Really Killing Chickens

The best and hardest working parents you can have, Cliff and OPal Olson

OK this is the true story, not that the last one was not true but this one is staying on the subject.

When you grow up in the country you learn to eat what is cooked and you grow, raise or hunt for your food. Now don't get me wrong we did buy some things at the store like sugar, salt and some processed foods. Now that I mentioned processed my favorite thing from the store was POST Toasties. Man! I could eat those every day. I do remember the day mom stopped making homemade biscuits. She bought some WHACK BISCUITS. Do you know what those are? They come in a paper can with metal on each end and you take off some of the paper then WHACK them up against the side of the cabinet and out pops biscuits which you cook on a flat sheet for 10 minutes and they taste great. Another thing that changed was SMASHED POTATOES NOT MASHED POTATOES. Mom use to get potatoes out of the cellar which we raised in our garden then boil them and then add butter, salt and pepper then she SMASHED them. Now-adays she buys them in a box and you add water, milk, and whatever and you have MASHED POTATOES. OK. OK, Chickens.

Once a year we would get up early in the morning and get a giant galvanized wash tub out or a big steel pot and we would build a fire under it once it was filled with water. About the time the water was boiling we started catching chickens. Now that is not a small task as once you start chasing them they pile up in the corner where you grab one with your hands. You actually grab as many as you can handle and you hold on by their legs. There are a couple of things you have to watch out for: One is you need to get both legs else they will claw you and it hurts. Second you swing them around to keep them from pecking on your hand or arm. Third is you either take an ax and cut off their heads or your learn how to disconnect their head from the rest using your boot or if you are really good you pop their heads off. Gross! HUH! As soon as you have removed the heads you throw them and watch as they are still flopping and I guess I will stop with the gross part of the explanation. If you need to know more I will explain.

The next big step after they stop flopping is you grab them and run over to the boiling water where typically mom would dip them and the feathers would just fall off. Then you had to continue plucking the feathers until they were clean which might take multiple dips in the water. By the way it is a good idea to have the dogs and cats put up when you are doing this else it becomes a circus.

The step just before putting them in a freezer bag is gutting and a final wash. Now it was during this process that a lot of folks and I disagree. That is I never kept the heart or liver except for fish bait. Now Gizzards were not too bad but I just did not like the idea of eating a gizzard even though they were tasty.

I know it is too late now but I apologize for the PG-13 story today. Personally these scary movies are 100 times more graphic and I don't like to watch them and never let my kids watch them either.

In summary each year I would guess we butchered/put up 100 chickens for eat ‘n later. We also had oodles of chickens for egg laying which we traded at Fred and Vera Mows store which later became Dale's Feed Seed and Fertilizer store or Ruby Jackson's store. We traded eggs just like cash for groceries and whatever else they carried that we needed.

So what do you learn in the Osage?

· chickens are better when they are home grown

· you really appreciate your food more when you work for it

· when you have to grow/raise your own food you take better care of it

Thanks for listening,

gary@thepioneerman.com

Killing chickens

It ain't no chicken but it is a turkey and you can fry them just as well

There are so many things that you do when you grow up in the country that today's kids never experience like killing chickens.  Somebody has to do it.

Every year we raised chickens for eating and chickens for laying eggs.  Now quite often we would harvest (kill) a chicken for lunch or dinner.  By the way let’s fix that!  We never had lunch and dinner.  We had Dinner and Supper.  Anyway mom made the best fried chicken you can imagine.  It was fried in Crisco and served hot with some salt on it.  Now I know everyone says fried foods will kill you and especially with fat like Crisco but there is no better eat'n than that.

