usual result in our hunts was that the adult coons, but not the younger ones, often escaped the initial clashes and found another tree to hide in. Stated another way, they made more work for me. The secondary trees were usually some distance from the initial tree, and this almost always meant that I clambered out of a tree with star or moonlight to guide me since the hounds and Daddy with the flashlight were already at my next work site. After Mr. Coon, and a few of his relatives, succumbed to the onslaughts we snatched each from the hounds and then marched off home where we tanned and sold the pelts.

Our biggest problem was getting rid of the ticks after a hunt. Texas was famous for its abundance of ticks and if man or beast walked where cattle grazed or rabbits ran, they were assured of having a few ticks clutching their clothing if not their skin. When we got back home, we immediately disrobed, removed ticks, and left the clothing hanging on the clothesline. Before the clothes could be worn again we had to scald them in hot water, but they needed to be washed after we slogged through the fields, woods, thickets, creeks and other terrain. Hounds were also monitored for ticks, and we dipped them weekly in a homemade mixture of kerosene, sulfur, asphalt tar, DDT and water that we kept in a 55-gallon drum. Even this miserable concoction didn’t always keep them tick-free, but it helped somewhat.

The morning after a hunt we skinned the coons and tacked their pelts inside out to the interior wall of the barn. An intact coonskin, properly dried and fat-free from scraping it each week, would bring a few dollars. The carcasses were field dressed, eviscerated, sectioned, and added the meat to a few bucketsful of wheat shorts, chunks of fat from the local butchery shop and water in a large cauldron and cooked the mixture over a log fire until the meat fell off the bones. If we supplemented this feed with a few vitamins and minerals, the hounds stayed in fine physical condition for up to 10-14 years.

Over the next couple of months that winter, and for several years afterwards, Joe lived up to his press releases, and on many a night we came home with all the coons that we could carry. In the process, we got plenty of exercise since we walked everywhere as we didn’t own an automobile. As testimony to her open-minded nature Mama became one of Joe’s biggest fans, and he was her favorite hound. Now that tells you something about both of them!

Firewood Production and Emergency First Aid

by Douglas Fodge



A memorable event occurred before I started school, and it may have been one of the first outings with the male members of my family, Daddy, Robert, and Mack. Our objective on this excursion was to cut some firewood in a small wood lot beyond the cucumber patch, down in the bottom below the site where we found so many Indian arrowheads. However, when your father’s main interest in life is to hunt ‘round-the-clock you didn’t go anywhere without being alert to the fact that you might happen upon a rabbit or two, perhaps some squirrels or even a opossum, raccoon, fox or wolf. Thus, although we had every intention of cutting firewood, we went to the woods, sans me, fully armed with enough firepower to kill an elephant. As extra hunters, Daddy carried along a squirrel dog, a couple rabbit hounds (perhaps Beagles), and some general roustabouts who hunted any game, but especially fox or wolf. Most were my playmates and good for fine roll and tumble games in the pasture behind the house, but under Daddy’s supervision they became merchants of doom for game animals.

Someone hitched Maude to the two-wheeled cart (WWI Army surplus variety) while Mama helped me into my low-top work boots. Well, they weren’t exactly my boots. I had a small foot, and the boots were somewhere between size 9 and 12 – not exactly boots made for walking! I had several pairs of socks on my feet, and Mama tied the boots tightly because they reached to just below my kneecaps. It was very important to have secure foot ware since every brush pile and briar patch along the way was kicked or shaken, and we went out of our way to make sure we didn’t miss any. For my part, I had a hard time just walking and standing up much less scaring some rabbit into leaving his hiding place and running in front of crazed hounds and excited people equipped with rifles. A little foot in a big boot made for lots of falling, laughter, teasing, and stern commands from Daddy to quit making noise. I never understood how the noise I made walking could possibly have been heard above the din and racket put out by the hounds, but anyway I needed to be quieter – I still need to be!

