We forget so easily where we came from, what we are. Here I am, a solid citizen of Whatcom County who has served on a county board, has voted in every election for the past fifty years, and pays plenty of local, state, and federal taxes.
I wish that the anti-immigrants of today would realize that a hundred years ago, they would likely themselves be the target of their own anti-immigrant mindset.
Last week, the sheriff of Whatcom County announced that the department’s role would be “a collaborative partnership in participating in [federal] Task Forces related to criminal activity that affects our community—not immigration enforcement.”
Our attorney daughter pointed out to me that the announcement was unnecessary because it is a foregone conclusion. Local officials who enforce federal law violate the 10th amendment (the states’ rights amendment). Subsequent supreme court decisions have made the separation clear. She cited Prinz v. U.S. 1997 SCOTUS.
The sheriff’s announcement was publicized in Whatcom News, a popular– at least with me– local news source. I was disappointed that the reader comments on the announcement were mostly unfavorable.
For the most part, the commenters confused the roles of local and federal law enforcement, saying that the sheriff was shirking his constitutional duty, when, in fact, he was correctly stating his constitutional role.
I am repeatedly amazed how personal sentiment changes people’s minds. Not long ago, the same folks who favored immigrant deportation and suppression of minority rights were asserting states’ rights against federal protection manifestos. Now, as the federal pendulum swings, states rights are sent to the back of their agenda.
I am also amazed at the changes in my home, Whatcom County. I can remember (just barely, I admit) when church services in both halves of my German and Dutch immigrant family were regularly held in German and Dutch respectively.
I overheard conversations about deportation and internment camps for Germans that my grandparents feared during World Wars I and II.
My grandfather was born in Minnesota, but his parents were both born in East Prussia, Germany. I vaguely recollect hearing that my great grandfather formally became a U. S. citizen in order to get a U. S. passport that would ensure a safe return home after a visit to Germany, probably in the 1920s. However, until then, my grandfather’s citizenship was from his birth in Wells, Minnesota, not his parents’ citizenship.
My grandmother was born in Germany and was never a documented U.S. citizen. Her citizenship derived from her marriage to my grandfather. In today’s parlance, an undocumented immigrant.
It’s likely that if you were to scratch into the family history of anyone whose Whatcom County roots go deeper than the mid-twentieth century you will find undocumented immigrants among their forebears.
As our daughter points out, the difference is that those Whatcom County immigrants were white, not brown. When I counter that a white at the bottom of the social ladder is still at the bottom of the ladder, she frowns and says its easier to climb to the next step if you don’t have to change your skin color; I have to agree.
I wish that the anti-immigrants of today would realize that a hundred years ago, they would themselves likely be the target of their own anti-immigrant mindset.
We lived differently in the 1950s on Waschke Road. Neighbors and relatives relied on each other when a job needed extra 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 came shortly after the first killing frost. In Whatcom County, that’s often 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. Their orange and yellow bounty brightened the stage for chicken catching.
In those days, my grandpa ordered cartons of baby chicks by mail in the spring. These chicks would replace the laying hens he kept in the chicken house.
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 had begun to lay a few eggs and roosted in the orchard at night. They 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. Squawking chickens 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 ready for everyone. In October, pie made with red Gravenstein apples from the orchard was the rule. 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.
