Roosters and Eggs

When I was first composing this account of my life, Jean and I soon left on a trip to the Bay Area and Sacramento over a Thanksgiving holiday. We left Ashland and the Saturday preceding the holiday and spent the first night of our trip with Jean’s longtime friends, Milton and Tillie Peterson in Petaluma. When we woke up on Sunday morning we heard some roosters at the house across Magnolia Avenue from the Petersons’ house and the roosters were crowing away.

I remarked to Jean that it reminded me of the roosters I would hear crowing as I lay in bed early on a summer morning in the house on the Peterson farmstead. The roosters in Petaluma were only at the house across the street from the Petersons’ but in the farm they would be not only at our home, but also at the neighboring farms that were close enough so that a rooster call could be heard. First a rooster at our home would crow, then at the old Woodard place adjacent to us, then at the Will and Annie place just across the road, then at the Vic Telleen farm a quarter of a mile to the ear, then perhaps at some more distant farmstead. Then the sequence in the same order would be repeated.

The crows we heard at Petaluma were apparent by bantam roosters (we learned later) and they seemed like the crowing of young roosters and not like the full-bodied cock-a-doodle-doo of a full-grown rooster. As I lay reminiscing with Jean I recalled also how the hens we had were not cooped up during the day but were allowed to run loose around the farm buildings and the adjacent areas. They would on occasion find out-of-the-way places to lay eggs (rather than in the nest in the chicken house). It was the duty of my younger brothers, Marold and Verner, to try to hunt out these nests and to garner the eggs from them. Usually as I recall to the less than complete satisfaction of my mother.

Milton Peterson, like his father before him, was in the business of egg production. He housed his hens in several large henhouses and the hens laid the eggs in nests in the henhouses. On the visits Jean and I made to the Peterson farm I would accompany Milton on his chores attending to the chickens and see him “candling” the eggs before putting them in the cases in which they were marketed. Later on when the practice developed to keeping the hens in individual cages, Milton left the egg business — he couldn’t stand to have the hens cooped up that way.

To provide income for his family, he bought into the junk business and there he spent the rest of his working career. As a junk dealer he became a collector of the various devices for candling eggs and also of small gasoline engines. He stored the gasoline engines (and there were a lot of them) in one of the buildings that used to house his hens. I think he intended at one time to spend his retirement years in repairing the engines and to get them running again. He never did. He developed Alzheimer’s disease and died before he ever started. According to Tillie, his wife, the last time I inquired about them they were still sitting in the henhouse. Somewhat their two children will have to dispose of them; Tillie is of no mind to do so. The egg-candlers he stored in the basement of their home — I don’t know what has happened to them. Milton was a tall rangy fellow; Tillie was rather short and stout. Jean had known her from college days at UCB [Berkeley]. Milton had been in the South Pacific in WWII but he never talked about it.