After lots of personal torment and difficulty, we reached the wood lot, and they set up shop to cut some firewood using a two-man cross cut saw and a couple of axes. I tried to avoid falling trees, flying wood chips and firearms that were leaned against nearby trees. Daddy warned us repeatedly to be careful around any firearms. While the firewood was accumulating in the cart, Maude munched tuffs of grass, switched at horseflies and generally ignored us, but the hounds worked fulltime scouring the nearby thickets. Every so often one of them would blurt out a special bark, at least it was special sounding to the others, but to me all the barks, bays and yelps sounded the same. These barks elicited an equally loud yell of encouragement from Daddy. He was the choir director and after a barking outburst, as the chunks of log were being split into firewood, there was excited discussion about what game might be the object of the barking: cottontail, swamp, or jack rabbit, or perhaps even a squirrel.

We had worked for a while and enough firewood had accumulated to stoke the cook stove and heater for a few weeks. Meanwhile the hounds continued pilfering through the brush. Once or twice work stopped and someone chased through the brush to redirect the hounds or to determine if some game animal had been cornered. Eventually these coaching tips paid off as a hound or two began barking in a more excited manner, and this raised our adrenalin levels to new highs. The hunt was on. Axes and the saw were abandoned, replaced with armaments and off we bounded through the thickets toward the barking hounds. I did my utmost to keep apace by running at top speed but all this accomplished was a multitude of swats from brambles, saplings and briars that sprang upright after being run over by those ahead of me. Occasionally I was stopped dead in my tracks by a sapling striking me flush in the face, and I had to let the stars clear before continuing. Pretty soon, I figured out that I didn’t have to run so closely behind the others, and this helped some.

“Do you think Cowboy might be after a coon?” Mack asked. “Naw, listen to how the hound’s circling back and forth, no coon would run like that and besides it’s daylight, and the coons went to bed before the sun came up. I think they are headed for the slough. I bet it’s a swamp rabbit!” Daddy declared. I didn’t know anything about rabbits, but if it was exciting to them, it sure tickled me plumb to death. Later on I learned that swamp rabbits (Sylvilagus aquaticus) were larger, up to 6.5 lbs, than cottontail rabbits (Sylvilagus floridanus), up to 4.5 lbs. From Daddy, “You boys spread apart a little bit ‘cause I don’t want that swamp rabbit to circle back and run around us, but be careful if you happen to see him ‘cause I don’t want someone to get shot.” Amid all the confusion, the others kept repeating high-pitched vocal encouragements, and Daddy occasionally blew his hunting horn, mostly little short bursts, to make certain the hounds could hear him above the racket. Daddy used a cow horn, or infrequently a goat horn, that had a special mouthpiece fitted on the tip. He could signal commands with the horn to a pack of hounds from as far away as a mile or more. Since he was a musician, his horn sang out clear notes and could be downright melodious if he desired it that way. He rarely tried to make music with his horn, but a few hunting buddies could blow taps and simple musical pieces on theirs.

After an eternity to me, but perhaps only 15 minutes, of chasing after the hounds, Daddy announced at the top of his lungs to the rest of us, “Cowboy has got it treed.” This didn’t mean as much to me as it did to the others, but now we crashed through the brush with renewed intensity, although I wasn’t sure what to expect. Soon enough I learned. After a few minutes I completely lost sight of everyone, but there wasn’t any danger for me as there was plenty of noise to guide me. In fact, the noise probably woke the dead in cemeteries all over the county. Finally I arrived to find the others standing next to a very large tree. The hounds were barking as loudly as possible and clawing at the base. When I got closer I could see a hole that was big enough to hold a basketball. Apparently the animal had temporarily escaped the approaching hounds by climbing into a hollow space inside the tree. I had no clue what kind of animal was in the hollow, but the others had convinced themselves that it was a rabbit. In any event, the adrenalin level was really maximized by now. No amount of intense excitement exhibited by any athlete under game conditions was greater than our father’s on these occasions, and that attribute lasted until his dying breath.