This especially becomes worthy of discussion when you consider New York City is trying to limit POP to 16 oz. or less to cut down on obesity.  In fact now Congress and everyone else in government plus a bunch of  groups want to dictate what a person can eat.  Next thing you know we are gonna have FAT COPS.  Now I don't mean cops that are fat.  I mean cops that give tickets to folks for being fat.  OK back to the point.  Instead of regulating what folks eat why don't we regulate how much time folks don't work or sit on their butts?  I personally sit in an office most of the day when what I should do is stand to do my work.  I would be less sedentary and my muscles would not get as lazy or weak.  Why don't we just legislate NO CHAIRS?  We could legislate that folks can only watch TV standing and that would include when they are on the phone or playing a video game.  Why don't we make everyone park a long ways from the front door of Wal-Mart so they have to walk?  Now doesn't this all seem absurd?  Sure it does.  The heart of the problem is not soda drinking kids or donnut eating cops or fried chicken or business people who sit all day.  The problem is discipline and focus and too much tempting opportunities to be excessive in our consumption (food and non-food).

Why don't we emphasize discipline again?  Why don't we stop trying to socialize everything and get back to incentives?  How about a penalty for being overweight?  I would be penalized so I am speaking about me.  How about penalizing parents who don't teach their children the right way to eat?  Why don't we get more lawyers educated to suit folks who own businesses who feed you food you eat too much of?  Absurd!  All this is absurd.  Let's use common sense.  Such a novel idea.

By the way if fried chicken is what kills folks and POP then my dad should have lived longer than age 87 and my granddad should have died long after 85 and my Grandma Annie would have lived longer than 90 and the list goes on and on.  Or how about Bill Sorter who died at 103 years of age and ate eggs and red meat everyday or his wife who died when she was in her late 90's who ate bad.  Oh ya, Mom! Opal Olson is 84 and walks five miles a day, YES 5 miles a day and she can sass you and think of more things to do than anyone I know.  So if eggs and red meat kills what went wrong?  The fact is nothing went wrong.  What was right is that the government stayed out of their kitchen and they WORKED HARD and tried to live a good life doing good things helping folks who needed help.  They did not exercise daily they worked daily.  They gardened and fed cattle, milked cows, canned vegetables, slopped the hogs, cleaned their house, drove the tractor and they got up early every morning and worked long days.

Today besides walking five miles a day Mom buys STUFF (if you would like a list let me know) and then she at her expense packages the stuff up and sends it to soldiers serving our country overseas.  She gives and gives until she can give no more then she gives some more.  I love my mom and what she stands for.

Well this story was gonna be about killing chickens but it turned into something else.  I will tell you about the annual or semi-annual chicken killing day next time.

So what do you learn in the Osage?

• Eat'n fat won't kill you but sitting on your butt might
• Hard work cures a lot of what ails you
• Common sense would make us all healthier
• I need to lose 40 pounds

Thanks for your time,

gary@thepioneerman.com

Flying Kites and Dads

One of my fond memories was dad getting a kite kit for 10 cents at Otasco in Shidler and then helping us three kids put it together.  We then made a tail out of string and material from old clothes.  After that we got one of our Zebco fishing poles and tied it on.  At first Dad then Larry and then Debbie got it flying until the string on the fishing real was at it's end.  I thought that was fantastic.  Dad then let me take hold of the real.  It  was exciting as it pulled on my small arms due to the wind pulling that kite.  I was amazed how powerful the wind was up high and how much pressure it generated.  It also reminded me of the Ben Franklin story when he flew a kit with a key attached to capture some of the electricity.  Of course after a while I lost the wind and it came tumbling down.  Of course that is when I discovered how difficult it could be to get the kite up and in the air again.  Dad would hold the kite up while I ran with the fishing pole and string to get it launched.

Dad was always busy but it absolutely amazed me when he took time to play and even then he knew so much about everything.  There just never seemed anything he did not know how to do or could not figure
out.   That brings me to tonight as I took Preston out to fly a kite.

