Ducks and Chickens

My oldest younger sister got an incubator for Christmas one year when she was 12 or 13 years old. It was what she had asked for, which might seem strange to some, but living on the farm it was quite useful. She had just gotten involved in 4-H programs at her school and it seemed an instant project generator to have an incubator.

4-H programs were quite prevalent in those days, especially at the rural schools levels. 4-H stands for head, heart, hands, and health. The organization is an outreach program that sponsors all manner of volunteer competition for rural kids. The local county fairs always had numerous contests covering everything from vegetables grown to livestock raised. It is still an active program. The last time I went to the local county fair I noticed there was a large metal building for the cooking and crop growing competitions along with the still existent barns for the livestock.

My sisters were all quite active in 4-H for many years, both in growing and showing livestock and some sampling of vegetable growing as well. My mother, as a school teacher was also one of the volunteer sponsors for the local 4-H so it was pretty much a part of my younger siblings lives the whole time they were growing up.

The incubator was probably their first adventure in that world and it was quite an adventure. The incubator was a round metallic structure about 12 inches tall and 30 inches in diameter. It contained a thermostat and heating element to keep the eggs within at a constant temperature during the incubation period before they hatched. For chickens, this period is a relatively short 21 days more or less. It is a little longer for ducks, usually another week or so.

The process is fairly simple, you take some fertilized new eggs and put in the incubator which controls the temperature to around 90 Degrees F. Our incubator also used water in the bottom of the pan to control humidity. It is not too hard to control the water level and humidity with a little practice and we had quite a high success rate. The eggs need to be turned regularly, we usually did this twice a day. The last piece of the puzzle is to try and avoid contaminating the shells with any foreign debris. We were very careful to handle them with gloves as we gathered them and turned them in the incubator.

We started out with eggs from our chickens but soon branched out to more exotic types of chickens. My sister’s loved the little Japanese silkies that have a kind of silky topknot on their head. We also had several of these types that have feathers sprout just above their feet so that they look like they are wearing feathery shoes. My oldest sister would put notices up at the Farmer’s Coop and feed stores in the area asking for eggs of all manner of chickens and ducks.

The end result of this was a yard full of exotic chickens by the time she got out of high school. The one rule my dad made was that we could not help any of them out of their shells. The chicks would usually peck a hole in the shell to breathe but it might take a whole day for them to get the strength to completely escape. It is a critical period for them and if they aren’t strong enough they sometimes never make it completely out. Naturally when the hatch date got close we anxiously peered through the little glass viewing lens in the top of the incubator, anxious to see how many would hatch.

I must admit that we weren’t always completely true to my dad’s rule. He never said anything but I know he was aware of it when we occasionally had a crippled chicken or duck hatch out. We once had a Peking duck with one foot that was balled up so that it limped continuously. It was the only duck that hatched out of the batch and I suspect he had some help in doing so. He lived for quite a while but never seemed to realize he was a duck as he hung around with the chicks he hatched with for his whole life.

During one incubation period of all ducks the heater element on the incubator failed. We were less than a week from their hatch date but they were not going to make it without the heater. My mom, ever the pragmatist, told us to take the duck eggs and put under a hen that was setting in the back of the hay shed beside the house. We took seven of the duck eggs and put under the hen who was sitting on two eggs at the time. She didn’t seem to mind the addition and seemed quite happy to have such a large brood of eggs to sit on.

The ducks began to hatch out right on time a week later. The hen didn’t seem to notice that the setting period was pretty short. She was quite proud of her little hatchlings, completely unaware that they were an entirely different species. The baby ducks didn’t seem to mind either as they happily got under her every night when it came time to go to roost. The daytime however, was a little less of a smooth transition for the hen.

Hens typically begin taking their chicks out to forage when they are very small, just a few days old. The mother hen will constantly cluck and “sing” to the chicks in a high pitched kind of crooning noise as they follow her around the yard. She will scratch and dig up seeds and small insects for them to eat, constantly communicating with them with her clucking and crooning. The clucking gets more staccato or rapid when she finds an especially tasty morsel for them and the chicks will react accordingly in a very short while, speeding up with the pace of her clucking or wandering slowly around with the smooth crooning. For a few days at least, the hen is forced to herd the chicks; keeping them in formation and gently pushing them in the right direction. Soon they are trained to follow her voice signals and she leads them proudly around the yard.

The ducks were not equipped with either the understanding of this language or simply an interest in being led around. I have since noticed the ducklings are usually simply herded around by their mothers but this little set of ducks seemed to largely ignore both her coaxing and her attempts to herd them in any direction. The upshot of this was that the poor hen was constantly running around behind them, clucking and crooning while they simply went wherever they wanted. Occasionally, she would manage to get ahead of them and show them a bug to eat but for the most part they simply ignored her until it came time to go to roost at night.

I imagine it was somewhat embarrassing for the hen to have children who so openly ignored her. I doubt it was something the other hens approved of the way she had to follow the ducks around instead of leading them. This seemed to put her on edge as she was quite frantic by the end of the day each day. She was only able to be comfortable when they got under her at night. The rest of the day she seemed distraught most of the time, no doubt a little ashamed that her brood was so unruly and disrespectful.

The ducks also grew at a high rate of speed so it wasn’t long at all before even this comfort was taken away from her. The sight of her trying to set on six ducks almost her own size at night was a little comical but I am sure it wasn’t for her. It was just one more failure in a long line of disappointing failures for her as a mother. They managed to somehow sleep under her for quite a while as it was the one time when they seemed to really need her but usually there was quite a bit of uncovered duck in their little sleeping area.

One day several weeks later I was feeding the hogs when one last indignity for this poor hen seemed to collapse what was left of her sanity. She was noticeably thinner and distraught by then, the constant disarray of her little flock steadily wearing her down. Our hogs had access to a creek that ran year round as a water source. Whenever we had to put one of the hogs up for farrowing (having baby pigs) I had to carry water from the creek to the farrowing house in five gallon buckets. It is quite a job to haul a couple of five gallon buckets of water the 75 yards from the creek to the farrowing house. As it happens, it was the dead of summer at the time and the sow needed a LOT of water in preparation for dropping her litter so I was making several trips a day to the creek.

On this particular day I was filling the buckets when I looked up to see the ducks waddling down through the hog pen. I think they were probably following me but then again, they could have just heard the creek running from some distance. At any rate, as I was filling the buckets and taking a short rest they made their way straight to the most rapid running part of the creek, the mother hen close behind. She was still clucking and crooning but as usual the ducks were simply ignoring her and going where they wanted.

As they got to the creek they immediately just jumped right in the water and began paddling around. They were ducks after all and they took to the water like; well…. like ducks take to water. As the last of them hit the water the hens clucking and crooning turned into panicked squawking. She ran up and down the creek bank squawking and flapping her wings in sheer terror. I am sure she thought her babies were going to their certain death. It had to be something of a mass suicide in her eyes and she was none too happy about it.

