Painting and Bee Keeping

After WWII a great deal of war surplus material was sold for ridiculously low prices. My father bought many five gallon cans of paint, mostly army drab, to paint the chicken houses. The hired hands painted the chicken houses every few year using a gasoline powered sprayer.

The paint cans came in sturdy oak boxes. Some boxes were one-can boxes and the others were two-can boxes. The one-can boxes were just the right size and shape for bee hives.

In addition to rats under the chicken houses there were, on occasion, bees. I fashioned a couple of bee hives out of paint boxes. The hives were on 2x2 legs. I placed the legs in tin cans filled with water to keep the ants from invading the hives and destroying them. I then captured two swarms of bees and introduced them to the new hives. I extracted honey for a couple of years before I grew tired of the effort.

I must have been stung at least a few times, but I do not recall having been stung.

In retrospect it seems that I was something like Henry Ford. He used the wood from the crates in which his transmissions arrived for floorboards in his automobiles.

More Ranch Dogs

When we moved onto the chicken ranch Teddy was already an old dog. It was only a couple of years before he passed away. To fill the void, two dogs wandered in and we adopted them. They were very young and obviously litter mates. We named them Buckskin and Beaver. (Some of you readers are too young to remember the radio program Red Rider, or was it Ryder?) Appropriately enough, Buckskin was buckskin colored. Beaver was much darker.

These two dogs were not nearly as good as Teddy at catching rats. In fact they were no good at all.

Early in his career with us Beaver started to chase chickens. On a chicken ranch that can be a fatal activity. I tied an old dead chicken around this neck and he had to drag it around for a whole week. After that I do not think he even looked at another chicken.

Beaver had the bad habit of chasing cars and trucks. On at least two occasions he caught one. As a consequence his right hip was smashed and his right hind leg did not function. That, however, did not stop him from chasing cars and trucks. It just slowed him down so he did not catch any more.

Another dog wandered in a year of so after the arrival of Buckskin and Beaver. Of course, we adopted him. He was a beautiful black lab. We named him Amonasro. (You may recall that my parents were aspiring opera singers.)

I do not recall any more interesting stories about the dogs other than they followed Jerry and me around the ranch and, without a whole lot of coaching, refrained from chasing the sheep that kept the grass and weeds trimmed in the lanes among the chicken houses.

Teddy and Bounty Hunting

When my parents bought my grandfather’s chicken ranch, Teddy (as in Teddy Roosevelt), a rat terrier, came along with it. Among Teddy’s talents was the ability to climb an eight-foot chicken-wire fence in pursuit of cats. I never saw Teddy catch a cat.

My father posted bounties: $0.01/mouse, $0.10/gopher or mole, and $1.00/rat. It was relatively easy to catch mice. My brother, Jerry, and I would take Teddy with us into the hay loft. There we moved hay bales and the mice would scurry about. Teddy, Jerry, and I would each catch our share of mice.

Catching gophers and moles was not quite so easy. Teddy did not seem to be interested. We caught a few using traps. Rarely, when a particularly pesky gopher invaded our vegetable garden I stood guard with my 12 gauge shotgun. When the gopher pushed out a mound of dirt and stuck his head out I would blast away. Of course this left very little evidence with which to claim the bounty.

Rat catching, on the other hand, was a mixed bag. We did catch a few with traps. The gold mines were under the chicken houses, of which there were over thirty. Under a typical chicken house there was a vertical clearance between the ground and the floor joists of twelve to eighteen inches. Teddy, Jerry, and I crawled on our stomachs, Teddy digging down the length of a rat burrow. There was always at least one rat burrow under every chicken house. Upon reaching a nest, an adult rat would run out and Teddy promptly caught it. (Remember, Teddy was a rat terrier.) Jerry and I would then gather up as many as a dozen baby rats. It only took a couple of such episodes for our father to amend the terms of the bounty: $1.00/adult rat, $0.10/baby rat.

I am not certain now whether the primary motivation for the efforts was the monetary reward or only the “thrill of the hunt”. Maybe I should pay more attention to why I say and do the things that I do?

More Oregon Stuff

To make sense of this story you will have to remember that my brother and I were kids from Southern California (Riverside) at the times our family spent summer vacations in Oregon.

Uncle Bob had several acres across the road from our grandparents’ house that he was preparing to convert to a berry patch. All of the big Douglas fir trees had been harvested. What remained was to blast the stumps, clear out all of the brush, and plow. This process was taking several years, leaving time for seedling fir trees to grow. To me and my brother this was magical. Just look at all of those Christmas trees!

And what does one do with Christmas trees? One decorates them! So we went to the barn and got a sack needle and sack twine. (You know, the stuff one uses to sew closed burlap sacks filled with grain.) We then gathered red rose hips from the many wild roses growing among the stumps and Christmas trees. Using the sack needle and twine we made a lot of rose hip strings. These we draped over a bunch of the Christmas trees.

I guess that Toys-Я-Us would never have made it back then with so many simple, low-cost (i.e. free) play things available for kids who used their imagination.