Ep. 201: This Country Life - Working with My Dad

with my dad. I spent a lot of time with my dad throughout the year, hunting and fishing. It goes without saying that there are tons of memories from those outings and adventures and plenty of tales to tell. But I also went to work with him a lot on his job. We're going to talk about that today, but first I'm going to tell you a story. Every summer, when I was out of school, I spent as much time with my dad as possible. We were always fishing,

hunting his hounds on the nights. It wasn't just blistering hot. My dad was a cold hunter. And I've talked about how you do that, at least how he and his friends did it down here, But for those that may be new to the podcast, here's a recap. Seldom did we ever see the cold. Rarely did the cold suffer any damage. We just listened to the dogs run until he got away, or got close to the highway private land that we couldn't hunt on, or we got ready to go home. Then we just caught the dogs and

went home. But this story ended about one of those times we stayed out all night listening to and trying to keep up with a pack of walker hounds. It's not about catching a mess of fishing, cooking them up on the bank of the Slain River, our river, or shooting a sack of the squirrels, only to give most of them away because my dad wouldn't have had one of them had he been starving slapped to death. He would keep a few and fix them for me. But

even then he didn't like doing that. He hated skinning them. He really didn't like touching them. They looked too much like a rat to him. And if one fell in the water, one shot out of a tree and got his tail wet, he wouldn't touch it. But he loved hunting them. Weird, I know, but he liked to give him away the folks that did eat them. There was an old man that lived down the road that favored squirrels as much as I did. My Dad would trade them to him for once a good family term. I know,

snake bite medicine. One mess of squirrels equaled one pint jar of snake bite medicine. Even enough about squirrels right now. In the summer, I would go to work with my dad. My dad retired as a serviceman for Tyson Foods. The serviceman was someone who went around to area fall they were under contract to raise chickens for the company. It was my dad's job to check on each individual grower. When I was a baby, he first worked for England

Farms and Mister Jack England and Rise in Arkansas. Over time he would work for Valmac Industries, Tasty Bird, and then the Northwest Arkansas based Tyson Foods. He basically did the same job for all of them, and according to the Pharmsy Service, he was good at it. Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for all his farmers. Some of them Dad would brag about to me. He was proud of how they farmed and raised the chickens. After all, the better their chickens did, the more money they made.

The more money they made, the bigger Dad's bonus was. Now Dad equated to dogs, horses, hooks and bullets for me. So it was in my best interest that when I was helping him, that I was really helping him. Now. Dad had a weekly schedule that he made out himself, regulated around the age of the chickens at each farm.

He worked from home, and unless he needed supplies from the office in Rising where the hatchery was located, or had to deliver feed samples to the meal and pine bluff, he would work like a man possessed, traveling to area farms, inspecting the houses and talking to the farmers, and just in general being the representative for the company to the farmer and the farmers representative to the company of trying

to maintain a good working relationship between both. He may have been an employee of the company, but he always worked on the farmer's behalf. They were folks just like us, country people working hard and trying to make a living, raised chickens, cattle, and crops. My grandfather on my mother's side was an independent egg farmer that raised, processed, and sold his own eggstra stores. I say that to say the poultry industry was big in our area and very

important economically to a lot of families. It still is, but just like other things, some oaks are better at it than others. My dad had an inspection book that resembled a policeman's ticket book. It was itemized with boxes to check on cleanliness of the house. I know you're thinking, how could a chicken house be cleaned with chickens in it, But trust me, it can be and it can sure be dirty. He monitored the overall condition of the house, water in the feed systems, and the apparent health of

the flock. Had a space where Dad could write in suggestions to correct deficiencies and a copy of that report which stayed with my dad and get turned in with his activity reports for the month. It was my job to fill those reports out according to Dad's observations. They never dinged anyone though on those reports. If he could keep from it, he'd talked to the farmer and tell them what they needed to do differently to keep from