The ducks meanwhile were contentedly paddling around and occasionally diving their heads down in search of tadpoles and minnows, completely oblivious to their foster mother’s frantic attempts to get them to come out of the creek. I felt so sorry for her that I chased them out of the creek but they immediately went upstream and jumped back in. This set her off again like a fire alarm going off at full tilt. I felt sorry for her but there was really nothing I could do to stop the inevitable. They were ducks after all.

The mother hen was never quite the same after that. She followed them around for weeks but seemed kind of dazed and uncommitted. If the ducks ignoring her in the yard was shameful, them swimming in the creek every day after that was a horror along the lines of your kid joining the Hare Krishnas and selling flowers at the local airport. She continued to go through the motions of mothering the ducks until they just got too large to get under her at night but they still wanted to sleep near her. She never offered to set on eggs again. I guess that one experience at motherhood probably blunted that instinct forever.

I have thought about that poor hen at times in the process of raising children. I have often seen them doing things that I thought were intellectual suicide and then had a faint voice in the back of my mind remind me: they might be ducks. We aren’t meant to be carbon copies of each other and there is a wide range of individual activities that humans may need to be well adjusted.

The Game Rooster

As time went on we had all manner of chickens at our place. They were my mother's special project so we had quite a mixture of them over the years. At one point, she discovered she could buy chicks through mail order. It was a little amazing but the US postal service delivered 100 baby chicks to her on a dusty Saturday afternoon. She had always wanted some Dominecker chickens but nobody local had any. Somehow she found this mail order business that sold them.

The chicks were only a couple of days old when we got them. I had moved out by then but had went home the weekend before to help dad redo one of the old sheds beside the garden to make it into a chicken house. Most of our chickens ran wild in the yard but these were going to be so small that he decided we needed to make them a house to roost in at night. We build a lot of perches just off the ground and put in a nice little water system with a trough in the middle of the house. We put some of the newest old tin we had taken from sheds we had torn down on the roof.

My dad had never seen fit to buy materials to build sheds. He just went on the local radio show that was in actuality a call-in yard sale show, where people offered up everything from tractors to livestock, and offered to remove sheds. What this actually meant was that we would tear down sheds and save the materials to build sheds on our place. My brother and I furnished the labor and we would make as many trips as we needed with the old Datsun stacked up to the top of its homemade sideboards with lumber and tin. This material was all piled up in a big open shed we had where we sorted it and finished removing all the nails. My dad had us straighten all the bent nails and soak them in an open half barrel of used motor oil. When we got ready to build something we used that material and even those nails. A nail soaked in oil goes into hardwood with a lot of ease.

My mother was quite pleased with her new chicken house and enclosed small area of chicken wire fencing. When the chicks arrived she took the box up to the "new" chicken house and turned them loose. I came over that night to look them over as they were something she was quite proud of. Dominecker chickens are black and gray mottled, with a very impressive pattern to their feathers. They are a little shorter and broader than the White Legguns and Rhode Island Reds we had when grown but these were very tiny and still almost black in color as they didn't even have feathers yet.

I am sure she had bargained to get a good price for them and she was very proud of how beautiful they were when they grew up. When they got large enough they had free rein of the yard with the other chickens but still slept in their own little chicken house. As in most bargains, there was a hitch to her plan. She didn't think about what the ratio of pullets to roosters that would come from a random sample of chicks. As it turned out it was about 60/40, pullets to roosters. It could have been worse but having forty young roosters around was problematic to say the least.

The old boss rooster just kind of gave up and trying to deal with that many competitors. They steered clear of him as he would flog any that got close enough but they soon learned to just give him a wide berth. The pullets weren't so lucky. One of the young roosters would get one of them pinned down and mount her and several others would line up. It was gang rape on a massive scale in the yard. The young pullets were so abused that many of them were losing the feathers on their back from the constant mounting.

Naturally, my mother wasn't too happy with this state of affairs. She would charge out into the yard with her broom and scatter young roosters like so many leaves in the wind. Woe be unto a rooster that didn't see her coming as it meant a good dusting and the feathers would fly. This led to multiple requests for chickens for the freezer and I spent a lot of evenings over there killing and cleaning young roosters. The old banty even lost interest in flogging the dead ones for a while, it was just too much work for him I suppose.

The young roosters soon wised up and I couldn't catch one most evenings. The sound of shelled corn in a coffee can could bring every chicken on the place running at our house but those young roosters were soon too wary to fall for that anymore. She even asked me if I could shoot them in the yard but I told her that wasn't a good idea either as the collateral damage might not be acceptable.

At that time, I was working in a factory that made sewing notions at night. It was a sweatshop factory but I was making decent money and going to electronics school in the daytime. I mentioned our problem with the roosters at work one night and one of my workmates told me he had a good solution for that particular problem. When I asked what it was, he said; "a game rooster."

I had heard of game roosters of course. Everyone who grew up in that area knew cockfighting was still a sport/gambling event that was played out at different venues in the area. It was illegal of course but I guess the sheriff's department had better things to do than to go arrest voters who contribute to campaigns every few years and they left it alone for the most part. At that time, I had not been to one but I knew what they were.

"How will that solve the problem," I asked. I knew they had a reputation for being extremely fierce but I also knew our old boss rooster hadn't done much to thin their population down.

"If you take a game rooster home, there won't be any rooster's around but him in just a short while," he assured me. He went on to explain that is why you have to keep them in seperate pens as they will kill any other chicken with a comb on it's head that gives it away as being a rooster. You can still see them today in some areas around here, lots of little small circular coops, each with a small house inside for the rooster. Most of the time, they are also tethered to keep them from flying out as they are also quite capable of flying for short distances.

He went on to explain that his brother "fed" roosters for several people who fought them in the area. "Feeding" game roosters involves a special mixture of grains, peppers, and proteins to get them in top shape. It also involves "training" them for endurance and strength. Every "feeder" has his own secret formulas and methods closely guarded and kept. The "feeders" also will handle them in the ring when they are pitted to fight for money.

I was a little skeptical but I called mother and asked her if she wanted a game rooster. When I explained what Phillip had told me, she paused a little but finally said if it would get rid of that gang of roosters she would be ok with it. She asked me if it would attack people and I told her that it would not, although I wasn't absolutely certain about that. I asked Phillip later that night and he told me that wouldn't bother people but would attack anything else that bothered their hens, including dogs, skunks, and raccoons.

The next night he brought me in a rooster that his brother had decided wasn't going to make a good fighting rooster; at least not for gambling on. The rooster was in a small crate. He was black with red feathers on his head and neck and some white feathers mixed in his tail feathers. He was a little bigger than the banty rooster we had but not as big as the boss rooster by a long shot. I did notice that his legs were heavily muscled, as if his drumsticks would be huge compared to the rest of his body. His spurs were just little nubs, not very sharp at all and very short.