First I would have to tell you that kite we took out today cost a lot more than that first kite plus the string and the string winding gizmo.  Second I have to tell you that Julian Codding (class of 70) actually bought the kite as a gift for Preston several years ago.  On occasion Preston and I go out to fly that kite and every time we think of our great friend and relative Julian.  Now I am going to divert right here and talk a little about Jullian.  He is a humble guy but he has a wonderful wife and three great boys.  They are one of the finest families you can meet and I attribute it to a GREAT DAD, JULIAN.  The sad thing is Julian and I like so many others lost contact for many years after leaving school.  It was always things like jobs, marriage, kids, sports, business and everything else you can imagine that kept us apart.  Luckily about seven years ago we found each other living in Edmond just a few miles apart, about 2 miles.  Now we don't see each other much but it is a joy to get together.  My last two comments about Jullian.  First he is a great writer and has written many stories over the years including poetry.  Second, he is dang smart but most of all he is a reliable friend from the Osage.

So what was all this about and what do you learn in the Osage?

• Dad's are extremely important to raising a child up in the way he should go (sounds a little like the Bible)
• Time is more important than quality of time to a child, think about it and make some changes if you need to
• When you get old enough you will never wish you made more money but you will regret the lack of time you spent with your children
• Don't forget your dad 

Thanks for your time,

gary@thepioneerman.com

HAIR - those were the days

I remember growing up that I always wore a burr haircut until I was about in the 8th grade and that took some talking to get mom and dad to go along.  As I remember a lot of folks got their underwear in their crack over the Beatles having long hair and then all the teenagers wanting to do the same.  It was pretty easy for me to go along with the folks and not like long hair but somewhere along the line I had to ask myself, "WHY?".

I remembered hearing that long hair was for for drug users, hippies, and bums.  I know there were even folks who trimmed a person's hair without consent when it got a little long.  Now that I think about it that was the first time I knew I was prejudice against a person and it down right disgusted me to think I was prejudice.  My folks taught me to never be that way but on the other hand dad did not want me to have long hair.  So for me I had to figure out what was going on.

I figured out there were two things getting mixed up and miss-construed (is that a word).  First, I learned that the hair did not make the person and Second, I still did not have to like their hair.  You see we can respectfully disagree but remain friends.  Also if you take the time you will learn about everyone that has something different than you is still a good person inside but just think a little different.

That is kind of like when your mom got on to you for wearing pants with holes in them.  Now that is another topic based on today when folks buy pants that have holes in them already for an even higher price, go figure.  Now I know everyone born back when I was young their parents would patch every hole in their pants, shirt or socks and if you wore something with holes you were going to get your rear-end chewed out.  People were embarrassed to have folks think they could not afford clothes without holes.  The point is it was not the pants with holes that was the problem but what folks thought of you if you did not look your best.  There was a standard of respect for yourself and for others that was important.

OK, back to HAIR.  Well once I figured out that long hair did not make the person another issue came up and it was just the opposite.  Girls had short skirts.  I mean to tell you everybody in town especially the principals at school starting with Pool, Treadway and Morris plus all others and the school board got their underwear in a wad over short skirts.  Now I do not know of a single boy in high school that objected to short skirts including me.  In fact the girls seemed to like it pretty good even when they got in trouble.  My wife wore those short skirts when she was in school and I remember Cindy, Jeri, Jenni, Marsha, Terry, Fran, Linda, and Frank (that was a joke- Frank never wore a skirt that I knew of but AJ did in the powder puff football game ) all wore very short skirts.  Actually I don't know of a single girl who did not and who was not threatened to be sent home for the same.

BUT HAIR?  What could that hurt?  I got in trouble by Mr. Treadway for having long sideburns.  Kenny Bowling, Larry Graham, Neal Pennington, Chuck Taylor, and the list goes on ALL had sideburns longer than mine but I GOT IN TROUBLE!  It really was not that bad but I did get talked to and told to cut'em.

Well that brings me to when I slipped away to college.  I grew my hair out over my shoulders and it actually looked pretty good and I was not a druggie, hippie, or bum, no matter what folks thought.  I did get it cut so I could get a job as I understood "THE GOLDEN RULE".

