The Olden 1930's & 1940's Days

My husband watches commercials on TV and sees these specials at restaurants, etc. I'm a coupon clipper. SO yesterday (because he saw a Taco Bell commercial) we went to eat one of the $2 specials for lunch. On my way back to get my refill on drink I passed a man in a booth that had ordered the box lunch and he had a sack in there with the most interesting looking things in it. I stopped (haven't met a stranger yet or if they are when I talk to them they aren't anymore) and asked him what they were. I told him they looked like "Cracklens". He was about my age so knew what I was talking about. He said, "try one". I did, and boy are they good. Kinda like a big fat cheese curl without the cheese but sprinkled with cinnamon & sugar. Yum. Yum. I had to go buy me a 79 cent sack of them to take home for an evening snack. When I was a kid growing up on the farm and Dad would butcher a hog. They would cut off the fat and cook it and make Lard for cooking. What was left after the fat was cooked out was (we called them) "Cracklens". Dad would put them in a box in our storage cave by the door. They were very tasty. As a kid as soon as you could walk & carry an egg basket, it was your job to gather the eggs each night. I put the eggs in our cave or cellar whichever you want to call it. Going out the door it was a habit to reach down and get a cracklen and eat it. I liked them! After I gathered the eggs from the nests the hens would go and sit in when they needed to lay an egg. Usually there were several eggs in the nest because she left after laying her one egg for the day and another hen would use the nest. Thus, several eggs would be in the nest by evening. Sometimes you would get a "setting hen" that the mood had hit her to hatch a bunch of baby chicks. We didn't have them for that, so as soon as they started doing that Mom would kill them and we would have baked chicken. Anyway when a hen was sitting on that nest and wouldn't get off and you tryed to reach under her to get the eggs. She would peck you. HURT. So I decided, without telling Mom, that if I reached around behind her and grabbed her by the tail and pulled I could pull her out backwards from that nest without getting pecked. There was one little bitsy problem. Fighing me, not wanting to be pulled out of the nest backwards. She would dig her sharp toes into the nest break some or all the eggs under her. If lots of hens layed eggs in that nest that day there may be lots of broken eggs. I was quizzed each night on how many eggs I got. On one of the "sitting hen" nights the count could be pretty low. Mom knew how many laying hens were in the chicken house and when the count was low or lots of cracked eggs in the basket, I would get quizzed about it. Every hen didn't lay an egg every day but mom knew the average count. We always ate the cracked eggs & sold the good eggs. People worry about so many things now but then the food WE raised we knew how old they were & how they were taken care of and we don't know that anymore about the things we buy in the stores. We always had one old rooster. He was always mean and liked to chase little kids and peck them with his sharp beak. I hated him and would watch for him and try to sneak by without him seeing me. He especially liked to attack you when you came out of the hen house with a basket of eggs. Thus you would run or kick at him which again didn't do your eggs any good banging against each other. SO whenever the count was low with lots of cracked eggs the rooster would get the blame. Mom died at 96 and I don't think she ever knew about my pulling the sitting hen's out back of the nest by the tail as a kid. Each spring we would buy about 150 baby chicks from the hatchery North of us in Atchison (20? miles away) or later a little town about 10 miles south called Rock Creek that started a hatchery. The reason to buy them all at one time and not let our sitting hens hatch them through the year was when chickens are babies you have to keep them very warm so we had a "brooder house" equipped with heat lamp they could get under to keep warm on chilly days. They had their own special feederers & waters just the right size for them. When they would weigh close to 1 lb. Mom would start butchering them. One for lunch each day till my brother got big and could eat a whole chicken by himself. Then she had to fry two each day. She never believed in going to all that trouble to get ready & clean up for 1 or 2 chickens so she would kill several at a time. The rest would go into the freezer to eat that winter. Killing them was an operation in it's self. First the big bucket of boiling water to dip the chicken in so you could pull out the feathers. After she "rung their head off by hand" swinging them around & around. What muscle. I could never accomplish that. I had to have a block of wood with to big nails the distance between being the size of a chicken neck. You held them gently HA! and stretched their neck between the nails & holding onto their heads with a very sharp little hand ax chop their heads off. The 13 yellow outside cats (mom loved yellow cats) were always there to grab the head. When you let go & they were headless they wouldn't just lay there they would hop all over the yard spurting blood out of their cut off neck before finally laying down dead. As a kid it was a game when mom would stand there ringing off the heads of several chickens and they were hopping all over the yard & you had to keep out of their way or get splattered with blood. Gee, growing up on the farm in the 30's & 40's was fun. Never a dull moment and we didn't even have toys but we did have a radio. That was the great depression years when it burnt all the crops up and the grasshoppers came in droves to eat everything in sight. Your crops, garden, and when desperate enough they ate the outsides of fence posts & wooden handles of your shovels, spades, pitch forks, etc. Imagine having to work with a handle all splintered up by grasshoppers eating on them. Most farmers wore gloves but that didn't do your gloves any good either & no crops, no money. Then we joined the war against Germany and Japan and in a REAL big hurry needed metal to make fighting equipment so all farms would take every piece of metal machinery, etc. they could spare for the scrap drives & women went to work in defense plants helping to build airplanes, etc. City people were starving because there was no excess food. What little the farmers could grow went to feed his family. People in the cities would send their children to family or friends on farms so they would have food to eat. We had no TV (wasn't invented yet) and was lucky to have a radio to get the news. Some funs shows you had to use your imagination to visualize them on radio like "Fibber McGee & Molly". Never, ever did I feel deprived on the farm because we always had something to do. No one else had any more than you did so the kids just made up games and played together. We heard about the war but was not subjected to seeing it unless you went to the moving picture shows that always had a cartoon & 5 minute news report in pictures which was usally about the war before the main movie. We were lucky in a little town 1,200 to have a "moving picture theatre" a couple in our town owned & ran on Saturday nights. The short was news so we did see pictures of the war a few minutes then. It never really hit home to a kid what was going on until you lost a loved one. My oldest cousin Eldon Reichart crossing the bridge on the Rhine River when the German blew it up. I loved as a little kid. He played with us little ones and held us on his lap. His mother (my aunt) never got over his death and lived to be 90. War is so bad!! WHY can't people get along. I wonder if Mother's were the leaders of EVERY country and had to give up their sons to war would there be a much better communication? After all we went through child birth to have them and raise & love them. Better sign off before I think of something else about the olden days that I remember now at 75 better than what happened last week.