In a few minutes, Daddy had cut and stripped a small sapling and shaped a fork from two little branches on the small end. Then he inserted the fork end into the hollow of the tree until he touched something that moved, and he immediately commenced twisting the sapling round and round in an attempt to snag the animal’s fur in the fork. The objective was to snag and then yank the animal out of the tree, but the animal disagreed and climbed beyond the reach of the sapling. Daddy sent someone to get an axe. In a few minutes, the axe appeared, and Daddy lined up to chop a hole in the tree. “I’ll take care of this dad gummed (probably a little more expletive-laced expression was used) rabbit,” and he swung the axe in a circular arc above his head, obviously aimed about head-high on the trunk of the tree. However, as the axe came down, a little branch suddenly appeared out of nowhere (overlooked in the adrenalin-fired prelude), and diverted the flight of the axe. Instead of landing solidly with a whack in the side of the hollow tree in front of us, the blade landed at a glancing blow in the side of Daddy’s head, just above and behind his ear, about a two- to three-inch slash. Fortunately Daddy had a leather cap on, and the axe struck at a glancing blow or we would have had a really bad situation. It was grave enough for me.

The sight of blood pouring out of my father’s head and him cussing the branch for getting in the way was somewhat unsettling, if not downright comical now. Simultaneously, he grabbed his head, pressed the gash closed, and started looking for his leather cap knocked loose in the event. He started reassuring us that it was a little cut, and it would be fine. As soon as he located his leather cap he calmed because it sported only small damage where the axe had landed – I suppose all hunters are practical that way! However, these calming words and actions didn’t help a lot as far as I was concerned, but the others began asking Daddy what to do. Soon a clean handkerchief and some coal oil (kerosene) appeared. Apparently he carried a little bottle of coal oil on his hunting forays; I suppose he started fires and disinfected wounds with it. In any event, they doused coal oil on the handkerchief and directly into the bleeding wound, and then applied direct pressure on the gash and tied the soaked handkerchief tightly around his head. This helped stop the flow of blood. Then he pulled his leather cap down over his head as tightly as possible, and the combination of the coal oil treatment, the pressure from the handkerchief and the hat led to a big reduction in the blood flow. In a few minutes, they went back to chopping a hole in the tree and then caught the game, a swamp rabbit. We had fried rabbit for supper that night, but I didn’t eat any as I was still reeling from the sight of the blood.

Washing and Ironing The Day Away

by Douglas Fodge



No one, and I mean no one, in our family liked to do the laundry. But frequently an all too familiar refrain from Mama was, “Douglas Walter, I need you to help do the wash tomorrow before you leave for whatever you have planned.” “Oh nooo, Mama do I have to?” “Well, you can’t go around in dirty clothes, so, yes, you have to wash them.” When Mama used my two given names, I knew there wasn’t any sense in arguing, and the next morning I was laundering and helping. After this exchange with Mama, Dolly Parton’s lyrics expressed my feelings,

“ Washday Blues”

Last Saturday night I looked like a princess dressed in calico
Now blue Monday washday I look like a lady hobo
Just rubbin’ and scrubbin’ and raisin’ ‘em out
I gotta hang ‘em out early; I hope the sun comes out
(Wash ‘em out, ring ‘em out, hang ‘em on the line
Get a little tired, just think about the good times) washday blues…….

“Ah,” you say, “that’s nothing special, every kid had to do their laundry.” True enough, our boys helped do their laundry when they were old enough to participate, but their activity consisted of hauling their dirty clothes to the washroom, dumping the clothing into the washing machine, adding some perfumed detergent, selecting the appropriate wash and rinse cycle and then taking off for extracurricular activities. Although instructions to our boys and to me were almost identical, the similarity ended there unless you consider that all of us used hot water and soap.

