Journal
No. 148 January, 2011
Baptizing, Beheading and Butchering Chickens
By Delores Miller
Cousin Lowell Ostermann (1938-2003) and I spent much time together as children on the Dupont farm. We would wait patiently twice a week for the blue paneled Servus Bakery Truck from Appleton to stop, if we were lucky out Mothers would buy us a chocolate cake with a cherry on top. Lowel was originally from Sheboygan, he was shuffled off, along with his siblings Gerhardt, Arleen, Geraldine and Allen to visit their Grandmother Bertha Lembke in Big Falls during the summer months. Eventually Lowell and Arleen stayed year around with Grandma and attended Marion High School. Arleen graduated in 1952, and Lowell attended with the class of 1956. Lowell migrated to Montana where he died in 2003. Half his ashes were spread in the mountains he loved and half rest in Roseland Cemetery next to his grandparents and parents.
We all were required to attend church at St. Paul's, in South Dupont where Rev. W. E. Lange preached hell and brimstone and the need to be Baptized or one was on the road straight to hell.
Diversified farming it is now called, but growing up in the 1940s every dairy farm had cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, maple syrup, a few sheep, sold wood and lumber to earn cold hard cash. Eggs were sold to Emil Pietz who trucked them to Northern Wisconsin to sell to the resorts. Everyone had a chicken coop, filled with several hundred laying hens. Baby chicks were delivered by parcel post, fuzzy little balls peeping. Buss Hatchery in Caroline also sold baby chicks. Put in a coop under a heating contraption called a brooder and they grew and grew.
On the Dupont farm was a larger chicken coop, a cedar shingled building, perhaps 12x20, windows to the south for heat. Musty, mildewed, rancid, airless, dank, murky. The smell of chicken manure still lingers in memory.
Cousin Lowell and I went through a religious faze, so took it upon ourselves to baptize baby chicks one spring. We felt it our Christian duty to initiate these chick's souls to Heaven. We dunked and immersed these hapless creatures and drowned a few before someone caught us. Can remember chanting the words: In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Three immersions in the water.
We all grew up eating lots of eggs, simply because they were cheap and filling. No cholesterol to worry about in those days. Roosters were butchered and sold. When unexpected company drove in the yard, one bird quickly became the ultimate sacrifice, forfeited his life and ended up on the dinner table platter. Oh, how good that fresh poultry tasted in those days. Fighting over the wish bone. Old chickens were butchered for dumpling stew with fresh vegetables from the garden.
After Russ and I were married, we raised chickens each year. I butchered all of them. Grandpa Louis Miller's broad axe to chop off the heads, immersed in boiling water, gutting them, rinsing in cold water. Twenty years I did that, 2000 dead birds.
The smell and grease residue on my hands, only alcohol cut cut the grime. Even to this day, I cannot eat chicken, broasted, fried, roasted. Someone else can have the pleasure.
It is comforting to know those chicken souls are forever in Heaven because Lowell and I baptized them. (Do chickens have souls?)
copyright Russell and Delores Miller, 2011