shining a bad light on them. Some of the chicken houses were old, but well taken care of and for a chicken house clean. Some were newer and not. Some of the conditions were due to just not knowing or having a grasp on the new techniques and equipment that helped maintain a more proficient chicken house, and others one in particular, was due to just plain laziness. I went

to that farm several times one summer. Now you could kind of see what was coming when you turned off the county road and headed down the drive past the old junkie house that the farmer lived in and pulled up in front of his new junkie chicken house. Dad didn't give him on paper any of the times, but he talked to him one on one with me acting

like I wasn't listening. Weekly. On the second to last trip I made to that farm that summer, I could tell my dad had had his fill of the sub par conditions of that house and the poor health of the chickens. He told him over and over that if he didn't start showing some signs of improvement, that the company wouldn't renew his contract to raise chickens. Now, I didn't know it at the time, but had that happened, he'd have had no way of making the mortgage on

that new chicken house. He was letting fall in decline, and he would have lost the land that sat on and he put up for clatteral when he built it. Now, I grabbed the inspection book and pen and started to bail out of the truck to get to work checking the boxes when Dad told me to check on our second to last trip there, and Dad said, you stay in the truck I need to talk to mister Bob alone. Now here's a disclaimer. His name was his name wasn't Bob.

But I shut the door and I rolled the window down as Dad walked around in front of the truck toward the chicken house door, reaching for the handle, about the same time mister Bob opened it up and stepped out of it. I heard it all, Bob, this place looks like a junkyard. The outside, while it doesn't look good, ain't as bad as the inside. And I've done all I can do for you. You're a good man, but you have got to do something, and you got to

do it before next week when I come back. I've run out of excuses for you, Bob, and you've got me in a bind. They know I'm covering for you, and your last two batches of chickens have been terrible. Mister Bob looked at the ground the whole time my dad was talking to him. I didn't want to be there. I was just a kid, but I could see the embarrassment on his face, and I felt bad for him. It was always so nice to me, if you'd give

me a quarter, nearly every time he saw me. I remember that when he brought his hand out of his pocket. I never saw more than one, and Dad and I talked about that years later, and he said, son, he'd probably gave you the only one he had. Well that day, mister Bob looked at my dad for the first time since we got there, and he told him this batch of chickens will be different. Buddy, you got my word. Now. Next week we went back and things started getting better.

The chickens were being tended to, and some of the junk around the outside was gone. What wasn't gone had been neatly stacked and organized. Even the grass had been mowed. A month or so later, that batch of chickens went out. Dad said he was still the worst chicken grower he had, but it was the best batch that mister Bob had ever grown. I went back with Dad for the last

time that summer to see mister Bob's farm. He was busy cleaning the old shavens and the chicken litter out of his house with his tractor and getting ready for a new batch of chickens that would arrive in a few days. He seemed happier, I know my dad was. I climbed up on that tractor and sat in the seat that mister Bob had just crawled out of, and while he and Dad talked, I was listening. He said. My Dad said, Bob, you've done good. That's the best

batch of chickens you ever raised. Mister Bob told him, I thank you for your help, buddy, You've been good to me. Now my dad every more. The jokester looked a man dead and eye and said, it's a good thing you had this turnaround. I only had two excuses left for you before they fired me, Bob. Mister Bob said, what was it. Dad said, I was going to tell them you were either planting them too deep or too close together. And that was the first time I ever

saw mister Bob laugh. And that's just how that happened Monday Tuesday in about half a Wednesday would start early in the summer. Breakfast was usually at someone's farm we'd show up to conveniently around breakfast time. It was always good too, not a dud in the bunch. Whatever farm we found ourselves at around mill time was always a winner. Lots of farmers and their wives would cook forest and Dad had already vetted the good ones and arranged our

schedule to arrive at certain times of the day. Between meals were good too. After all, I was a growing boy and I never met a quarter milk and a bag of powdered doughnuts. I didn't like. I needed the energy. One of my jobs was to climb the feed bends on the outside of the chicken house and look down inside through the top hatch and count the section of metal rings above the current feed level, so Dad would