Other families had utilities, but we didn’t, and we were one of the last families to get them. However, we had as much pride as others, and this included the desire to wear clean clothes, the few that we had. A command to be ready to do your laundry meant to be ready to work, sans electricity, running water, gas-fired stoves and other modern conveniences. When we laundered we did it with a washboard and tub supplemented with water heated on either the wood-burning cook stove or rarely in a black, 20-gallon cauldron surrounded by a pile of burning wood. We used bar or powdered soap purchased from the local grocery store, or occasionally we used homemade lye soap. Neither of these soaps was similar to modern detergents. Store-bought soap was made with ingredients of higher purity than homemade soap, but they were almost identical otherwise.

Laundering activity at our home occurred no matter what kind of weather or temperature. We started by drawing bucketsful of water from our cistern and heating it to boiling. We had a pulley and a long chain with a big galvanized metal bucket on the end. You dropped the bucket into the cistern, let it fill and then hauled it up. If you pulled a few buckets up each morning, your arms got quite a workout. We set two number 3 washtubs on the edge of the back porch and filled them about halfway full with water. The tub for washing was filled primarily with boiling water and the tub for rinse water received a mixture of cold water and hot water. If we had a large amount of clothes to wash, we had to draw and heat water from the cistern several times, and before we were finished washing we expended plenty of energy.

Clothes were sorted into groups that could be washed together. We washed the white clothes first, followed by colored clothes and finally our jeans and other really dirty work clothes. It worked best if we let each group soak in the hot water a few minutes before the washing process started, and this was especially the case for Daddy’s work clothes from the foundry since they were covered with fine black dust. If the outside temperature was cold, we heated and added boiling water to the wash water several times.

To wash the clothes we stood on the ground, inserted the washboard in the wash water and bent over and grabbed the clothing one piece at a time. The top 6 inches of a washboard was wooden and across the bottom of this section a 1 x 2 retained the bar soap. In the washing process, clothing was pulled out of the hot wash water, and rubbed thoroughly with the bar soap. Below the retaining bar for the soap was the metal scrub board portion, and beneath the metal were two short legs that protruded to the bottom of the tub. The washboard was about 2 feet long and about 40% of it was the metal scrubbing surface – the business portion of the device. Moving parts were arms and hands, huffing and puffing lungs, and aching back muscles. The metal scrubbing surface was a series of about 20 ribs running horizontal to the surface of the wash water. Each rib had a twist that ran the length of each rib, and this gave it a rough surface. The metal didn’t rust, and I suspect that it was composed of steel and brass. Since the washing action was forceful across the ribs of the metal surface, it would be correct if one concluded that a person’s knuckles took quite a beating. If your back didn’t give out, your knuckles held up, and you didn’t let the water get too cold, then dirty clothes rubbed with soap and scrubbed over the metal ribs were cleaned after just a few scrubbings.

Once the piece of clothing was sufficiently free of dirt and grime from the scrubbing process, you wrung out the soapsuds and water, and pitched the garment into the rinse water. We swirled the clothing around in the rinse tub, wrung out the water and repeated the process until the water ran clear. If the weather was acceptable, we hung the clothes outside, but inside otherwise. Hanging the clothes on a line to dry was the easy part of the operation. After the clothing dried on the line, and that wasn’t very long in the strong winds that seemed to blow forever, then it was time to bring them in and do the ironing. The entire washing process usually took a few hours to complete, if not most of the day for large loads of clothes.

When I have told this story to others, many have asked if we wrung the soap and water out of the clothes with a wringer. The answer to that question was yes, a wringer manufactured using traditional genetic engineering procedures. Mama wrung soap and water out of the clothes with her hands, and initially I couldn’t, but gradually I developed enough strength and stamina to do it. There were some things that Mama couldn’t do, but this wasn’t one of them. She could wring out clothes and anything else that required strong hands without much help, and for a slightly built woman, she had a grip that would make physical fitness aficionados proud. Wringing out the clothes could be particularly grueling on cold days since we worked on the north side of the house and there wasn’t any windbreak between Northeast Texas and Canada, excluding numerous barbed wire fences, and they didn’t stop the wind. We spent the morning with our backside in the cold winds, but at least they dried the wash, although they tamed our spirits and froze our hands and other unmentionable anatomical parts.

