The Chicken Business

This is an excerpt from an interview in 1995 with my (now) late great uncle, Marvin. He is the man in the picture above. The girl is my aunt. She is still alive.

Marvin: Yeah, after I got married I assumed the chicken business, raising little chickens up into hens. They went to laying. I have been close to 1,000 of them. George would have nearly 2,000. He kept me busy. Your grand-daddy Orville used to fool with milking cows. I never did get into that part. George and I were into all those chickens. That kept me busy day and night. Some days I’d get 60-70 dozen eggs a day. I’d have to gather them up twice a day, bring them in, clean them that night. I had a thing, an egg washer. You put them in some warm water, and it rotated like that. You’d buy a special kind of soap to put in there, to help clean them. Set them down, let them dry out overnight, then get up at 4:00 the next morning to carton them all up and label them for the people I carried them to. I’d carry Rozena in to work. She’d take several of them during the week; two or three days of the week she would carry them to people where she worked. I carried them all over Belle Meade, and everywhere else down through here.

I remember going to the 2-story chicken house with my grandfather and two uncles as a young child. The egg business was gone, but they still raised chickens for personal use. It was a large, airy structure with chicken-wired windows running the length of it, with wooden shutters to close in inclement weather. They would feed the chickens outside, then get the eggs and clean the house while they ate. Nowadays those chickens would probably qualify as "free range".  That farm was hard on the men, but it was a home away from home for me as a young child.