I told Phillip that our boss rooster had huge spurs compared to these and he just laughed. He explained that game roosters don't really have spurs, that they are filed down if they do. When a game rooster fights in a pit they put gaffs on them. A gaff is a slender curved spike not much bigger around than a wire, about 2 inches long with a sharp point on the end. The gaff is attached to the roosters leg where their spurs should be. He told me that it was one way you could tell if a rooster was a pure game rooster. If he was pure game, he wouldn't try to kick the gaffs off like a regular rooster will. A game rooster instantly recognizes it is a weapon and actually gets excited when you put a pair of gaffs on him.

I still thought he was a little undersized to be something that was going to kill all the roosters on our place but Phillip just laughed again and told me not to worry. "Just take him home and put him in the yard. All your rooster problems will be over in just a little while after that."

When I got off work early the next morning, I took him home with me and put some water in his crate. The next morning I took him over to Mother's house. She was out feeding the chickens when I got there. She was very impressed with her new rooster. She told me he was beautiful. I had to admit he was pretty flamboyant looking with his black and bright red colors. I set his crate on the ground and opened the door.

He strutted around for a few seconds before he noticed one of the young roosters walking by and immediately started flogging him unmercifully. The rooster didn't have designs on being dominant so he was trying to just get away but the game rooster was faster and determined and soon chased him up the driveway towards the road. He probably would have chased him all the way across the road if the boss rooster hadn't seen what was going on and intervened.

As the boss rooster took a run at the game rooster he didn't even slow down; the game rooster just veered left and met him head on. They crouched once to jump but before the boss rooster could get off his feet the game rooster was bashing boths sides of his head at once. Every blow was perfectly timed to catch his head between those two strong legs as if in a rapidly slamming door. There was a sound to it that I have never forgotten. It sounded for all the world like a balled fist striking bare flesh. Pop, pop, pop, three rapidfire triphammer blows and the boss rooster went into convulsions, flopping helplessly on the gravel driveway. He never even got a chance to change his mind. He was dead before he knew what hit him.

The game rooster barely paused before taking off after another rooster he had spied watching. This one took off full speed with wings flapping and feet windmilling at a high rate of speed. It was pandemonium in the yard for a good fifteen minutes. The game rooster killed three roosters in that time and set the others heading across the road, up in the pasture and down through the garden as fast as they could go. It was the closest thing to the old tasmanian devil cartoons I had ever witnessed. He was literally a whirling dervish of destruction on anything that resembled a rooster.

Mother wasn't sure what to think. She asked me to pluck the dead roosters and bleed them out. She also suggested we probably should lock the banty in the barn for a while. It turned out that wasn't necessary. The banty seemed to know the game rooster wasn't something he wanted any part of. They lived in harmony for quite some time afterwards, the banty staying out of the yard and the game patrolling the yard and the garden.

Within 3 days there wasn't another rooster on our place. Most of them just left for better pastures but a couple flew in the dog pen with our beagles which was certain death for a chicken. Mother said they surely knew better than to get in the dog pen. I think they did it on purpose as it was preferrable to facing the game rooster.

For many years, we never had any roosters but the game rooster. He killed everything that hatched and grew a comb on its head. He also protected his hens with a ferocity that is hardly to be believed. One of our beagles got out and was chasing the chickens a few weeks later and he made a believer out of her. She ran halfway across the pasture to get away from him.

He lived a long and happy life there at our place. Mother always talked about how pretty he was but she never mentioned the fact that he was the most vicious killer I have ever seen. There is an old saying that nothing is as mean as a game rooster. I don't know of anything that is even a close second. God help us if they ever manage to put their genes in something larger.

First Monday and the Banty Rooster

When I was young I was introduced to a local tradition that still flourishes in North Alabama. The town of Scottsboro, Alabama had First Monday the first Monday of every month. It was a trade day that was held on the square of the town and surrounding areas. They had one every month but the biggest one of the year was on Labor Day weekend when it turned into a three day event culminating on Monday.

First Monday was a trade day in the truest since of the word. Although you could buy things there as well as time went on it was a barter system event. You could literally trade anything at First Monday in those days. People traded livestock, farm implements, guns, vegetables, toys, and literally almost anything else you could think of at that time. Scottsboro was a short drive from Huntsville and from Fayetteville, Tennessee where we later moved. After we moved to the farm we did more barter trading as we came into possession of some things we couldn't sell easily and had more need of things that other people felt the same way about.

One of my earliest remembrances of First Monday was trading a pair of worn out roller skates for a pocket knife. It was that kind of place. Anything you had that someone else might value could be traded for something of similar value. On this particular year dad had me help him load up a rusty old harrow that had come with the place. Since we didn't have a tractor that it would hitch too it was useless to us but he thought he might be able to find someone who could use it in Scottsboro. I took a box of old baseball cards to trade for a hunting knife if I could fine one I liked.

We got up early that Monday morning and took off on the drive down to Scottsboro which was about an hour and a half away from the farm. It was chilly and wet that morning as we climbed into the old Datsun truck we were currently using. The Datsun was a compromise between needing a truck that was dependable and something for my dad to drive the 35 miles to work every day that wasn't too bad on gas mileage. The truck was a 1972 Datsun and dependable only if you discounted the fact that we had to work on it every other week to keep it running. In those days the small Japanese trucks were built for hauling supplies. They were so lightweight and thin bodied for mileage that they rode like a buckboard wagon. The suspension was very stiff so that it rode ok with a load on the back but if it was empty it almost bounced up into the air every time you hit a bump in the road.

It had a catchall compartment under the glove box that contained everything from flashlights that didn't work well to fence post staples and the nuts and bolts left over from it's latest repair job. Naturally, every time you hit a bump something fell out of it and rattled around on metal floorboard. If you weren't careful, whatever the loose article was would bounce or roll around until it found one of the rusted out holes in the floorboard and fall under the truck. Dropping steel nuts out onto the road at 65 mph tended to make them into projectiles that hit cars behind us or bounced up into the exposed drive shaft and spun out the sides of the truck at high velocity. Dad frowned on both of these eventualities so it was my job to catch anything that bounced into the floorboard before it could find its way out of the holes.

As we left that morning I was hopeful that harrow in the back was heavy enough to smooth out the ride but I soon was disappointed on that measure. We didn't talk a whole lot on the way down except for him questioning why I would need a new hunting knife as I already had one that I had bought the year before. I explained that the blade wasn't really heavy enough to cut a squirrels head off. My dad had taught me and my brother how to clean squirrels when we first started hunting. It was a quick and easy process that first involved cutting their feet and head off. Once that is accomplished you simply cut a little notch in the fur of their middle back large enough to get two fingers in and pull the skin in opposite directions with one finger of both hands. The skin would split and come off very quickly and easily, leaving the meat exposed so that you could then gut the squirrel. It was a quick process which we perfected over many years of hunting squirrels before school. We could clean five of six squirrels in just a few minutes, after which the meat went in the deep freeze in the back room. I explained that I needed a heavier blade so I could chop rather than sawing the head off and he accepted that as good sense.

