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.

Ole Purty Thang

by Douglas Fodge



Ole Purty Thang (OPT) was Mama’s cat that allowed us to reside at her home, provided of course that we didn’t interfere too much with her cat activities. Mama pronounced everything correctly and said Old Pretty Thing distinctly, but the rest of us pronounced the cat’s name as Ole Purty Thang although occasionally we called her other names such as Pretty Cat. OPT didn’t know about all our other baggage when she agreed to this arrangement. I’m quite sure that had she known about all the hounds (fox, coon, rabbit, squirrel and wolf) and the unusual people, the decision could easily have swung the other way. However, OPT was an opportunist, and in a short amount of time she convinced the various hounds that she was boss, and after a couple of lessons they never pressed the issue again. I can’t blame them. I actually saw few demonstrations of her martial art skills, as only one or two were required before OPT had the run of the place, as before.

OPT was a golden-yellow female, 100% mammy cat. I suspect that she weighed about 12 lbs. OPT had two major claims to fame: she produced big litters of kittens like clockwork, and she could catch and kill any animal that moved, up to those almost her size. The list of prey included many species of small birds, squirrels (gray, red and flying), rabbits, moles, gophers, rats, mice, snakes (garter, blue racer, and king), and fish. I can’t recall actually seeing the fish or the flying squirrel, and they may have been Daddy’s tease of me, but I can attest to plenty examples of the others. She hunted most of the night and showed up every morning to feed her brood and rest up for the following night. Occasionally, when the pickings had been a bit too slim to provide enough energy to feed her kittens, OPT allowed someone to provide some favorite treats: a bowl of fresh milk or scraps of meat from the table. On these occasions, the hounds stood beyond the reach of OPT’s claws and looked wistfully in her direction as if to beg for a morsel or two, but OPT was queen, and queens didn’t always share with their subjects.

The penultimate number of hounds that OPT managed was 52. This occurred when I was in the 1st or 2nd grade. Daddy had temporarily lost his job at the foundry in Dallas and was home for several months. He earned supplemental money by running a kennel for Dr. A. G. Elder (another story) and Mr. Wylie Tye, two of his well-to-do hunting buddies. While this number of hounds was almost more than we humans could bear, the increased number of subjects didn’t disturb OPT in the least. She sauntered in and around almost all of them, with the few exceptions being the newest members of the pack. After some encouragement from OPT the new hounds fell in line with the rank and file. Daddy always told prospective buyers that those scarred ears on the hounds were a good sign of their bravery in battle with coons, wolves etc., but I thought another explanation might be more accurate for a couple of them.

Remarkably, OPT was friendly even with Traveler I (TI), but even she didn’t get too close for comfort. This hound had a specialty, fighting wolves or any animal that came close, so he was avoided at all costs by all the other hounds, and yes, later on there were two other Travelers. It might be safer to state that OPT and TI tolerated each other. In fact, she even housed her kittens behind TI’s appointed leash-spot near the back porch. I can’t recall if she had raised kittens elsewhere before TI arrived, but while he was alive she had a residence either on or under the porch, and he managed the yard in front of the porch. This arrangement seemed to work pretty well, and obviously her kittens were a lot safer there as the likelihood of a marauder invading and terrorizing her brood was minimized with this beast on guard. In fact, I never knew of hounds terrorizing her kittens, and afterwards the mere suggestion to me that cats were dumb animals evoked a reply, “you never met OPT.”

If my father was away hunting, and that was often, we kept any useful hounds that he left behind either tied or penned. If we didn’t pen them, they left in an attempt to discover where he was hunting, and the result would be hounds scattered from one to the other end of Red River County, and many days of work would be required to find them. The useless ones in the pack, and there was always one or two, were allowed to roam free, but our useless hounds would have been great models for artists’ caricatures of the Southern Flop Hound. Some of ours were so worthless that if we tossed them a biscuit, and it missed their mouth they didn’t even go get it. Hunting or defending anything was out of the question for them. On one occasion, in the wee hours of the morning, we heard wolves howling from several spots east of our home. This wasn’t unusual as I often went to sleep at night listening to wolf music in the distance. When wolves howled, Daddy’s useful hounds raised a ruckus and wanted to go for a good chase and possible fight, but this was not to be that night as they were penned. In hindsight, we should have turned those hounds loose to chase the wolves.

The next morning we found OPT, and it wasn’t a pretty site to see. The wolves caught OPT in the middle of an open field, and without a tree to climb she was easy prey. From the looks of the turf around her, OPT had put up a good fight, but even she was no match for a pack of unfriendly wolves. From the wolves perspective they eliminated a serious competitor for small game. We hoped that a couple of the wolves got their ears pierced that night and spent the rest of their lives attempting to explain why they sported sliced ears and gashed jowls. Naturally Mama and I cried over OPT’s unceremonious demise, but she had been with us about 12 years, sired 106 kittens and kept rats and mice to a minimum. Shortly afterwards we replaced OPT with a couple of her offspring, but they didn’t have the upper hand with the hounds and hardly paid attention to the rats and mice that were in abundance. Eventually, these two disappeared as farm cats were wont to do, and we didn’t enlist the aid of another cat for many years. There just wasn’t an adequate replacement to be had for OPT, the ultimate feline.