know how much feed the order for him. The sun would beat down on that galvanized medal, and the only cool thing about that job was climbing the ladder, even the ladder was hot enough to scald a hog. My dad hated climbing those bends, and in his later years of work and he kept a box of rocks in the cab of his truck. He pulled up the side a feed bend, and instead of climbing it, he chunked. He chunked rocks at it, listening for the tone it made when he hit at the medal, and repeat it

until he found the spot where the feed stopped. Then he'd order the appropriate amount of feed. I bet he didn't climb one feed bend ladder the last five years he worked before he retired. There was a lady in there, Star City, Arkansas, that worked on a man's farm, and I would love to know her history and how she wound up here. But miss Hudson was from Ireland and

she had the most beautiful accent way of talking. It was hard for me to understand her at times, but I love to hear her talking laugh, and my dad was good at making folks laugh. She dressed like she was straight out of Central Casting for what you'd imagine an Irish grandmother would look like. She smiled a lot, and when she looked at me, she had the kindest eyes I believe I've ever seen. I noticed it even as a little boy, and I think of her often now as a grown man, but I never really knew her.

She was just one of a number of folks that I'd see every summer making the rounds to all the farms. They weren't all as nice as Miss Hudson. The incident. This incident happened after a feed truck driver got stuck in on gravel road that the farmer had built between two chicken houses. Now, the road was there for the feed trucks to use, but had been freshly graveled, and unfortunately big rain had come the day before the feed truck got there. I keep in mind that these feed

trucks aren't they're not pickups. They could be as big as a concrete truck or an eighteen wheeler, depending on how much fee they were delivering. Now, this truck driver drove right up in the middle of the freshly gravel road. After the rain had absolutely buried that truck to the axis. The farmer came off the chain, screaming and cussing that poor truck driver something terrible who was doing everything he

could to apologize for his mistake. He told him to never come back to his farm, and it upset the driver so bad that he walked away, leaving the truck there and quit. And sometime later the office got in touch with my dad and he went down to talk with a farmer and try to resolve the issue. By the time he got there, a wrecker had removed the feed truck and the farmer was there with a shovel by himself, repairing the damaged road. My dad didn't say

a word to him. He just grabbed a shovel out of the back of his truck and started in helping him shovel gravel back in the deep ruts. A few minutes went by before anyone said anything, and finally Dad said, you know, you made that driver quit. The old man kept shoveling and said, well, I didn't mean for him to do that. You tell that fellow. I'm sorry, and he can come back here anytime or better yet, I

tell him myself. A few minutes went by and he continued saying, I don't mean to be this way, buddy. But in nineteen forty one, I was working for John Deere and I was making forty dollars a week. Now, I know that don't sound like a whole lot of money, but in nineteen forty one, that was a heck of a wage son. Then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. I got drafted into the service, and I told it a ninety pound pack from the Belgian border to the Baltic Sea for six hundred dollars a year, and I'm still mad

about it. The list of colorful characters that I met and grew to know was as varied as any group of people couldn't be. They were good folks for the most part, some better than others, the same of which could be said for the people my dad worked with, and I got to know lots of them over the years, and they more or less saw me grow up. Too many to mention, but it was. It was like one big family, and everyone knew my dad, and most of them called me little buddy. My dad was the strongest

person I knew, but he had one weakness. He suffered from undiagnosed musophobia, a condition where a person shows extreme fear, panic, and anxiety of rats and mice. A possum just ran over my grave thinking about it now, most folks would call out a shutter when something gives you the willies and your body has a sudden tremor. My grandmother, Mama's Lie said that happens when the possum runs over your grave. I told her once when I was a kid that I didn't have a grave, and that saying didn't make

any sense. She told me to be quiet anyway. It was widely known that my dad had this fear. One person thought it would be funny to play a trick on him at the feed meal in Pine Bluff. Now, this guy was not on my dad's Christmas card list to begin with, and this trick would see that he never made it on there. Now, rats are attracted to feed. A feed meal that produces tons of feed is going to have an issue with him. There's just no way around it. The Pine Blood feed meal was no different.