If you don't know it, here it is:  HE WHO MAKES THE GOLD MAKES THE RULES

So what do you learn in the Osage?

• Don't judge a book or person by its cover, get to know it, look inside
• The heart of a man or woman is their character and that is the one thing only you can give up, protect it
• Isn't it great that even though we all had our challenges we turned out OK

Thanks for your time,

gary@thepioneerman.com

If you ever want me to come visit you here is how to make it happen

First off I have to tell you that I will come with reasonable notice and if my schedule allows but here is how to make it happen.

MAKE A RHUBARB PIE

Also here is the recipe and then the story behind it.

Fresh Rhubarb Pie

For mild flavor use only pink Rhubarb if tender and pink.  Cut into 1 inch pieces (one pound makes 2 cups)

mix together - 1 1/2 to 2 cups sugar, 6 tablespoons flour, and 4 cups cutup rhubarb

Mix thoroughly then pour into pan - dot with 1 1/3 tsp. butter
Cover top with crust- sprinkle with sugar
bake 425 degrees for 40 to 50 minutes

I was lucky in that my folks loved rhubarb and we raised it in our garden.  There are secrets to raising rhubarb in Oklahoma.  First you have to put it where it gets lots of cold during the winter.  We planted it on the east side of a building where all the snow would pile on it during the winter.  We also had lots of composted cow manure from the cattle pens to give it a great amount of fertilizer.  Don't eat the leaves as I remember mom saying they would make you sick, just eat the stalks.

Dad was born in Anoka, Minnesota and they had lots of rhubarb up there and his mom would make pies and sometimes just cook the stalks in a pan for a great treat.  Rhubarb jelly is also excellent.  Rhubarb is very tart and it takes sugar to give it that tart/sweet flavor.

You already know that cinnamon rolls and chili are my favorite food groups but I have to add one more, rhubarb pie.

Well what do you learn in the Osage?

• it takes a lot of bull crap to make good rhubarb and a lot of snow
• Cooking in the country is about as good as it ever gets and my mom was the best
• Hard work makes you appreciate rhubarb pie
• when things are given to you by the government remember they stole it from someone who worked hard and gave it to you so they can get your vote - 
• in private life it is called bribery and you can go to jail for the same thing

Thanks for your time,

gary@thepioneerman.com

Big thinking vs. small

Our farm west of Edmond where we had the Pumpkin Patch and tomatoes

First off I have to tell you the picture has nothing to do with this story unless you can somehow tie growing tomatoes to catching trout.

One of the things that happens when you grow up in the country is you have time to think and think big.  Now it is not that I always wanted to grow tomatoes but if I were going to grow them I wanted to grow a bunch. That is what I did and here is the story.

 So after Shouna and I had been married about 15 years and Wynter, our daughter, was about 12 years old, Chase  was 9 and Preston was 6 we bought a farm northwest of Edmond.  I still worked full time in the data processing business but now I owned a farm so what was I going to do.

The first year we planted pumpkins and that is another story but the second year I decided to plant tomatoes. Everyone knows that home grown tomatoes are the best especially when you take cold fresh Big Boy tomatoes sliced and put on bread with mayonnaise plus some crisp bacon you have a sandwich to-die-for.  That is "good eat'n" as dad always said.

Well I planted over one acre of tomatoes.  Shouna wanted to know who was going to pick those tomatoes and who was going to purchase them since no one knew we had tomatoes.  I told her that "if you plant them they will come" and people would pick their own. There were a couple of problems here not counting my wife.  First I got too many tomatoes growing before folks knew we had them.  Second we had to pick them and we put them on our front porch for folks to get.  I would say we had about 300 to 500 lbs. of tomatoes on the front porch and very few buyers.  Have you ever smelled rotten tomatoes on your front porch?  Well that is where my wife became a problem.  She did not appreciate my tomatoes or the smell.  It got worse and worse but folks did start coming.