We took clothes off the line while they were still damp if we were going to iron them immediately. Of course, it was difficult to dry clothing in bad weather even in the summer, and in the wintertime drying clothes could take many hours. Ironing was done with flat irons that weighed about 5 lbs each. Ours were cast-iron devices forged in a foundry, and the surface for ironing was ground flat and polished smoothly. Ironing required a hot stove to heat the flat irons, and Mama used 2 or 3 irons depending on what was needed. The flat irons were heated to the desired temperature by setting them on top of the cook stove in the kitchen. The stove required lots of firewood to heat them, and I brought in the wood. Our cook stove was big, and the cook surface had 4 spots to set things on to be cooked. It was also capable of heating the entire house. That was wonderful when the outside temperature was below freezing and the wind was blowing, but it yielded a sauna most other times. In Northeast Texas, summer temperatures reached 100 oF many afternoons. But whether it was August or January, laundry had to be done, and the irons needed to be hot to put a crease into pants or iron a white shirt. The only air conditioning was the wind, and even the wind could be hot in the summer.

Ironing was not simple, and I was never allowed to handle the irons as they were dangerous to use. The difficulty started with determining whether or not the iron was hot enough to use, and there was definitely an art in making that judgment. Mama would wet a fingertip and tap the surface of the iron. If a sizzling sound was heard, the iron was hot enough to use. If the iron was too hot and she was not careful, her fingertip would burn slightly. An iron that was overly hot was cooled to prevent it from scorching the cloth. Even the handle of an iron heated up, and you couldn’t afford to risk dropping one of the things on yourself or the floor, as both would be burned. Mama used a thick potholder to keep the handle from burning her hand. If the clothes were not damp, she sprinkled water on them, and when the hot iron touched the cloth, steam was produced. It was a certainty that a hot iron would scorch the clothing if there were no water on the cloth. When the iron cooled it was exchanged for another iron that had been heated on the stove.

Washing and ironing processes took 1 to 2 days to get garments ready to be worn again. In the summer, the process was akin to working in a sauna, and in the winter we may as well have worked in a deep freeze. However, we were presentable, and we also learned yet a lesson that not every activity in life was fun, even if it were necessary. No one ever asked me if my clothes were washed by hand, and if ours were compared to clothes washed and dried in machines, our clothes smelled ultra fresh compared to those. However, no matter how good my clothes looked or smelled I never enjoyed even one minute of doing the washing or helping with the ironing, and I still don’t particularly care for either. By the time I entered my teen years I worked so much outside the home that I was no longer required to wash more than work clothes and jeans.

I have traveled in many underdeveloped countries since 1990, and most farmers in them washed, dried and ironed their clothes the way my family did in the 1940s. Perhaps my story will help us to understand why people have suffered great hardship to enter this country, legally or illegally, and perhaps it has rekindled some faded memories about the hardships our ancestors endured to raise our culture to its current status. Even if both those conditions have been met, it still won’t make me like to wash, dry and iron clothes!

Chicken Feathers

by Douglas Fodge



A coworker had been wooing a preferred young lady for several weeks, but he had not told her much about his work. Finally she agreed to go to dinner and then a movie, and P. was walking on cloud nine. Everything went perfectly up to the time that the bill for dinner was presented. P. retrieved his wallet, opened it wide for all to see, and to his embarrassment out floated several chicken feathers. P. spent the remainder of the evening trying to explain that he caught chickens for a living. I suppose all wasn’t lost since he eventually married the girl and raised a big family, but at least on one occasion he was caught up short for adequate explanation. I know that feeling since I have been trying to explain my involvement in the chicken business for the last 50 years. It started for me during the summertime when I was about 12 years old and ended temporarily when I finished high school, only to reappear 30 years later, not exactly a quick payback for all the earlier work.

