The larger of the two beds was where an older brother and I slept, he about ten and one-half years old and myself about eight. The smaller bed was for my little brother about four years old. The room was not all that big, not big enough to have a closet or any other furniture that I can remember. A single light bulb hanging from the ceiling on an electric cord was the light source, turned on and off with a pull-chain. One window with a pull down blind with a curtain hanging there, pretty much completes the picture.

Our mother always raised about fifty chickens each year for fresh meat. This was before we had a refrigerator so if you were to have any meat for dinner, it had to be fresh. In the case of a chicken it had to be, here’s the chopping block today, gone down the gullet tomorrow. We also raised a lot of rabbits for the same reason but they were not a problem to us three boys as you will see later in this story.

It all started in the early springtime; when our mother would raise about fifty baby chicks for our summer’s food supply. Sometimes she would order the chicks from the Montgomery Ward or Sears & Roebuck catalog. They would arrive in a cardboard box, perhaps they would arrive with motion sickness or maybe they were just homesick, at any rate there would always be two or three dead ones in the box. These chicks would have to be kept warm in a “brooder” until they had enough feathers to keep themselves warm enough to survive on their own. Other times she would incubate about fifty eggs in an incubator. This took about three weeks for them to hatch and then they went into the “brooder”. The rabbits never became a problem for us because our mother never could figure out how to incubate them;------- I guess she would have tried if she had ever been able to find their eggs!

The incubator was a rather large wooden affair about three feet square, maybe sixteen inches deep and it was set up on a small table on one end of the kitchen. It had a little kerosene heater about the size of a lantern base, a wick and flame much like a lantern but the chimney went on through the contraption and then came out through the top. This is what kept the contraption warm. If I remember correctly it had some kind of thermostatic damper heat control and some kind of water container to control the humidity. It also had a couple of trays which contained the eggs which my mother had to turn over a couple of times per day.

We kids could scarcely contain our eagerness to see the first baby chicks wake up and peck their way out of their shell. These chicks would always be of the red varieties, such as Rhode Island Reds or some others best known for their value for what we called “fryers”.

The brooder was made of galvanized sheet metal, about three feet square. It had little watering and feeding troughs around the outside and little windows where the little chicks could stick their little heads through and dine or sip. There was a fifty or sixty watt light bulb in the center of the contraption to keep the chicks warm. The light bulb was contained in a tin can so the chicks would not get too close to the hot bulb and as a result, burn their fuzzy little behinds. This tin can was very significant to this story as you will see as it unfolds. The brooder had a false bottom made of screen, so the droppings could be cleaned out through the openings provided below. The whole contraption was placed on a small table at the foot of my little brother’s bed.

It was fun to watch these chicks hatch and we looked forward to seeing them placed in the ‘brooder”, we were going to have our very own fifty chicks in our very own little room. We just didn’t know that this was going to be the last night that we would get peaceful sleep for about three or four weeks.

It wasn’t too bad the first couple of days when the chicks were real small. They sure looked innocent enough and they were fairly quiet. Not after three or four days though. They soon turned into savage chicks from Hell; there wasn’t a whole lot of discipline shone in these hellions. I guess you couldn’t really expect much, considering their mother was a tin can. What could one expect her to do with fifty of these overactive brats anyway?

First they would run around one direction and then they would run round the other. Then they would settle down a little bit until the ones in the outer edge of the bunch got a little cold, and then they would all crowd and struggle to get closer to their “mother”, the warm tin can. When any of those chicks got too cold or too warm there was a mad chicken stampede right there in our bedroom.

This was not a noise that one could become accustomed to, it was too random. The bigger those chicks grew, the more noise they made, and the more crowded that brooder got as they grew, the bigger the stampede, first one direction and then the other. We had thought these feathery little critters cute before, now we wanted to wring their scrawny little necks.

What could anyone expect from those little beasts who were raised by a tin can anyway? Surely one could not expect a great deal of order and discipline, now, could we really?

This whole story could lead to a whole bunch of dumb chicken jokes; I can feel them coming on already.

Can you imagine what life might be like for a young rooster who had a tin can for a mother? It could change his whole view of life.------- Think about his first date, he’d most likely ask a “cute little tin can” out to the chicken prom.------- One might hear a conversation in the barnyard between two roosters like this, ------ “hey, check out that cute little tin can over there”, “heh, heh”, “she can spend the night on my roost any time she wants to”------- Or one might hear a very sad rooster say----- “Did you hear what happened to Red”, “yeah, too bad”, might say the other.” “Well, I told him to stay away from those recycle trucks”, says the first, “but he just wouldn’t listen”, “he got into the driver’s blind spot and now he’s just a grease spot”. “He was a good chicken though, if you needed anything, he would give you the feathers right off his back”. ----- Or you might hear one young rooster say to another, ----- “I heard that Red got dumped by that cute little tin can that you see over there”. “Really, why”? “Well, he took her to a dance. All he wanted to do was the Fox Trot and the only dance she cared about was the Can-Can.

Finally one might think of an old joke about why a young rooster wanted to cross the road, the answer of course, is that it's just because he can.

All of us old geezers have some stories to tell about those same years, but I’ll remember this one as the great chicken stampedes of the early forties.