Dad told me he was going to trade the harrow on potatos and a couple of banty chickens for my mother. We had a yard full of chickens but she had been wanting some banties for quite a while. A banty chicken is almost a miniature chicken. They grow to about half the size of regular chickens and are more adapted to living on their own than most chickens. They forage more widely and eat mostly insects, worms, and grubs. Our yard chickens did that too but they also needed corn and chicken feed to stay healthy. I didn't know a lot about banties but I had often heard mother talking about wanting to have a few of them.

As it turned out the trades went very well that day. I got a heavy bowie knife with a bone handle that needed a lot of sharpening for my box of baseball cards and a small penknife I had traded for at school. My dad traded the harrow for 500 pounds of potatos, 2 banty hens, and a banty rooster. The banties came with their own little wooden crate which we put in the back of the truck with the two large burlap bags of potatos. Dad explained on the way home that we would put the potatos in the old horse trailer behind the house. We would spread them out on the floor and cover them with lime so that they wouldn't rot or sprout too many eyes. He expected it would supply our family with potatos for upwards of a year.

We made it back home well before dark. He and I unloaded the potatos into the old horse trailer and spread them out with a good covering of lime on the floor of the trailer. When mother came out to check on us he showed her the banties in the crate in the back of the truck. She was really tickled about the banties but wondered out loud how the rooster would get on with the big boss rooster of the yard. At that time we had White Leggun chickens. We probably had 20 or so chickens with a couple of mix Rhode Island Reds thrown in and several roosters of varying size. The boss rooster ruled the yard and the other roosters had to steer clear of him and his hens or catch his wrath which usually involved a couple of spurring jousts and a chase around the yard.

Roosters have a natural tendency to fight other roosters. It is a territorial thing and with the exception of game roosters usually involves a few jousts wherein they fly up and try to hit each other with the spurs that grow on their feet. The spurs are quite nasty little pieces of hard cartlidge that have a sharp point on them. They can easily pierce bare skin and roosters have enough strength in their legs to make it quite painful when they spur you. The boss rooster depends on bluff and constant reminder so their is seldom a serious contest amongst them that lasts very long. Occasionally a young rooster overtakes the old boss and establishes dominance but it is dominance it is after and not bloodlust.

As I was to find out later, game roosters have a whole different attitude. They will fight to the death and have to be kept completely seperated accordingly. Domestic roosters like those we had didn't usually actually hurt each other before one established dominance. I hadn't thought about the banty rooster and how he would fit in with the boss rooster but I knew they had quite a reputation for feistiness.

We knew they would have to sort things out themselves but weren't too worried about it until we let the banties out of the cage. The banty rooster immediately and without delay attacked one of the smaller roosters and chase him around the yard. This went on for a few minutes until the boss rooster saw what was going on and came over the check things out. The banty rooster immediately attacked him as well. The boss rooster was probably 8 inches taller and double the weight of the banty but that didn't seem to register with the banty. They went at it for quite a while until both of them were bloodied and panting for breath. I think the banty got the worst of it simply because the boss rooster had bigger spurs but when they parted company neither one seemed to want any more of the other one.

The banty rooster took his two hens and moved up behind the barn. The boss rooster would run at him after that if he came too close to the yard but he suddenly had no interest in visiting behind the barn either. It was kind of an agreeable detente for both of them. The banties slept in the barn loft and stayed off to themselves for the most part. We eventually had quite a few banties as they hatched chicks every so often and were quite independent and a little wild. They had the run of the barn lot and the hog pen and the other chickens basically stayed away from those areas from that point onwards.

I thought that was probably the end of things for the banty rooster and the yard roosters but he proved to have a long and unforgiving memory. The chickens were around for eggs but they also were around for chicken dinner every so often. It was my job to kill and clean the chickens when it was time for chicken dinner and that happened pretty often around our place since it was relatively free as far as meat goes.

There are many ways to kill a chicken including simply wringing their neck but I felt like it was impossible to do that without them suffering more than was necessary. My method was to simply chop their heads off and I kept a hatchet in an old piece of a telephone pole beside the barn for that reason. The roosters knew enough to know that me taking them up behind the barn carrying them by their legs wasn't a good thing and they would squawk quite a bit on that short journey.

When you chop a chickens head off they will usually flop around for a few seconds which can make quite a mess on your clothes of you stand too close. My way around this was to simply toss them into the weeds beside the old telephone pole until they quit flopping around. One evening shortly after the arrival of the banties, mother told me to go kill a chicken for dinner that night. I took a scoop of corn and threw it out and grabbed the first rooster I could catch while they were eating.

As I carried him up behind the barn he squawked very loudly, plainly not too happy with whatever was coming next. All the squawking brought the banty rooster around the barn to investigate as we were in his territory when I got to the pole. He stood off to the side and watched as I layed the roosters neck across the pole and quickly chopped his head off, tossing him into the weeds immediately afterwards.

That was when I learned that the banty had a long memory. He immediately ran over and began furiously flogging the dead chicken. Every time it flopped a little he would flog it some more. When the dead rooster finally quit moving and was still the banty scratched and strutted all around; finally climbing up on the pole and crowing furiously. This became something of a routine whenever I killed a rooster. The banty would hear them squawking and come from wherever he was as fast as his legs and wings would bring him. He got his revenge on a lot of roosters before I grew up and moved out on my own.

I didn't tell mother about it because I knew she wouldn't approve but I figured it wasn't hurting the dead roosters and he seemed to get quite a kick out of it. If you ever hear the expression "proud as a banty rooster" it has to do with the way they strut and carry on as if there isn't anything they are afraid of. It turns out they also have a long and unforgiving memory.

Gentleman Farmer Part 3

As we trudged back through the woods toward the hog pen, my dad seemed less dejected than I was about the whole thing. He told me to put some feed out in the trough we had made and leave the electric fence off so that if they came back they would be able to get in the fence. This seemed rather optimistic to me but I didn't argue.

He also told me that we needed to clean out the car when we got back. I had forgotten about this during the chase but I knew he was right again. Mother was not going to be too excited about the prospect of driving us around in that car the way it smelled at the moment. As we got back to the car and dragged the cage out to store it in the barn, the full scope of the mess became more apparent. The hog scour had run down into the folded back seats as well as the carpet in the floor boards. The seats were vinyl so they weren't that hard to clean but the carpet was a different story.

The first order of business was to take a hose and spray all of it that was coated on the back of the seats and tailgate out the back of the station wagon. This was done with a mop and a bucket of dishwashing soap without too much trouble but we were adding to the mess underneath with the water. The interior doors were coated as well so a lot of scrubbing with rags and soap was needed to get back to the native green color of the interior.

As we folded the seats back up it became obvious that we were in for quite a battle getting everything underneath clean. It was literally soaked with hog scour and water. The car smelled exactly like hog manure and was only getting worse as the sun started to heat everything up. We spent most of the afternoon scrubbing, hosing out and generally working ourselves to exhaustion trying to clean everything up. We managed to get the brown color dissipated but the smell was literally impossible to remove. We finally resorted to Pine-Sol solution in a very strong mixture but succeeded only in making a combined Pine/Hog Scour smell that really wasn't any better.