I was called into action initially because others didn’t show up to catch his chickens, and Mr. Dennis needed some help. The chickens were out of feed, and the truck designated to carry them to the slaughterhouse was already in position to be loaded. What could he do but ask kids if they wanted to earn some spending money? I was asked, along with others, and 4 or 5 of us accepted. None of us had two nickels to rub together, and there’s nothing quite like being broke to provide motivation to work, even if it meant to catch chickens. That described me, and while I was from an otherwise wholesome, functional family, we didn’t have extra money for me to spend, and anyway it wasn’t such a big deal to catch a few chickens if you’ve been raised on a farm, so my parents said, “go ahead.”

In those days, farmers raised chickens much as their parents had raised them, barnyard style. Instead of buying 200 baby chickens to grow and eat throughout the year, the farmers, mostly the women, now raised them in batches of 3,000 to 6,000 per barn, 3 or 4 times per year. The farmers bought feed for the birds from a nearby feed mill unlike their parents who bought it one sack at a time from the local grocery store’s feed room. The feed was often in sacks and was distributed by hand on a daily basis, and water was provided in concrete troughs placed on the floor. Gas-fired brooders were available to help keep baby chicks warm initially, and they were on pulleys so they could be raised or lowered as needed.

After about 9 weeks confinement in a barn, it was time to carry the chickens to market, and that is where I was called into action. When I accepted the job I didn’t know that we caught the chickens at night. We arrived at the barn about 10:00 PM, and almost immediately someone unscrewed all the lights in the barn and replaced one bulb with a 25 watt blue-bulb. This was sufficient light to make vision almost possible, but only in one small location inside the barn. After a few minutes our night vision improved somewhat so that I ran into something every 15 minutes, rather than constantly, for the remainder of the night. Brooders had short legs and a foot on each, and they were suspended from the roof so that the foot was even with my forehead, an excellent location for self inflicted lobotomy.

Without lights for sight the chickens hunkered down, and to catch them you simply bent and picked them up. A worker showed me how to pick up the chickens by grabbing one leg between your thumb and forefinger, and then he showed me how to swing and twist the chicken so that it draped behind my open hand. That part was easy enough, but he didn’t explain how to avoid the free leg, talons flared, of a frightened chicken. The birds flapped their wings incessantly, squawked loudly and clutched at any object with their free talons, and since my shoulder was available it was what they grasped. After a few times catching chickens, I could always pick out other chicken catchers in a crowd since they often had festering and inflamed scratches the length of their arms. A chicken’s foot was contaminated with everything that was found in the chicken house, and those contaminants were transferred to the open wounds created by the talons. When we had caught a clutch of 4 chickens in each hand, we carried them to the people on the truck or to an intermediary. This meant walking a distance of perhaps 100 feet each direction, a time consuming process.

On the very first night that I caught chickens for Mr. Dennis I learned a valuable lesson. We weren’t very efficient catchers, and near daylight we were still trying to catch the last of his chickens. That is when I discovered why the lights had been turned out. Chickens, on seeing the light at dawn, began to stir and look around, and as we bent to pick them up, they jumped up, ran about 2 steps, and leapt into flight and soared the length of the building. It took about a half-hour to catch the last 100 birds. Modern birds in the poultry industry are too heavy to fly so modern catch and haul workers may work long after sunup, as required, without having to catch birds on the fly.

The chickens were hauled to slaughter in wooden coops, 16 birds per coop. Usually we toted 8 birds per carry to an open window and handed them to a person standing outside the window. The blue bulb had been installed near this open window and this really ignited wing flapping and jerking motions by the birds. After I dropped a few handfuls of them, I soon learned the proper technique involved in the handoff process – not exactly rocket science, but still I didn’t want to drop them if for no other reason than that I didn’t want to get laughed at by other workers. After my initial experience, the people must have noticed something useful that I did since I was soon being asked to work 3 to 5 nights per week.