Fishing Lessons At The Big Pool

by Douglas Fodge



“Miz. Jack,” it’s Suzy, “Miz. Jack, Oh Miz. Jack, you there? Miz. Jack, I don’t want Mr. Russ’ foxhounds biting me. They tied up?” “It’s OK Suzy, they’re tied,” Mama yelled. Mama’s nickname was Jack, but that’s a another story. Someone yelling outside our house on a weekend morning happened occasionally, but I usually went right back to sleep. People were concerned about Daddy’s foxhounds, and rightfully so, but the hounds were so many pets to me.

We lived about 1/4 mile from a two-acre stock pond (known as The Big Pool), and people frequently fished for Bass, Catfish, White Perch, and Blue Gills. There were two simple ways to get to The Big Pool: drive to the backside and park next to the levee or if you didn’t have an automobile, and Suzy probably didn’t then, you walked to the Fodge’s house and then across the pasture to The Big Pool. Even had Suzy owned an automobile she would have probably come by our house anyway as she and my parents were friends.

With all the commotion, though I had been asleep, my eyes popped open. In spite of the clamor of the foxhounds barking at someone invading their turf, I had heard a familiar voice and knew who was calling to Mama. I also knew that a fun time was ahead for me if I got a move on. I jumped out of bed and hit the floor in a dead run because I wanted to go fishing, and Suzy always asked Mama if it was OK for me to go. I charged into the kitchen to wolf down a bowl of oatmeal because I knew that Suzy wasn’t one to tarry very long for anyone when fishing needed to be done. Like most bodies of water in Texas, The Big Pool had large numbers of water snakes, poisonous cottonmouth moccasins and a few copperheads lurking in the brush on the banks. The snakes plus the fact that I was still too young to go to The Big Pool on my own, meant that was I eager for any opportunity to go there and fish. Mama knew I would be safe under Suzy’s wing.

The hounds were rarely a problem and Suzy knew this, but she didn’t leave matters to chance, whether it was catching fish or dealing with a dog that might bite her. She outfoxed both animals and man, as far as I was concerned. Daddy had known Suzy since his youth, and she had given him some instructions in correct fishing techniques some 40 years earlier. He recalled that Suzy already was grown woman by then, and I guessed that Suzy was beyond 60 when I was her student. Suzy lived a lot of years after I left for college so she may have been well into her 80s before her death. After her death, I imagined that bass within walking distance of her home breathed a collective sigh of relief and thanked their fish god for sparing their lives during Suzy’s time on the planet. Suzy was to fishing as our father was to hunting, the ultimate, deadly serious, fishing machine that happened to be wrapped in human skin.

Suzy came equipped to fish. From the black rubber boots that came up to her knees, her razor-sharp butcher knife, the pliers for skinning catfish, a pistol for killing snakes (a big Wyatt Earp affair without a long barrel but armed with big bullets in the chamber), 4 or 5 cane fishing poles, a bucket of freshly caught minnows and occasionally a little folding chair to sit on. She was literally armed for anything. Suzy also wore unusual attire for fishing, including heavy work pants that were stuffed into the tops of the rubber boots, and a long dress over this. She almost always wore a jeans jumper as well. The crowning effect of her ensemble was a man’s hat perched on top of her pigtailed hair. She was quite a sight to see, but to this little boy she was akin to a Saint stepping out of the woods and inviting me to Heaven. I got to sit at the feet of the Master and learn some things that were pretty important to know about, at least at my ripe old age of 5 or 6!

Suzy sometimes carried a 22-gauge, single-shot rifle – her squirrel and rabbit gun, but none of this concerned us, and Mama often took advantage of Suzy’s armaments. We had a flock of about 100 guineas roaming our fields, and when we had overnight guests one weekend, Mama wanted to fry a young rooster for lunch, but none of the men who could handle a rifle were at home to shoot the darn thing. A guinea could run like a Roadrunner and fly like a Mallard duck so catching one was impossible. Mama waited patiently until midmorning for Suzy to finish fishing, and when she came by the house, Mama asked Suzy to shoot a Guinea rooster. Her specific instructions were to be sure to head-shoot him so as not to ruin the edible meat. Suzy pulled her big pistol out of her dress pocket and promptly shot the desired fowl, in the head no less. I don’t think the visiting lady had seen anything quite like this before, nor afterwards.

Suzy was on a seafood diet (see food and eat it), but since she walked almost daily to her preferred fishing sites she had plenty of stamina and strength to go anywhere she pleased. Nonetheless she wasn’t going to be without food for long, and she usually had a stash of summer sausage and rattrap cheese in the folds of her garb. Suzy needed a lot of pocket space to carry the tools of her trade, and since this was before people purchased a backpack with umpteen Velcro pockets in it, the dress and jumper were almost essential. Both had multiple pockets and all of them were bulging to overflow. The overall effect of carrying all this gear was that with each step she took, the extra weight in her pockets shifted and almost pulled her over. It was a marvel that she didn’t fall with each step, but lo-and-behold she never fell, at least in my presence, but when she walked she didn’t glide gracefully along like either of my parents.