Naturally, my mom was not too happy although she tried not to say much about it. My dad seemed to take it all in stride as if it was the most normal thing in the world for our car to smell like a pig sty from that moment forward. We left all the windows and the tailgate down and put a box fan blowing air through the car from the rear to try to dry everything out. We had church the next morning after all, and no one wanted to ride in that car with it smelling like it did.

The next morning I was amazed to see our three hogs contentedly eating and rooting around in the muddy lot around the farrowing house. We fixed the fence where they had come in and out and turned the electric fence back on. Even mother seemed in a good mood when she came out to see them rooting around in the mud. They were quite tame and docile for the most part and even liked to be scratched behind their ears. This caused a little bit of a problem in that mother accidently leaned into the electric fence line running on top of the posts holding the mesh wire as she petted one of them. Both her and the pig were quite vocal in their surprise as the current went through her and into the pig as well. That particular pig eyed her warily from the moment on whenever she visited the hog pen; never quite close enough for mother to touch after that moment.

The car never completely recovered. It did get better than that first Sunday when we drove to church with the windows down even though it was quite chilly. I am sure we all smelled like hog scour that morning as it seemed to creep into everything. For years afterwards we would be going down the road with the windows open and a current of air would find it settled in some crevice and it would instantly make the whole car flare up with that scent. Us kids would all smile knowingly, fully aware that we weren't allowed to say anything without stirring up a touchy subject between dad and mom. He would cut his eyes at us in the mirror when the scent wafted around, just as an extra warning to be quiet. I am sure I also saw a little bit of a smile trying to tick up the corners of his eyes whenever he did that.

Gentleman Farmer Part 2

I didn't listen to the bargaining process that went on between my dad and Mr. Dickey but I didn't really have to. My dad never bought hardly anything without first haggling over price. I can remember being embarrassed many years later when he picked up a hammer and asked the cashier in a hardware store what he would take for it. With my dad, there was an asking price and a settling price and they were never the same thing. After a few minutes I heard them agree to price with a handshake and dad told me it was time to go.

As we got in the station wagon and bounced back down the dirt road leading to Mr. Dickey's house, I asked him how we were going to get our hogs home. We didn't have a truck as yet and the old yellow station wagon served as an all purpose vehicle. We had hauled everything from fencing to feed and lumber as both seats in the rear would fold down flat. Dad told me would simply build a cage and slide it in the back of the station wagon as if it was a perfectly obvious plan. I told him I didn't think Mr. Dickey's hogs would fit in the back of the station wagon and he just laughed and told me we were buying "feeder" pigs that would be between 50 and 60 pounds when we picked them up.

This seemed reasonable to me but I couldn't see up putting anything near the size of the hogs I had seen at Mr. Dickey's in our station wagon; cage or no cage. When we got home that day we gathered up some plywood scraps and two by four pieces along with some of the dog wire we had used to build a pen for our rabbit dogs. From these materials we constructed a cage that slid neatly into the back of the station wagon, complete with hinged door on the end that we would face towards the tailgate type backdoor on the station wagon. When we slid it into the back of the car with all the seats down it fit perfectly. We could just close the back tailgate with the cage wedged tightly against the back of the front seat.

The next Saturday we made sure the electric fence was working. Then we loaded our newly created cage in the back of the station wagon and took off for Mr. Dickey's place. I was pretty excited about the whole prospect and couldn't wait to get there as dad had told me that I could pick one of them out for my own. This was an unexpected but exciting possibility that had whetted my appetite for hog farming to a very sharp pitch. As we finally wound up the dirt road to Mr. Dickey's my excitement was pretty much at a fever pitch.

As we pulled up in his driveway Mr. Dickey appeared from behind the barn at the back of his house and waved us toward a gate in the fence behind his house. He stood at the gate as we pulled up and seemed a little puzzled. "You have a truck coming behind you?" he asked when we rolled to a stop and got out.

"No.. we built a cage for the back of the car that will hold them until we get home," dad answered as if it was the most normal thing in the world for people to pick up hogs in their family car. Mr. Dickey walked over to the car and peered inside. He didn't say anything for a moment or two as if he was considering something carefully.

"Well..... that should hold them," he said, nodding his head. "But..... I wouldn't mind delivering them in my truck if that would work better," he suggested. I think he figured out we didn't have a truck and was trying not to be rude but at the same time he seemed anxious that we shouldn't put hogs in the back of our car for transportation.

"No need for that," my dad explained, "this will hold them until we get home and it's really not very far."

"Uhh..... Ok.... " Mr. Dickey mumbled, "if you're sure?" he said asking one last time if we might not prefer letting him deliver the hogs.

"I'm sure," dad said. My dad could surely tell as good as I could that Mr. Dickey didn't seem to think this was a good idea but he didn't let on. I was so anxious to pick out a hog and I didn't think too much about it; but I remember thinking later that Mr. Dickey had done everything he could to talk us out of our plan without being rude.

Mr. Dickey opened the gate and directed us through the muddy ruts the passed for a road to the barn. As we pulled up behind the barn I could see a lean to roof on the back with a low hog wire fence surrounding it. Inside this pen were 12-15 small hogs. One of the odd things about hogs is how proportional they grow from the time they are born to maturity. A piglet looks like a perfect miniature of a full grown hog when they are born. Some six inches tall to the tip of their back they are born perfectly proportioned and extremely agile. Within an hour or so after their birth they are running around are more or less full speed, which is surprisingly fast. They don't really go through an infant or clumsy childhood, they just get proportionally bigger and stronger as they grow.

As we stood there looking at the pigs dad told me to pick out which one I wanted. Mr. Dickey added that they were all gilts so it didn't matter which ones we chose. A gilt is a female pig that hasn't had a litter yet; after which they become a sow. Dad had already explained some of the terminology to me so I wasn't surprised by the term. As I looked the pigs over carefully I noticed one of them eyeing us as well. She was taller than the rest with her back arching 8 or 10 inches higher than the rest and she appeared to be longer as well in the length of her body. I pointed at her and told dad that was the one I wanted.

Mr. Dickey seemed to approve my choice as he said, "I like the high back ones as well," and gave me a smile. "Go get her," he said. He took a large scoop of corn and handed it to me. He told me to put it in the wooden trough and then grab her by the hind legs when she started eating. If you grab a pig by the hing legs and pick them up high enough you can walk them where you want them to go on their front legs. Of course I didn't know this at the time but I trusted Mr. Dickey to tell me what to do and my dad just nodded and waved me into the pen.

The pen was several inches deep in the muck that hogs love. It was a combination of mud and manure and had been thoroughly turned and rooted over for quite a while. This muck or "wallow" as we called it was the color of chocolate and was very slippery and slick underfoot. I stepped over the fence holding the large scoop and was instantly startled by the rush of pigs against my legs as they knew what was in the scoop. I managed to make it the few feet to the trough without getting knocked over but I was instantly aware of how strong the pigs were as they were effortlessly knocking my legs in every direction as they passed around and through them.

