Raisin’ Banties and Chickens

Great-Granny raised chickens, geese, ducks and guineas, but by the time I can remember she mainly had chickens. I don’t believe she ever settled on any one particular breed. She had a few of each; Bard Rocks, Rhode Island Reds, Wyandottes, Leghorns and Bantams, which she always called banties.

She had one of the sassiest Banty roosters. There wasn’t a fence he couldn’t climb over or dig under. He was the despair of my Great-Granny. She spent more time hunt­ing for him than in caring for her entire flock. Usually she didn’t have to look far, because he would be in her daughter’s (my Granny’s) chicken yard.

One late afternoon that rooster was among my Granny’s chickens, strutting like he owned the flock. Here came Great-Granny asking if her ‘pesky’ rooster was with the flock. Then she saw him. She grabbed the first thing she could find, which happened to be a wooden stake about 8 or 10 inches long, threw it over the 7 foot fence and scolded, ”I’ll teach you to leave home! I ought to break your neck.” It didn’t look like she had taken aim, but that stick sailed true! It knocked the living daylights out of that rooster. Banty rooster stew was on the menu at their house the next day.

I raised chickens, usually Leghorns and New Hampshire Reds, as a Vocational Agriculture project while in high school. Growing up around banties, I always had a few myself. In 1949, I had one banty rooster that I would antagonize when I went into the chicken pen to feed the chickens or gather eggs. I was wearing jeans and boots. That banty rooster would jump up about the top of my boots and start spurring. I thought it was funny, because he couldn’t hurt me through my jeans and boots. One morning, I watched Mom go into the chicken pen to feed the chickens and my banty rooster jumped on her bare leg. He brought blood with his first spur before I could get to the pen to stop him. Mom caught him by the head and wrung his neck. That’s the last time my banty rooster spurred anyone, because he was now flopping around on the ground, headless. When Mom wrung a chicken’s neck, the head came off in her hand and the headless chicken flopped on the ground. My banty rooster ended up in the pot of soup that Mom had on the stove in the kitchen.

I raised New Hampshire broiler chickens in 1950 for Vocational Agriculture/FFA. I ordered 100 cockerels and received about 105, as usual. That year, I was lucky and actually had 102 survive. The VA teacher came over and together we caponized about 25 of those young roosters. I had never seen a capon before. Those became some of the biggest chickens I have ever seen and they were really tender. We put most of them in the locker plant to have when Dad got back from Okinawa. He had spent over a year on Okinawa as a Fire Chief at Kadena AFB. We didn't own a freezer. In fact, most people didn't either. Most of us took things to a freezer plant and had our frozen food stored. Then we would take out what we needed as we needed it.

The afternoon that Dad came home from Okinawa, he and I went to the freezer plant. Mom told us to pick up a couple of those chickens (capons). Dad looked at our storage area and thought that all we had were turkeys. He had never seen a capon before.