This particular morning I managed to swallow my oatmeal in a few bites, and sure enough Suzy asked Mama if I could go along to help her, and just like clockwork, Mama said it would be fine. My feet probably didn’t touch the ground for the first 50 yards, but soon I was given my first assignment by Suzy – catch a bunch of little grasshoppers while we walked along through the pasture. My main responsibility on these fishing trips was to catch all the young fish around her fishing site. She didn’t want them around to distract the big fish since her plan was for them to focus on her baited hooks. This was a fine responsibility as far as I was concerned, and I got lots of praise for doing a good job. Often as not I got to sample the summer sausage and rattrap cheese after I caught several small fish. Her rattrap cheese always tasted a lot better than any we had at home, but of course it was purchased from the same store. A time or two during the morning I had to run to the house to fill Suzy’s water bottle, but there was a well-worn cow path between The Big Pool and our house so I didn’t worry about snakes and other miseries, such as sand burrs. Now how could a fellow go wrong with that kind of a deal!

My fishing gear was a little cane pole, with a short, lightweight line that ended in a tiny hook. I baited the hook with a grasshopper and swung the thing out on the water. Sure enough, the grasshopper started wiggling and flopping about, and a little perch snatched it right away. I became adept at catching these litter buggers, and as quickly as I could yank them out of the water, unhook the fish, rebait and throw the ensemble back in the water, I would catch another fish. I’m sure the snakes in the brush licked their chops at the prospect of having fish for lunch, but the real treat was to watch Suzy fish.

I didn’t have a notepad and pencil, and they wouldn’t have been any help anyway since I couldn’t write at that time, but I had big eyes and ears and asked lots of questions. I absorbed all the details. Suzy fished with cane poles, but they were 3-times longer than mine and had a line on them that was at least 3 feet longer than the pole. She always attached a float to the line to keep the bait suspended above the muddy bottom. She fished with a high-quality Eagle-Claw hook, and she pierced the tail of a minnow (shiner) just behind the dorsal fin with the hook. She explained repeatedly that you had to hook the minnow so it could slowly swim about and attract the attention of the big fish.

This was similar to how Daddy fished, but Suzy had some other unique procedures that were the clinchers as far as I was concerned. Among the additional things that she did to ensure success, Suzy would spit tobacco juice on the minnow just before pitching the baited hook into the water. When I asked what this was supposed to do, she told me that the tobacco juice made the big bass want to gobble up the minnow. She always caught the biggest fish of anyone who fished in The Big Pool, so the proof was in the pudding, but of course I wasn’t nearly so scientific or analytical in those days! Often by the time she started fishing I had caught and hauled about a dozen small fish out of her fishing site, and if she saw any snakes swimming nearby she had either killed them with her pistol or scared them half to death, and they left. After everything settled for a few minutes and she started fishing, we talked in a whisper to avoid disturbing the bass, and she wanted us to stand back from the water’s edge or behind a small bush or tree so the fish couldn’t see us. I have since learned that unfamiliar shapes, movements and noises on shore will spook carnivorous fish. There was also another major, somewhat unrelated, reason I didn’t question Suzy’s way of fishing. Suzy was a bonafide fortuneteller, and many local people believed that she practiced a West African form of voodooism, but to this day I don’t know if she did or did not practice voodoo.

My family had benefited directly from Suzy’s fortune telling skills so I didn’t doubt that these skills were directly related to her success in fishing. Just to illustrate her impact, near the end of WWII Mama had accompanied Grandpa Vickers to see Suzy because Grandpa hadn’t received a letter from my Uncle Bill in several months. Since he was in the Pacific Theater, Grandpa was worried, and he needed some reassurance that his son was OK. They posed these concerns to Suzy, and she told Grandpa’s fortune as they sat at her kitchen table. She would tell fortunes either with a deck of playing cards or by throwing a handful of small bones, and I do not know which she used that day. Suzy told them that Bill had been wounded as his battleship had been attacked, but that he was recovering in a military hospital. She reassured Grandpa that he would soon receive a letter from Bill and that they should go home and not worry anymore. About a month later Grandpa received a letter from Uncle Bill. Indeed he had been wounded in some kind of battle, but he was now safe and sound and would soon be home. Her technique might not rank high on sophistication compared to modern medical practice, but the positive impact of Suzy’s pronouncement on Grandpa and our family was just as dramatic, and it cost next to nothing! Mama never doubted Suzy’s fortune telling skill, and never questioned her motives even when others suggested that Suzy practiced voodoo and should not be trusted. And me, I wasn’t about to start a new trend, especially when it came to questioning her authority on how to catch a bass. She always caught fish, and no one ever caught more at The Big Pool. Unfortunately, I was never able to duplicate Suzy’s success in bass fishing, and I always blamed this on the fact that I couldn’t chew tobacco without getting sick. Consequently, I didn’t have any means to enhance a minnow’s charm. Darn it!

Pickles or College

by Douglas Fodge



None of us knew where Muleshoe was located, and those from Muleshoe probably thought Detroit referred to a place in Michigan, but both parties learned quickly enough about the other’s location. Detroit and Muleshoe were both Texas towns. Over the course of a few weeks the Muleshoe project convinced me that I needed to go to college.