As I dumped the corn in the trough they instantly all were shoving and pushing each other as the begin munching on it. Your could hear the hard corn cracking open under their molars with each bite. I threw the scoop back to Mr. Dickey and maneuvered carefully behind the pig I had picked. I needn't have bothered with being careful as she didn't seem to notice or mind, even when I grabbed her hind legs just below the main joint. Her legs were coated in "wallow" which made it hard to get a good grip and I was suprised how slick and cold it felt. As I slowly started lifting her legs she didn't react until I got them a couple of feet off the ground. When she did react, it was quite a reaction. She started kicking them to and fro with a great deal of strength and speed so that I felt like I was hanging onto a paint can shaker like they have in hardware stores. It was so violent and so fast that I couldn't focus my eyes, she was literally tossing me around like a rag doll and I couldn't hang on. As I let go of her legs, she calmly went back to eating as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, I was covered in the oozing wallow that has slung violently off of her legs and instantly smelled just like Mr. Dickey's whole place.

Dad and Mr. Dickey seemed to think this as a very good show as they were laughing outrageously. "Why did you let her go?" my dad asked in his best mocking voice. After they settled down, Mr. Dickey explained that she wouldn't kick if it tilted her over far enough to make her lose her balance a little. He explained that she would cooperate by walking whichever way it tilted her after I got her away from the trough. Since she was still eating I grabbed her legs again, but this time I tilted them all the way up and yanked her away from the trough. As I turned her towards where dad and he were waiting she calmly walked over to them on her front legs. When we got close, dad and Mr. Dickey grabbed her hind legs and swung her up on to the tailgate of the car. She immediately went into the cage and dad closed the door behind her.

After dad picked two more of them and we followed this same procedure of loading them into the car, he paid Mr. Dickey $120 and we were soon on our way back home. Unfortunately, I was fairly well covered in "wallow" that smelled like hog manure and began drying on my skin and clothes. The tailgate of the car was also pretty much coated in it as well. Somehow, dad had managed to get very little on him as he had worn gloves and managed to avoid the worst of it. Two of the pigs had not liked being handled at all and had squealed in a pitch high enough to carry for quite a distance. I was later to learn that a young hogs squeal is one of the louder noises that the human ear is likely to hear. It is simply ear splitting in pitch, the moreso when they are very young.

As we rode in the car I discovered something else about hogs. Under stress or excitement they had a tendency to "scour". Scour is a polite term for animal diarrhea. Hogs are prone to it anyway, but the more excited they get the more exaggerated it gets. Evidently, our new hogs were very excited by the time we went a few miles down the road as the bottom of our makeshift cage was now covered in the proof of their stress. It suddenly dawned on me why Mr. Dickey was so concerned about our method of transporting hogs as their scour was now running out of the edges of the makeshift cage and slowly sloshing down into the openings around the folded down seats on either side when we made a turn.

I knew I could shower all this muck that was presently coating me off. I wasn't so sure about the car seats or the carpeted floor under them. I could see my dad eyeing things in the mirror so I knew he was probably having the same thoughts but there wasn't much we could do about it until after we got them unloaded. It was only about a 20 minute drive back to the house and they seemed to settle down more the longer it went. When we finally pulled in our driveway and began the slow bouncing path through our side pasture to the hog lot dad went over the plan for unloading them.

He and I would lift them over the electric fence and I would run back to the barn and turn it on whenever we had them all in. In retrospect we should have blocked them in the farrowing house area where we had web wire for a few days but I didn't think of that until later. As we eased back against the edge of the fence I got out and lowered the tailgate on the station wagon, so that we could have it directly over the fence. Once we got in position we opened the cage door and grabbed the first pig we could reach. We hauled her out and lowered her into the pen. As soon as she hit the ground she ran to the far end of the lot before turning to watch the rest of the proceedings. When we lowered the second one to the ground she lit out in the same direction at full speed. My pig didn't seem in any hurry to get out of the cage and it took us a few minutes to coax her back where we could reach her. Once we grabbed her and set her in the pen she took off in the same direction.

As I ran toward the barn to turn the fence on I looked up to see all three of them shoot right through the unarmed fence at a trot and head for the woods down below our house. Dad was already running that direction so I took off after him as well. By the time we reached the creek on that end of the pen they were out of sight. We chased down through the woods for a while occasionally seeing their track but since it was fall there was a carpet of leaves on the ground and we soon lost their track too. Sounds on dead leaves carry quite a distance in the woods and we couldn't hear any rustling or running at all. They were simply gone.

The Gentleman Farmer Part 1

When I was 12, my dad decided we needed to get out of the city and have a farm. Both him and my mom had been raised in Birmingham but had family that live in rural areas and they both wanted to give it a try. I think they believed it would be better for all of us kids as well. There were five of us by then, two boys and three girls. I was the second to oldest boy and it seemed a grand idea to me. I didn't really understand a lot about what we were getting in to, but as I soon found out; my parents didn't either.

My dad didn't quit his job, he just took on another one; the job of Gentleman Farming. What that actually meant was that he committed himself along with me and my brother to working every night and weekend on fencing, gardening, livestock tending, and a thousand other little jobs that never get finished on a farm. I loved it while we were doing it, I don't have any desire to go back to it now that we don't.

He bought a small place in the southern edge of Middle Tennessee that had 26 acres and a somewhat delapidated old wood frame house. Like most things my dad did, it was a bargain hunter's dream. The house had actually been half house and half saddle shop when we took it over. The saddle shop end was to be a den, and two bedrooms for my brother and I. We were excited to have our own bedroom, something new for us.

For several weeks my dad and I drove up to the place every night and on the weekends to build walls, rough in the electrical and hang sheetrock. We ran out of time before we had to move so there weren't any doors in that end of the house but at least the walls were up and the electrical was finished before we moved in. The heat was all supplied by a few baseboard electric heaters which combined with the fact that none of the walls were insulated didn't do a whole lot toward keeping us warm at night but we had plenty of blankets so we thought we were living large with our own rooms.

After a few months of living there we had finished the inside doors and trim and began working on starting our "farm". My dad decided the first order of business was to get some hogs. Mother had already ordered a bunch of chickens through the mail (more on that later) but the hogs were dad's first foray into livestock. Being twelve years old, I was convinced my dad knew pretty much everything there was to know about everything. He was a fair carpenter, and could do enough wiring to put plugs and switches in without burning the place down. I had never known him to fail or even be wrong about anything the whole time I was growing up. We often did things the old fashioned way, right up until he quit building things. He didn't believe in electric saws with the exception of a small jig saw that he used to cut round patterns with. Everything else was done with a hand saw. He cut straight and true with a hand saw with long steady strokes and he taught my brother and I to do the same thing with a lot of patience. I can still hear his admonition to "let the saw do the work," and "find your rhythm and stick with that."