The work pace in catch and haul operations was furious, but it was not very heavy lifting, compared to working with cucumbers or at a sawmill. We got paid per truckload at the rate of $3.00/truck/person so it was to everyone’s advantage to load as many trucks as possible in the shortest amount of time. For about 3 years, I worked with crews composed of one or two women, two or three teenagers (I was one of the teenagers) and one man. The man usually worked between the house and the truck, and there was another crew of two or three people on the truck. The women were about 5’2” and weighed perhaps 150 lbs each, but they were tough as boot leather. However, their short legs couldn’t keep up the pace that was needed, so the women worked on their knees, caught the chickens, handed them to us, and we carried the birds to the window or truck. Fortunately, the women had more sense than the men and tied handkerchiefs over their noses to prevent constant inhalation of the dust from the litter. One distinct problem, at least for me, of this work was that everyone viewed it as a 2nd job, and their day jobs were fulltime. Consequently all were sleep-deprived and interested in sleeping every available spare moment. Thus, I never got to know much more than a person’s nickname as no one wanted to talk, much less gab with a kid about something.

The women could catch chickens at Mach I speed, so to keep up with their pace we trotted, rather than walked. Some nights we would load 2 or more trucks per night. When we loaded more than 2 trucks, we often worked from shortly after dark until just before sunup, but the pay was great, and to make $12.00 per night was good money in those days. As a bonus, when track season arrived I didn’t need to train much for the ¼ mile dash as I had been in training 3 to 4 nights per week most of the winter. I won most races that I entered, even beating boys who were bigger and faster. All my stamina in the race was undoubtedly directly related to working at a fast trot for hours while carrying about 30 lbs of chickens to those trucks.

Over the years I worked inside and outside of the barns for various types of crews, and I preferred working outside, although the work was a little trickier than inside. Outside, between the barn and the truck one person carried chickens and handed them to a person on the trailer. Then the birds were stuffed the birds into wooden coops through an opening about 1 foot X 1 foot, and this maneuver took skill as the owner couldn’t sell birds with broken legs. They had only the moon and stars as their guiding light sources. On nights when inclement weather factored into the process, this was a very difficult task. The coops weren’t large and once 16 birds were stuffed inside they could not turn around, so they sat quietly for the ride to the processing plant. Each truck could handle 6,000 birds. Another delicate job was stacking the coops so that they didn’t shake loose on the bumpy dirt roads and get dumped into a ditch somewhere along the route to the highway. Even one coop set askance on the others could result in the entire stack being dislodged, and that was never a pretty sight. In the summertime we worried about chickens suffering heat stroke but in the winter we worried about them freezing and solving either problem was always a lot of work, especially if foul weather was present.

The last stage of the operation was to haul the chickens to the abattoir where they would be processed. I did this infrequently because I caught chickens at night during the school year, except for times of the year when I was involved in nighttime sports, such as basketball. Often someone from the catch & haul crew picked me up after school, carried me home to change into work clothes, and drove us (up to 3 hours) to a work site. We caught chickens in a territory that was bordered by Gilmer and Tyler, TX on the south side, Hugo, OK and DeQueen, AR on the north side, DeKalb, TX and Bonham, TX, on the east and west sides, respectfully. We caught chickens until the wee hours of the morning, and I was often dropped off at school with just enough time to run to the gym, shower and change into acceptable clothes for classes. I tried unsuccessfully most nights to sleep in the car to and fro the job site. In spite of this kind of schedule and a lack of sleep, I managed to graduate from high school with grades that were acceptable for entry into college. Considering that cellular repair, cell replication and overall bone growth is maximum when a growing animal sleeps, and minimum when they are awake, was it any wonder that my height did not increase after I was 12?