Growing The Business

In some of Mr. C’s many telephone calls, he had talked with a big shot of a food company, a subsidiary of Brown & Root Corporation, that was headquartered in New Orleans, LA. Mr. C. told the fellow about all the extra vat space we had at Gulf Pickle, but at the time, we might have had three empty vats. This conversation led eventually to Brown & Root visiting and signing a contract for us to salt cucumbers that were grown using irrigation technology on farms near Muleshoe, Texas, a town 450 miles away in the Texas Panhandle. As we were in Northeastern Texas, this meant that cucumbers picked on Monday in Muleshoe had to be at our place by sunup Tuesday, or shortly thereafter, or risk considerable spoilage from sun damage. The big reason we were contracted for the work was that we were 100 miles closer to Muleshoe than the next salting station for cucumbers, and that extra distance in the hot Texas sun was devastating economically. Neither Gulf Pickle nor Brown & Root complained about this business arrangement, and I learned a valuable lesson in business. The location of one’s business could be a significant factor in whether or not you were profitable: location, location, location is critical to success!

Hustle, Hustle, Hustle

You can imagine the scrambling the Muleshoe contract caused. Mr. C viewed it as a large problem that could be divided into lots of little problems, and the little ones could be more easily solved than focusing on the bigger issue. As usual he was correct about how to do something. Soon we worked almost 24/7 just to get ready for the produce from Muleshoe. First, we needed a lot more vats to handle the irrigated produce, and Brown & Root came to the rescue and located a source of used vats, all in acceptable condition for the perceived need.

Tom Cat, the foreman with his knowledge of how to do nearly anything mechanical plus overall management skill, my brother Mack with his accountant mindset, and Jack and I with youthful muscles drove Mr. C’s automobile to Nixa, Missouri, a suburb of Springfield, about 450 miles north of our location. With the exception of Tom Cat, we made $0.70/hour that summer. Since I had never been more than 125 miles from home, this was a big trip for me. In Nixa, we went to an unused ethanol factory that was either owned or controlled by the US Govt. Mr. C. had purchased, sight-unseen, many large vats to be used for the Muleshoe project, and we spent a week taking them apart. These vats were the smallest vats at the ethanol plant, but they were the largest vats we had at our place. For example, the staves that formed the sides of the vats were 3” x 4” thick redwood pieces of lumber, whereas I had been accustomed to working with staves that were about 1 to 1.5 inches thick and 4 inches wide. We numbered each piece so that we could reassemble them exactly, loaded all the pieces on a truck owned by Maurice Curfman and sent the entire batch to Northeast Texas for reassembly. Not one piece was damaged in the process. The only things we discarded were the severely rusted iron rods that held the vats together, but Tom Cat informed Mr. C. of this early in the week, and by the time we returned, a truckload of new sucker rods was ready for the reassembly process.

Unfortunately the new rods were straight, and they needed to be circular to fit around the vats, and there was no easy way to bend a straight rod around a vat, so we bent them by hard work and then dropped the circle over the top of the assembled vat. Rods were spaced about 10 inches apart from bottom to top of a vat, so we prepared about 12-16 rods per vat. These were cut to proper length, threaded to accept nuts, and each rod was bent into a circular shape with the use of a 16-lb sledgehammer. This was a job that required both brute strength and finesse since the rod needed to be bent into a flat plane circle. One fellow held the rod and kept it in perfect alignment, and a second man hammered away with the sledge. If a rod didn’t lay flat, it was rejected until any twist was eliminated. Bending the rods was exhausting work, and pairs of men would work for a few hours, and then a fresh pair of workers relieved them.

While some workers bent sucker rods, others started the reassembly, quite an affair. First we laid a foundation of crossties, and then we placed the bottom boards on the crossties. Clinched together these formed a circle about 10 feet in diameter and 3 to 4 inches thick. The staves were added in sequence. They projected about 3 inches below the bottom and 10 feet above to form the walls of a vat. A groove (dado) had been machined at right angles to the length near the end of each stave, and the bottom boards fit into this groove. Three assemblers were needed to position the staves around the bottom, a process that was accomplished one stave at a time. One man stood on a ladder, another on the ground, and a third assembler tacked a hemp rope near the bottom of each stave. The fellow on the ladder tacked a second rope on the top of the stave. Two others brought staves to the assemblers. This process was repeated until the shell was assembled, and the entire thing was held together initially with two ¼ inch ropes.

The next step was to attach the ¾ inch sucker rods; we started at the bottom and worked to the top. Tom Cat supervised this portion of the work very closely since it was critical that we attached the rods just tightly enough to not work loose or fall off. This was tricky since tightening a rod just a tad bit too much caused the rods just below it to fall several inches. This could be very time consuming so we solved the problem by stationing men at intervals around the vat and occasionally tacking the rods to a few staves. A loose fitting was absolutely essential since water caused either cypress or redwood to swell as they saturated with water. Staves in the wall or bottom of a vat that were pulled too close together with the sucker rods would succumb to the intense stress and buckle. When either type of board buckled, we often had to partially disassemble the vat, replace the damaged part, and reassemble the structure.