The saw made a pleasing rasp that you could set your watch to in his hands and the smell of fresh cut pine is one that you never really ever forget. He was the same way driving a nail; steady, strong and consistent. The sound of a purely struck nail "drinking" in the wood is one that a lot of this generation will never hear. As the nail goes into the wood it's pitch changes every time the exposed part gets shorter, hence the "drinking" sound like a man guzzling a glass of water. Later on, when I did framing work and hammers were still in use, we used a 28 ounce checker face hammer almost 18 inches long. One blow set the nail and the next one drove it home in the soft spruce that had become the framing wood of choice. When I was a kid you used a 16 ounce hammer and harder wood so it took 8 strikes or so to sink a 16 penny nail, each blow changing pitch when someone with skill did it.

Our hog pen consisted of a small area on the lower end of the farm with a couple of low slung sheds for cover. The sheds were pretty ancient post and sawmill board affairs with tin roofs. They were just under six feet high and probably 12 foot square under roof with two sides open. We seperated them into two halves for farrowing (hog nursery) purposes. We built a hog wire area around the two farrowing houses that was probably 30 feet square and then added an opening into a much larger area that we put up metal fence posts and electric wire around. It was probably close to an acre and a half, running all the way down to a spring fed creek in the edge of the woods on the east end of our property.

Electric fencing was simply some small gage bare wire ran on plastic insulators on the metal posts. We put the fence charger that drove it in the barn that was close to the farrowing houses so it would be out of the rain. An electric fence puts out an extremely high voltage at low current in a loop from positive charge to negative charge and then to ground. It pulses on an off a couple of times a second and feels a lot like grabbing a live spark plug on a car. The problem we had with our fence was that it wasn't strong enough to burn through grass. When grass grew up into the lower strand it simply grounded the fence out and it didn't have enough juice to get the hogs off of it. At that point you would have to walk the fence down and find the offending grass to cut away from the fence.

We learned all of this after the fact of course. It became one of my jobs to maintain the electric fence. The easiest way to check it was to check the return loop at the charger, if it was still hot the rest of the fence was fine. I soon learned to take piece of johnson grass and hold the thick stem against the wire. It acted like a semi-conductor so that I could feel the fence pulsing without getting the full voltage. It wasn't pleasant but it wasn't as bad as getting zapped full on. I could judge the charge by how close I could get my fingers to the fence with the grass before it was overpowering.

After a few weeks of building fence and stringing wire, we were ready for our hogs. My dad had an uncle when he was a kid who had Poland/China hogs but we couldn't find anyone locally that had them. The most common and hogs at the time were Durocs, Yorkshires, and Hampshires. Durocs were probably the most popular but people regularly bred Durocs with Yorkshires to keep from having inbreeding issues so that combination was popular as well. Durocs are a very large red hog with floppy ears and very long low slung bodies. Yorkshires are white with ears that stand straight up. They are also very large but usually taller and with less length between their front and back legs. The cross between them was usually either all red or all white but had ears that were half tipped, somewhere between flopping over and standing up.

I learned all of this as time progressed as we wound up mixing Duroc and Yorkshire but our initial hogs were going to be Duroc. Dad had talked to some local people at the feed store where we purchased chicken feed and corn and they all suggested Durocs were the best combination of size and good health available. We soon found a local breeder named Mr. Dickey. Mr. Dickey had purebred Durocs but they weren't actually registered stock which is much more expensive. For the most part purebreds are healthier than registered stock anyway, most likely because of inbreeding.

One Friday evening when dad came home from work he told me we were going to look at the hogs he wanted to buy. We got in our old Dodge station wagon and drove the 6 miles to Mr. Dickey's farm. Mr. Dickey lived in Kelso, Tennessee and had been raising hogs his whole life. He had a really good reputation for honesty and very large hogs. As we drove up the little gravel road that led to his house I noticed his fencing didn't look anything like ours. The fencing was all on large cedar posts crossed braced every few posts. It was arrow straight and tight like a banjo string with three layers of heavy red brand barbed wire on top. I was beginning to wonder why he had such amazingly stout fencing when I saw the first of the Durocs in a corner of the fence.

I could tell it was a hog by the general shape but it wasn't anything like I had pictured in my mind. It was massive. This hog was probably 40 inches tall with back legs slightly longer than his front. His back curved up to a point a little more than halfway down his long body before sloping back down to his rear end. He was probably 20 inches wide at the shoulders and his legs appeared stubby because of the extremely long length of his body. He was probably 750-800 pounds and put me more in mind of a hippo than what I had thought of as a hog.

Mr. Dickey came out to meet us when we pulled in his driveway with a big smile on his weathered face. He wore the habitual farmer's Lincoln County Bank cap on his head and sported some Liberty overalls well worn with usage. He shook dad's hand and mine as well, calling me Mr. Rick when my dad introduced him as in, "glad to meet you Mr. Rick." His hand was brown and felt like saddle leather as he swallowed my own in his and smiled. He had some very light blue eyes that seemed to almost glow in that dark tanned face and a kind of perpetual grin like he saw the fun in most everything.

As he and dad talked I wandered over to the fence to get a closer look at the huge hog we had seen on the way in. He was grunting deeply as he dug in the mud with his snout. I could hear the ground tearing with each small toss of his head as he dug his snout in and pushed. He was literally tilling the ground with his nose, stopping every few seconds to loudly chew and swallow a root or grass bulb he found in his digging. He eyed me under his loose flopping ears as he rooted around but didn't seem overly interested one way or the other. His wiry bristling hair was thin and barely covered his skin which appeared thick and wrinkly under his coat. His back and shoulders were caked with dried mud, large chunks of hard clay clinging to him. He smelled like hog manure, just like everything in the area seemed to.

Hog manure has its own odor that is unmistakable for anything else. Over my years on small farms I came to recognize almost all livestock by the smell of their excrement. Cows have a mild fermented grass smell while horses have a slightly less sharp almost aged smell to their manure. Chickens smell extremely strong with a tinge of ammonia, which is one reason that chicken manure will burn up almost anything you try to fertilize with it unless you cut it profusely with water. Hog manure is probably only second to chicken manure in the pungency of its odor, it sticks in your nostrils for quite a while. It was a smell I was to become quite familiar with as time went on. Whenever I smell it today, I must confess that it brings back fond memories. I can catch a whiff of it driving down a country road and instantly be transported back to a simpler, happy time in my life.

As Mr. Dickey and dad talked I leaned close to the fence, fascinated with the great tearing ruts the hog was making and the sheer power he possessed to rend the ground that way with just his snout. Mr. Dickey seemed to notice my fascination as he broke off the conversation with dad to say, "you can pet him if you want, he likes to be scratched behind his ears."

I hadn't considered that this beast could be touched, much less petted or scratched like a friendly dog. As I stepped close to the fence he leaned against a post and began scratching his back and side with it, a great shower of dried mud and dirt flying up as he did. I reached through the fence and began lightly scratching behind one of his great floppy ears. His skin was wrinkled and tough like a baseball glove that had been left in the rain for several years. He tilted his head a little and grunted his appreciation as I scratched harder. His grunts were a deep bass sound, rumbling up and out of him like an echo in a large muffled chamber.