I remember Dad let me climb up an access ladder to the top of the building once and I looked down at the ground behind the mill and saw several big ones running around him, and I mean big ones. There wasn't another possum. But Dad walked into the office there one day to deliver some feed samples, and the fella in question here saw him coming and had saved a particularly large specimen they'd killed earlier that day in

the meal. The man hid behind the door of that with that big rat in his hand, and when my dad walked in, he just laid it up on my dad's shoulder. Dad ran back outside through the door while the man laughed and laughed, saying, what's your hurry, buddy. My father looked at him and looked at him and told him, you're gonna regret that he dropped the feed samples in the parking lot where he stood and turned

around in the yuh. The months went by and my dad never brought that up, never mentioned it to him, never said anything to anyone. It was one of those things that everyone knew about, but no one said anything about. Now. One thing my dad wasn't scared of was snakes. Snakes of any persuasion, it didn't matter. I've seen him catch all kinds, from grass snakes to cotton mouse and rattlers.

As luck would have it, one day, my father was driving to Pine Blood to deliver some feed samples when of particularly large rat snakes crossing the road in front of it. Now they routine to grow to six feet in lengthd here, and this one was fully grown. How opportunity he had him caught and stuck in a bucket with his feed samples. In short order and continued his journey. Walking in the office, he saw the man that had laid the rat on his shoulders sitting at his desk

on the phone. My dad poked his head in the doorway, and the man for him to come in and pointed to a chair for my dad to sit in. Dad said, he walked in his office and dumped that bucket of port sized zip lock bags and one huge angry rat snake in the man's lap and says, I can't stay. I'm in a hurry, and walked out the door. Now I look back, I look back on those times often. They're good memories, some just as good as when we were hunting and fishing, the common denominator being that we

were together just having fun. Now I make a concerted effort to do the same with my children and my grandchildren, and I really anyone I happen to be sharing a space with the little folks. They're the ones that matter most to me, and the ones that you and I can make the biggest impressions on just by sharing our time and our interest. When a kid is about to drive you crazy, asking a million questions and going ninety

miles an hour, put your in their spot. Think about how you wanted someone to talk to you when you were that age, or if you can't remember back that far, how do you want him to talk to you now? They're going to ask someone, And if we're gonna stand even the slightest chance of making the difference in this entangled mess of life we find ourselves in today, we need to be the ones to answer you and me except to us. Mister Bob, I don't know what became

him after that summer. He sold that farm and got out of chicken business. Dad told me later on in life when I asked him about that story. I told y'all at the beginning, I hope he moved to the mountains or the beach and did whatever his passion was. It certainly wasn't raising chickens to farming, but he proved that he could do it, and my dad didn't do it for him. As a parent, I'm tempted to make things easier for my daughter Bailey by doing things for her.

That's not the way to make her better. I need to be more like Dad than mister Bob and show her the tools that she needs to use to be successful and help guide her along her path, but I can't told her. She has to take the steps herself, watch where she's going, and whenever she needs some help, she just needs to know that all she has to do is turn around and they're outfits. Hey, did you know that my friend Ryan Kyle Callahan has fired up

the Meat Eater auction House Oddities. There's some pretty sweet items up forbid. The money rais is going to the Land Action Initiative and support of the Corner Crossing Legal Defense Fund. That decision will have implications on public access everywhere,

and I think it's a good cause. That's why I and my friends at the Cash Buy You Coon Camp, sun Spotlights, and case Knives have teamed up to offer to the highest bidder a two night coon hunt date to be determined with lodging at the legendary Dick with more cash value can a case bone stag trapper, pocket knife, and a copperhead hunting light just like the one I wear made by my friend Michael Roseman and sun Spot hunting lights. We're gonna feed you all day and take

you hunting all night. It's gonna be a good time, I promise. Meet Your Live tour is about to kick off out West, so you can check out and get the particulars on both the auction and the live tour at meeteater dot com. I thank y'all for listening and until next week. This is Brent Reeve signing off. Y'all be careful