Once we began filling a vat with water, I was often assigned to wedge cotton batting into any crack that did not close properly from the swelling process. This was accomplished with a hammer and cold chisel, and I was soaking wet most of the day, a situation that caused severe chafing of my skin. Since only men were present, I would shed all clothing and work as naked as the day I was born. Beneath the vats and over most of the premises mud and muck had accumulated from discharge of wastewaters, salty and fresh (subjects of another story). This muck exhausted fumes with the worst stench I have ever smelled, and if the muck contaminated clothing, it was really difficult to remove the odor from the clothing. I became adept at this work, and I often spent many days at it. In some sense of the word, I became an apprentice cooperer.

I participated in all aspects of the assembly process, and the pace was almost frantic since workers needed to unload and dump the cucumbers quickly to get them out of the hot sun, and frequently I would be yanking a ladder out of a vat, having just washed the inside, as the first sacks of cucumbers were dumped into it (the pickling process is another story). To keep ahead of the scheduled number of vats needed each day I started work at 2:30 AM and readied 4-6 large vats by 7 AM and another larger batch before I left work. During the daylight hours I often split time unloading the trucks and preparing additional vats to receive cucumbers the next day. A 14 to 18 hour day was common fare. The largest number of trucks I recall arriving in any day was about 25. Each truck held a minimum of 44,000 lbs of cucumbers, packaged in sacks.

When I started at Gulf Pickle we had 16 vats with an average liquid capacity of about 1,000 gallons each. As the company grew, the number and size of the vats also increased considerably. By the time of my last employment at the Pickle Shed we had 50-60 vats at headquarters and 150 vats in Sherman, Texas, about 75 miles closer to Muleshoe. Thus, in the 5 years I worked at Gulf Pickle, Mr. C. expanded the business ten-fold, and by today’s standards that would be considered phenomenal.

Pickles vs. College

In mid-August, one hot day (@ 105 F) Pete B. and I were hard at work in the back of a very large trailer truck. Our job was to pitch sacks of cucumbers over the sideboards of the trailer on to conveyers, and other workers dumped them into the vats. Pete was at one end of the trailer, and I was at the other. Pete was about 8 inches taller and probably 30-50 lbs heavier than me, but the sideboards of the trailer rose nearly to my armpits. The sacks typically weighed an average of 100 lbs each, although occasionally a sack would appear that weighed as much, or more, than I weighed. While I was tough as boot leather and had more rock-hard muscles between my ears than gray and white matter, I wasn’t dumb, and after a couple of weeks of this work, I realized that a little guy was ill-suited for it.

Pete and I had had a particularly grueling morning trying to keep ahead of the crews who dumped the cucumbers into the vats. Shortly after lunch Pete asked me, “Guess what I’m going to do tomorrow? I’m going to Commerce to talk with the Dean of Students at ET about going to college in the fall – school starts around Labor Day, and I don’t want to do this kind of work for much longer.” About 4 PM, I asked Pete, “Would you mind coming by my house and letting me ride over to Commerce with you to hear what the Dean has to say?” “Yep” was his reply. Mr. C. was a big supporter of two of his workers taking this step, and he gave each of us the day off and later supplied towels and bed linens when we enrolled in college.

About 15 years later I was still going to college, and by then I had obtained a PhD and done 3.5 years of Post-Doctoral research at UC Berkeley. Pete had obtained a couple of degrees by then, served military duty in Vietnam, attended OCS and started a 20-year career in the US Army, where he eventually achieved the rank of Colonel, if not higher. It is safe to conclude that we started using our heads for something other than a hat rack.

I have often wondered what would have happened to me without Pete’s impromptu openness about his plans and his willingness to give me a lift to East Texas State to meet and discuss going to college with that Dean. While everyone in my family had expressed their desire for me to attend college, I had not made any plans for such an activity. I thanked Pete for his thoughtfulness the last time I saw him in 1984. Then, he worked at the Pentagon in Arlington, VA. Did the lessons we learned from observing Mr. C’s ability to handle people, plan and solve complex problems impact Pete’s career as it did mine? Without knowing the answer to that question, I am certain that Pete’s benevolent act of leadership for a friend and schoolmate since first grade led eventually to an easier life for me, and I hope it did for him as well.

Pickling and Pidgin English Lessons Rolled Into One

by Douglas Fodge



Mid-summer, just before I entered the 9th grade, I got a job working at a company that processed fresh cucumbers into pickles. The company was headquartered in Detroit, TX, the birthplace of John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner, Speaker of the House of Representatives of the 72nd US Congress and FDR’s Vice President from 1933-1941, Detroit’s most famous former resident. The company was Gulf Pickle Company, LTD, and it local citizens called it the Pickle Shed. I got paid $0.40/hr, and the hours were often from about 7AM to 7 PM six days per week. During peak harvesting season we worked even more hours/week for 3 to 4 weeks. This pace made schoolwork seem like child’s play, and the experience conditioned me forever to be able to withstand hard work for long periods of time. Years later I have come to value some lessons in business and in sociology that I learned in this workplace, but oh what a way to learn.