The Job Interview

Craig was a senior engineer at the company I got a job with some 30 years ago now. I had worked construction and plant maintenance as an electrician for quite a few years. I was in the midst of settling down with a family to raise and needed to get a job with some insurance benefits. I had put applications in at many of the local defense and space industry contractors in the area but had gotten very little response. When this company called and set up an interview I was pretty excited. At that particular time I was running commercial sites on the electrical side and I had a wide array of power and control system experience.

The interview as set up at Marshall Space Flight Center which is housed on Redstone Arsenal; a military installation. I had worked on Redstone for several contractors doing different jobs so I was at least moderately familiar with the area. I knew NASA had some large test stands on site where the original Apollo rockets had been tested. I also knew that the Columbia disaster had decimated the work force on the contractor side at Marshall but that was about all I knew at the time about NASA activities at Marshall.

My interview was at 2 PM on a Tuesday afternoon. I couldn't take off of my current job for a whole day so I made arrangements to leave from there to go to my interview. We were in the process of roughing in a grounding grid for a plant expansion so it was muddy, wet, and cold all that day. I felt a little embarassed to go to an interview with mud all over my clothes but then again; it was a job that required my skill set so I figured they could accept that I was used to getting dirty.

From the look on the secretary's face when I walked in I probably misjudged that particular assessment. She sat me in her office foyer and told me that Mr. Strickland would see me. Mr. Strickland was the chief engineer for the site, which I later found out meant that he signed off on all the work orders and basically made job assignments for the engineering staff. The contract itself was an agreement to operate and maintain pressurant and propellant facilities for NASA. He explained it to me as a bit like being a utility company; they ran the facilities and provided the pressurants and propellants that NASA needed to operate their test facilities at Marshall.

They had a new contract to refurbish and bring back into operation a whole section of the test area that had been mothballed for years. My job was to be to physically refurbish all the electrical control and instrumentation involved with running these facilities. He asked a lot of questions about my experience; specifically experience working directly with engineers. I wanted this job. It seemed challenging and interesting at the same time. I had worked directly with architects and engineers for most of my career so it wasn't like I had to make things up; but I was trying pretty desperately to paint as rosy a picture as I could. He seemed to sense there was an underlying issue as he kept repeating questions and asking for direct instances of how I dealt with engineers when I had problems with them.

He finally got around to asking how I would deal with an engineer that was both stubborn and wrong. I thought this was an odd question and tried to parry it with some vague generalities about using diplomacy and tact when dealing with people in general. He pushed back and bluntly asked if I would follow directions that I knew to be wrong if the engineer insisted. I told him I would not and that I deemed technical disagreements to be different from chain of command hierarchies. He wanted more explanation of this theory and pushed harder; suggesting that engineers had a lot of education and might know some things that I didn't. I agreed with this assessment but was getting a little irritated with his badgering comments. I told him that I had a lot of experience where systems HAD to function and that I would not follow anyone's lead in such situations when I knew their solution would not work.

"So".... he said, "You think engineers are sometimes full of crap?"

"I think anyone can be full of crap, it isn't limited to engineers" I said, probably with a little more heat than was really necessary. I had already gone from badly wanting the job to the point where I wasn't going to be badgered anymore by him or anyone else.

He pulled his glasses down and looked at me over them for a minute. "I hope you can keep that in mind after we hire you," he said.

Shortly after, he took me down the hall and introduced me to his most senior engineer, Craig. Craig could have been the model for every engineering stereotype caricature I've ever seen. He was very thin, with large thick glasses and still had an honest to god pocket protector in his white short sleeved shirt. He talked without looking you directly in the face and laughed at odd intervals over things that you seldom had a clue about. He was also one of the smartest people I have ever met. He lived engineering; it was his reason for existence. I found all of this out later, but that day he just seemed a little quirky and strange.

He showed me a few drawings and asked some really simple questions about electrical theory and control. After that, he told me we should go to the test area and he would show me around some of the facilities that they were refurbishing. It was quite a show. We went up on top of the test stand where the Saturn 5 engines were tested. It was a massive structure, some 270 feet high with large lifting cranes permanently mounted at several locations.

We went through the pumphouse that housed 13 locomotive diesels used for pumping coolant water to the test stand. He showed me the liquid hydrogen storage area, two huge vacuum jacketed spheres that held over 150,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen apiece. He explained that Hydrogen starts to boil at -420 Degrees F so even though it is stored and transferred in vacuum jacketed tanks and lines, it is always boiling off. As he talked he explained that at this temperature metal contracts significantly, requiring pipelines to be on rollers with stress relief loops included to keep them from pulling apart as the changing temperatures make them contract and expand.

It was fascinating stuff. He talked continously for probably 30 minutes, explaining in great detail how each facility worked and how it fit into the grand scheme of testing rocket engines. As we walked across a large field below the test stand toward one of the flare stacks that was constantly burning the venting hydrogen gas he explained the control system that operated the flare stack. As we walked down the vent line which was a 15" line, he suddenly stopped and pointed to a broken fitting on the conduit carrying the control wires to the flare stack. It was a 2" ridgid conduit and the broken fitting was a cast pulling C. Pulling C's are installed as required by code every 200' for the simple reason that fish tapes used to pull wires are only 250' long. It also minimizes the amount of force needed to pull the wire through the conduit which lessens the likelihood of inadvertently cutting or tearing the insulation on the wires inside.

As he stopped and pointed to the broken pulling C, he asked me why I thought it might have broken. I looked around a little and told him that I though somebody was probably climbing over the pipe rack and stepped on it. Pulling C's have a lot of tensile strength in a direct line, but have very little shear strength; it wasn't the first time I had seen one similarly destroyed.

"Well...." he started in, "think about what I told you about contraction of the vent line and the fact that there are no rollers or stress reliefs on the conduit" Craig said.

I knew where he was trying to lead me. I told him that it was possible that such contractions had broken the C but I didn't think it very likely. I explained that these fittings are very strong in that radial direction but not in shear. He seemed unconvinced and maybe a little confused why I didn't seem to agree with him.

"Why do you think someone stepped on it," he asked.

I pointed out that there was a worn path in the grass leading to and from the pipe rack at that location as it was directly between and the shortest route back and forth from the viewing bunker to the test stand. I also pointed out that there was dried mud on the pipe support hanger on the other side of the pipe rack that looked like it had been there for a while and a footprint on top of the vent line above the conduit.

Craig looked at all of this for a second or two and then said, "I think you're probably right." He then went right into asking me how I would repair the pulling C without seeming to take any more notice of our disagreement. Over many years, I never saw Craig take a personal slight from a technical conversation, not even in the slightest degree. People sometimes tried to give him insults but he never seemed to care about that at all. It was all purely technical to Craig, nothing else really mattered.

As you may can guess... I got the job. I worked there for many years quite happily.