There were both immediate and longer-term consequences of chicken catching, and I know some of these firsthand. Workers, and I was one of them, tended to cough a lot, sometimes for years afterward. People who worked inside the barns without protective masks have often been diagnosed with multiple respiratory problems, mainly acute and chronic bronchitis. This is not surprising now, but in those days no one thought much about the work environment, but we should have. Chicken litter was composed of dried and wet manure, feathers, insect parts, rat droppings, wood shavings, and dirt and spilled water. These were ideal nutrients and at an ideal temperature for the growth of bacteria, yeast and fungi. If the litter got wet, microbial metabolism released enough ammonia to choke a person. All the materials, including the microbes, were powerful antigenic materials, and some of the microbes were opportunistic pathogens. A second problem was the environmental issue we created. If left untouched, litter in a barn will eventually form compost that can be used for soil amending, but we cleaned the barns after each cycle of chickens and dumped the raw materials on the pastures. Today many of those areas of the US are contaminated with large amounts of minerals that may have potentially harmed the environment, so this practice was discontinued. In modern operations, growers remove the litter about once/year, compost it properly and then sell or use the product. About all that is needed to accomplish the process is to turn the materials once per week.

In 1955 when I started, the US poultry industry generated perhaps 1 billion birds/year, if that. Some pioneers of the industry were at work in those days: John Tyson, Frank Perdue, and Bo Pilgrim and companies founded by them now produce about 80-90 million chickens/week. Remarkably, chicken prices in 1960 were almost identical to those in 2004, and this was accomplished by massive industrialization of the industry. The size of the barns increased from little 2400 ft2 buildings to massive 20,000 ft2ones, and I have seen barns in Thailand that are 3- to 4-fold larger than our largest. An average of about 24,000 birds/cycle, 6 cycles per year are produced in one of our barns. In the formative years of the industry, we caught 9-week-old chickens whose live weights were about 3.5 to 4.0 lbs, but the industry geneticists advanced the growth rate so that a 5.25 lb bird (average of males and females) can now be produced in 6 to 6.5 weeks. While many among us have criticized the industry for many obvious problems, it has remained one of the best examples of how industrialization provided more and better food, at improved prices, for our people.

15 to 20 years ago, chickens were still caught by hand, but the labor-intensive handling of chickens by several people between the catchers and the truck had disappeared. Now a large forklift and stacks of plastic coops that were constructed like large chests of drawers were brought to the work sight. The forklift, known as the chicken hawk, was used to remove the plastic coops in huge stacks per maneuver, and then the operator placed a stack of coops next to the chickens inside the barn. When a catcher pulled a drawer part way open, grabbed two handfuls of chickens, and stuffed them into the coops, they did not walk more than 5 steps. Once full, the chicken hawk was used to carry the chests of drawers and placed them on the truck. Thus, a major portion of what we did in the old days had been mechanized, and today a barn with perhaps 4 truckloads of chickens in it can be loaded in approximately 3 to 4 hours, something that would have taken us all night. All the feeding, watering and mediation processes have also been automated, and birds are now raised in almost quarantined facilities to minimize the need for medications.

In 1989, I was working in a biotechnology company on a project to complete the development of a product for the oil-services industry. For our company, the Director of Research and I had worked diligently to identify other market opportunities for our product, and once he told me that some scientific articles indicated that soybeans contained a substance in them that was similar to the material we degraded for the oil company. He asked me, “Doug, do you know what industries, if any, would use soybeans?” Without hesitation I said, “chickens.” We subsequently developed a slightly different product for the animal feed industry to degrade the material in soybeans. In our tests, animals eating soy-containing feed with our product in it grew faster and used the feed more efficiently than animals that did not receive our product in their feed. We patented various concepts and methods to use the product to maximize growth rates of meat-producing animals. We did this in all meat-producing countries of the world, a winning situation for everyone involved, www.chemgen.com. Thus, a childhood work experience had paid off long after my youth, and occasionally a stock dividend check has arrived in the mail to supplement my retirement income – a very recognizable sign that catching chickens was a useful experience for a kid.