In modern times, parents would surely think twice about allowing one of their offspring to work at the Pickle Shed, but in those times few other options existed for kids to earn spending money. Cursing was the language of choice, a few people (the main bosses) drank far too much alcohol and may have been functioning alcoholics, a few others were exconvicts, and safety was not high on anyone’s priority list. In spite of these factors, the Pickle Shed was an exciting place to work most of the time. We introduced some new products, and an amazing amount of work was accomplished by an otherwise lackluster group of workers.

Fortunately, due to a combination of genetic temperament and prior exposures, I wasn’t affected by the shenanigans around me, and I wanted to make some spending money. Since I already had good training in dealing with people who cursed, and as I never saw or heard of any employee being cursed for something they did, or did not do, the cursing didn’t concern me much. In fact, the cursing was primarily directed at inanimate objects; e.g., accidentally hitting their thumb with a hammer resulted in expletive-laced cursing that was almost lyrical in its content. However, I had little experience dealing with people who consumed copious amounts of alcohol on a daily basis, and I had to adjust my thinking on this issue. Those consuming the whiskey didn’t require me to participate, and they weren’t noticeably impacted by their drinking habits so I adapted to the situation. The ex-cons were street smart and had good senses of humor – I suppose being out of the worst state prison system on the planet was enough to make anyone feel good and exhibit a good sense of humor.

Cucumber Sources.

Farmers in the surrounding area brought freshly picked cucumbers (cukes) to the Pickle Shed or to one of our outlying stations, and we sorted their produce by size, as #1, #2, #3, #4 and culls, using a grading machine. We paid them $5-6, $2-3, $1-1.75 and $0.50 per hundred weight, respectfully. They took culls home for themselves, for their animals or otherwise discarded them. In the course of a week, the average farm received a gross payment of $90 for delivering roughly 3,600 lbs of cucumbers (600 lbs/day) to us. Most of the cukes were # 3 and # 2 and far fewer were #1, #4 or culls. If the area received adequate rain over the course of the summer, the farmers’ crops could last 10-12 weeks, and the resultant income was something that they took great pride in generating. It undoubtedly paid for lots of things in their lives.

In my first year on the job, there were perhaps 40-50 local farmers delivering cucumbers to the Pickle Shed via car, truck, and animal-drawn wagon. Wagons were hitched to either mules or horses. Initially, there were fewer farmers who raised large acre plots of cucumbers, but that situation changed over time. Women and kids picked most of the cucumbers, but invariably the men handled the money. A fairly large percentage of the farmers were illiterate, but that doesn’t mean that they were dumb – anything but dumb would be an apt description. They just never went to school very often as work in the fields had to be done during a significant portion of the school year or they found other excuses not to go to school. Most of the farmers liked the new owner (Mr.C.) of the Pickle Shed, who was a very experienced businessman, and their trust and his skill running the operation led to continual growth over time. These circumstances inspired me to write about some situations that occurred at the Pickle Shed.

Pidgin English 101

Fast tempo and soulfully sad R&B music had been blaring non-stop for about the last two hours from a jukebox setting under a big oak tree, and a few people were dancing on an open air, packed-dirt floor. My deer-in-the-headlights eyes were flitting between my work and the dancers. In the words of Dandy Don Meredith, there was some “Shucking and Jiving” going on. I had been around dancing all my life, but never had I seen anyone dance with arms and legs flailing in multiple directions while their bodies swayed in synchrony to the beat of the music. These farmers were in excellent physical condition, so dancing hard for an hour or two was not difficult.

Contributing to the dancers’ abandonment was a couple of bootleggers hovering on the fringes of the crowd. These swine were peddling cheap red wine and moonshine whiskey. I don’t know where they obtained the wine, but undoubtedly the moonshine was locally brewed. Although all forms of hard liquor were illegal, the High Sheriff wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and this was probably because he didn’t want to start a riot. Wine was being passed around openly among some of the men, but people ducked behind a building – the combination general store, garage, gasoline station, post office and general hangout - when they wanted to take a nip of the moonshine. I suspected that the bootleggers were taking home better profits than the farmers as wine was about $1.50/bottle, and the moonshine was about $2.50/quart. The jukebox cost $0.25 for 5 plays, and the quarters made a dull thud when they dropped into a vessel inside, a sure sign that this was also a profitable venture. The music was sung and played by the who’s who of R&B, Lowell Fulson, Lightning Hopkins, Muddy Waters, BB King and Etta James, and I recognized them as I listened frequently to radio station WLAC, Gallatin, TN. No Pat Boone or Hank Williams song was heard that day!

