We lived differently in the 1950s on Waschke Road. Neighbors and relatives relied on each other when a job needed more hands. Haying, thrashing, digging potatoes, hog butchering, and chicken catching were the community events that entertained kids before we began to see the wider world on television.
Chicken catching night came shortly after the first killing frost. In Whatcom County, that’s about now, mid-October. School had started by then. Kids were needed to help, so chicken catching night was usually the first Friday after a hard frost, which withered the squash and pumpkin vines in the vegetable garden and brightened the stage for chicken catching with their orange and yellow bounty.
In those days, my grandpa ordered cartons of baby chicks by mail in the spring. Grandpa set out the chicks under a metal hood heated with light bulbs and suspended by a block and tackle from the collar tie rafters in our brooder house. As spring turned to summer, Grandpa raised the hood gradually as the growing chicks began to explore the brooder house. Summer wore on and the baby chicks grew into hardy pullets, that ranged over a wider and wider area, eventually running loose all over the farm yard, grazing on grass, weeds, and bugs. By September, they roosted in the orchard at night and only went into the brooder house for water and wheat that Grandpa set out for them.
Towards fall, Grandpa would call Wallace Poultry in Bellingham. Today, city folks get coffee and bagels, something we had never heard of, at a shop called The Bagelry, which occupies the old Wallace Poultry store. Decades ago, instead of fancy coffee, Wallace sent out trucks to pick up the old hens from our chicken house. If a kid was lucky, the truck didn’t arrive until after school and the kid got to join the squawking mayhem of tossing the old birds into wire crates that the trucker loaded on his flatbed. We kids speculated on exactly what happened to those scrawny and scrappy old birds. Needless to say, we only sold to Wallace, never bought their poultry.
When the old hens were gone, my dad and grandpa would thoroughly clean the chicken house and spray it down with Carbolineum to kill mites and parasites in preparation for chicken catching night. Some years Grandpa would brighten up the coop walls with a coat of white wash, another job to entertain a kid if Grandpa didn’t finish before he got home from school.
Chicken catching night was a big event. Relatives and neighbors carrying flashlights came to help capture a couple hundred sleeping pullets. Anything in the dark with flashlights was fun for the kids and squawking chickens only added to the excitement. The men would shine their flashlights into the trees, reach up and catch the pullets by the legs. The kids would grab the legs the men lowered down and carry the noisy struggling birds to the chicken house feed room where Grandpa had a wooden barrel waiting. We’d drop the chickens in the barrel. Grandpa pulled them out one by one, looked them over, set aside the culls, then forced a worming pill down their throats and let them loose in the chicken coop. The chicks in the spring were all supposed to be hens, but a few roosters made it through and had to be set aside. Grandpa also didn’t like to feed runts and the occasional one-legged hen who wouldn’t lay eggs anyway.
When all the pullets were in the chicken house and wormed, it was late and we were all tired. My mother and grandmother would have coffee and dessert, usually red Gravenstein apple pie in October, ready for everyone. Even the kids got milk with a little coffee. Tired folks in those days did not fret over drinking coffee at night.
Sleep always came easy after chicken catching night on Waschke Road.