The farmers who dumped their cucumbers into the grading machine didn’t want to be left out of the fun, after all it was late Saturday afternoon, and they inevitably paid more attention to the dancers and dumped cucumbers to the rhythm of the music rather than whether or not the machine was overloaded. The faster the tempo, the faster the cucumbers were flying out of the machine at me, and I was panting like a dog trying to keep bushel baskets from overflowing. This wouldn’t have been so bad if I had had any help, but there were only two of us; one to help the check writer, weigh the graded cukes, and load the bobtail truck, and I was supposed to manage the grading machine. However, something from this one-day assignment lasted the better part of a lifetime for me. I handled the pressure well enough, but when I looked up all I could see were mule teams hitched to 4-wheel wagons, all loaded with cucumbers and people, the latter were mostly elderly men and women. Kids were playing tag among the wagons and trees, and some younger women were going into the store in twos and threes, laughing and talking non-stop. The elderly folks sitting in the wagons were staring vacantly at the younger set on the dance floor, and I imagined that all of them wanted to go home and get a drink of cool water and kick off their work shoes. The outside temperature was above 100 F, and even the mules looked exhausted. I seconded the mules’ view of the situation!

The year was 1956 or ‘57, and we were buying cucumbers from a group of Texas farmers whose farms were just south of the Red River separating Texas and Oklahoma. We identified two high school students among the dancers, and they helped translate and spell the farmers’ names correctly. The farmers received a check for their produce, and most farmers immediately signed their names with an X and went into the general store and cashed it. The owner of the store must have known everyone personally, as he cashed the checks he hardly looked interested.

I was getting a rude awakening to spoken English. About 95% of the farmers were descendents of African slaves, and their spoken language was unfamiliar to me. I doubt that I understood more than 30% of it, and some of the words sure sounded foreign to me. Since then I have learned that many offspring of African slaves retained considerable amounts of their native language and blended it with rudimentary English in their spoken language. I don’t know if this was a true Pidgin English, but for certain I wasn’t hearing the dialect of the black hunters and fishermen that I grew up with or the dialect of the migrant workers in the area. Miss Alta’s English class hadn’t prepared me for this, but I was taking a crash course, and it was clear that I was part of the problem because I often didn’t understand the truck driver or the owner of the Pickle Shed either. They were New Englanders. In the 1950s I had been outside of Red River County only a few times, and I knew next to nothing about communicating effectively, even in my own dialect. However, for reasons I could not explain then, or now, I was captivated by the fact that I could not communicate with people who lived less than 30 miles from my home.

Even as an overgrown kid, I tried to imagine myself in their situation – most were unable to communicate orally with the outside world, they were a societal minority, most couldn’t read or write, and they had few of the opportunities to better themselves that were available to me. In spite of these obvious disadvantages, the huge mounds of cucumbers heaped on the wagons were testimony that they were careful planners and hard workers, and they often pitched in to help each other unload the heavy sacks of cucumbers, but their positive attitudes were the really amazing attribute of the people. In a material sense, they had little to be happy about, but they seemed every bit as happy, or even happier than, any other group that I knew at that time.

About 10 years later, I accepted a job as a General Science teacher at the local high school, and a few kids from that area attended my classes. They had a difficult time, just barely passing, and even this feat was amazing. Almost none of my fellow teachers, including the few black teachers on the staff, and very few of their classmates could communicate with the kids from the cucumber farming area. Today, I wonder if the farmers have stopped farming cucumbers and whether or not they have been able to join the electronic age. Overall, I gained inspiration from the farmers that has lasted a lifetime. For example, whenever I have felt depressed or had insurmountable odds stacked against me for many situations, I have often reflected on that group of farmers from a forgotten part of Northeast Texas, and the difficulty of my current situation has seemed to lighten almost before the thought dissipates.

That Brahma Bull Jumped the Fence

by Douglas Fodge



Mama yelled loudly, and then she shouted for Mack and me to run to the cart parked at the end of the cucumber patch. Mack had almost finished dragging the sacks of cucumbers and loading them on to the cart when this urgent instruction came. He had tied Maude’s (the horse) reins to a tree limb while he loaded the cart. The Brahma (pronounced braymer by some Texans) bull was running at a fast trot trying to see what was going on, but we beat him to the cart and scrambled to the top of the sacks. Mack, who could run much faster than us, had stopped long enough to pick up some small rocks and threw these at the bull as it closed on us, all the while untying Maude’s reins from the tree limb. By the time we were atop the cucumber sacks, the bull was snorting and pawing the dirt from about 15 to 20 feet away, and Maude was wild-eyed and raring to go. She didn’t want any part of that bull, and her sentiments were exactly mine.

This was the meanest Brahma bull around. He had already cornered and hurt a few cowhands, and rumors were afloat that he had battered and penned his owner twice in brush piles. He was certainly a crippled man. The bull had never killed anyone, but he was fully capable of such, according to our father. He knew about bulls, and he had had a couple of confrontations with this one already while on some of his hunting forays in its turf. In fact, he had once peppered the bull with birdshot from his shotgun in order to keep it from getting too close and delayed long enough to scramble under or through a fence to safety. The bull was as tall as Maude, and the hump on his back made him appear even taller, but he was not quite as heavy as Maude. He could run like a deer and had either jumped or broken the 4-strand, barbed wire fence separating the cucumber patch from the neighbor’s place about like a deer could leap over it, except he probably weighed 1,200-1,500 lbs, if not more. This was one mean animal, and Daddy had warned us repeatedly about not veering over into his territory. We were face-to-face with the beast, and he was more frightening in real life than I could have imagined. No one ever needed an imaginary, scary monster when a mean Brahma bull was in their midst.

As Mama climbed on top the sacks she had a garden hoe in her hand, but I don’t know where it came from, and armed with the hoe, she was barking orders to Mack to drive Maude as fast as possible to the gate leading into our main pasture and on to the house. At the same time Mama yelled at the bull that if he dared come one step closer she would chop off his head. Mind you, his head was formidable and fully equipped with a set of big, stubbed-off horns, either broken off in a fight or partially dehorned. Since those days I’ve seen feature films showing a mother Wolverine or Badger defending their young against attack by some Grizzly bear, and that depicted our situation, at least from this first-grader’s eyes. Mama, all 100 lbs of her, was barking orders for her two cubs to escape danger and all the while ready to beat up the Brahma bull with a dad gum garden hoe. It’s laughable now, but at the time it was frightening to me. I don’t think she and Mack were nearly as scared as I was, but even they weren’t acting too casual.

We usually didn’t leave the gate open between the cucumber patch and the main pasture because the cows would get out, but this time Mack hadn’t closed it when he came through with Maude hitched to the empty cart. The gate was only a short distance away, and Maude was already near top speed (while pulling about 1,500 lbs of cucumbers and 230 lbs of humans, including at least one very scared kid, in the cart) by the time we passed through the opening. The bull was behind us, and he occasionally came very close to either the cart or Maude, but stopped short of contact each time. Once, he got too close for Maude’s comfort, and she tried but never failed to kick him since the harness and the traces interfered with her kicking ability. He might still be trying to recover if she had connected with her massive hooves on the end of those long legs. Fortunately Maude neither stumbled nor fell and continued the dash to the house, about ¼ mile away. Suddenly the bull wheeled around and raced for a pile of cucumbers that spilled from one of the sacks. We were hanging on for dear life and amazingly enough the cart didn’t wreck on the way to the house. I never knew, but the bull either didn’t eat any of the spilled cucumbers or gobbled them down in one or two bites for he was soon racing full tilt after us with ears laid back and eyes wildly flared. It was just dusky dark, and due to his whitish, gray coloring we could see him plainly.

In the brief interlude of time that the bull checked out the pile of cucumbers, Mama realized that he wanted our cucumbers, not us. That logic didn’t help me very much even though she was trying to console and calm me all the while! She untied one of the sacks and threw several large cukes at the bull. This effort distracted him enough for Maude to race to the house, but the beast wasn’t through with us just yet. Mama told Mack to pull the wagon alongside the fence separating our yard from the pasture, unhitch Maude and for us to either jump over the fence or go through a little gate, if we could there in time. With Mama pelting the bull with delicious cucumbers, Mack was able to unhitch Maude, and she immediately ran away at top speed, a portion of the harness and her collar still intact. The bull ignored Maude, but kept his attention riveted on the cart. As far as I was concerned I would have happily allowed the bull to have my share of the cucumbers.

Mack, followed by me, hopped off the cart over the fence into the yard, and Mack went inside to get Daddy’s double-barreled, loaded shotgun. Meanwhile, Mama tried to get off the cart and over the fence without catching her skirt on the barbs of the top wire (that’s right, she picked cucumbers in a cotton dress). All of us ended up on to the back porch. As all of this was taking place, Daddy’s hounds (I don’t know how many of them were tied to various posts, limbs etc. to keep their infighting to a minimum) were barking at the top of their collective lungs, straining at their leashes and spoiling for a good fight with that bull. Just then Mack appeared at the door, apparently armed to the teeth with that double-barreled shotgun. From Mack, “Mama, you want me to shoot him?” “No, don’t shoot him ‘cause I don’t think he wants to deal with these dogs. He just wants the cucumbers and will probably leave in a little while anyway if he can’t get any of them” came her reply. The bull didn’t know it at the time, but Mack, though only 13, was a crack shot and with the long barrels of that shotgun, two rounds of number 4 shot would surely have messed up that bull’s hide, if not seriously hurt him, at close range. I wasn’t hanging around on any porch to wait for the Brahma bull to get me so I ran into the house and watched from about as far away from the action as I could.

After about 30 minutes of the bull circling, snorting, pawing and always with a watchful eye directed toward Daddy’s hounds (all of whom were eager for a good fight) or Mack and Mama, the bull gave up his unknown objective and trotted about 50 – 75 yards away. Before he trotted away to watch them, he came close enough a couple of times for Mama to swat at him, once with the garden hoe and another time with her broom. He watched intently as they heaved the sacks of cucumbers over into the yard. They seemed almost causal about unloading the cucumbers, but not me; I was still shaken to the core.

I didn’t sleep much that night, and afterwards I occasionally had nightmares about a Brahma bull crashing through the fence onto our back porch and trying to get into our house. I never saw him again, and no one talked much about the episode so I concluded years later that I was the only one really frightened by the bull. I always liked to imagine that the Brahma bull shied away from the Fodge’s cucumber patch afterwards because he realized just how close a call he had that dusky summer evening; either from a 125 lb, thirteen-year-old boy armed with a big shotgun or a 100 lb, determined mother bent on chopping him to pieces with a garden hoe. From that day forward, I rarely doubted Mama’s sincerity or determination when she told me she was going to do something.