The next problem was that we found ourselves going out to take care of customers all the time and that was not worth it either.  The good news is we started letting folks pick their own or pick them off the porch and pay on the honor system.  I think our income off the tomatoes tripled at a minimum.  Now i will have  to tell you that three times not much is still not much as we still had hundreds of pounds of tomatoes to get rid of. Folks loved the tomatoes.

under construction in this pic but this is the house where the tomatoes were on the porch

Now I have to tell you that I really never gave much thought to making a lot of money on tomatoes but I loved planting them and seeing folks fight over our tomatoes.  It was a lot of fun.

OK, what do you learn in the Osage?

• It is not always about the money but the journey
• The value of a great tomato and bacon sandwich is incredible
• If you build it they will come

Thanks for your time,

gary@thepioneerman.com

Cinnamon Rolls

There are two food groups in my mind:  Cinnamon Rolls and Chili.  Like everyone, my mom made the best cinnamon rolls and the best chili.  Today it is all about cinnamon rolls.

When mom made bread and cinnamon rolls it took two days.  The first day was making the dough which was done with dry yeast to make the bread rise only each time it would rise and start falling out of the bowl we would pound it down and get it back into the bowl.  Now when I say bowl I am not talking about a sissy bowl but one where you can make a couple of loafs of bread and a pan or two of hot rolls plus 6 to 8 pans of cinnamon rolls.  The recipe below is not for that much stuff but it will get you what you want.

The second day the bread was literally hanging out of the bowl and that was when mom would take part of it and roll it out with a rolling pin.  Do people even know what that is now-a-days?  We would put melted butter all over that rolled out dough and then add cinnamon mixed with sugar.  It was so good it did not even need cooked.

OK, here is the recipe:

1/4 cup warm water
1 package active dry yeast
3/4 cup luke warm milk
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 egg
1/4 cup soft shortening
3 1/2 to 3 3/4 cups flour

dissolve yeast in water then add milk, sugar, salt, egg shortening and half the flour to yeast
mix until smooth, add remaining flour
Knead until smooth, put in greased bowl
cover and let rise until double about 11/2 hours
punch down and let rise again about 30 minutes
roll dough 15x9 inches and spread with 2 tbsp. soft butter or more if you can handle it
    then sprinkle with 1/2 cup sugar and 2 tsp. cinnamon (mixed first)
roll dough
cut rolls in 1 inch slices and place in greased pan 13x9
cover and let rise until double - 35 to 40 minutes
Bake 375 degree oven for 25 to 30 minutes
Frost with quick white icing which is powdered sugar and milk right out of the oven

I would advise you to put extra cinnamon and extra butter and extra icing and perhaps some pecans mixed with that cinnamon and sugar to put on the butter.

There are a number of ways to make cinnamon rolls and I would tell you that Aunt Peggy had wonderful cinnamon rolls as well.  What I liked about the way mom did it was that we would freeze several pans wrapped in wax paper then put in giant baggies which were not actually around when I was a kid so we used the cellophane wrap.

What do you learn in the Osage?

• Mom is the best cook no matter whose mom it is
• If you want to eat you need to suck up to the Mom in your house
• A perfect meal is Chili and cinnamon rolls

Thanks for your time,

gary@thepioneerman.com

Now this story did not occur in Osage County but the joy of the hunt was taught there and I can blame it on how I was raised.  You see when I was growing up Dad, Cliff Olson, took us hunting at night relatively often as a form of entertainment.  Basically if the Beverly Hill Billies were not on TV or Bonanza then it was a good night to go hunting.

What most folks think of is coon hunting but that was not our thing.  But let me explain that sport as well since my Pope (pronounced POP-E') Jess Lane (my grandad) was a coon hunter.  The sport is basically a lot of guys making a camp along the creek drinking coffee and telling stories into the wee hours of the night unless the night is enterupted by the sound of coon dogs who found a coon.  Now I did assume you knew that a coon is a Raccoon.  What the hunters would do is turn the dogs lose to run up and down the creek until they found a coon who would abruptly climb up a tree to get away from the dogs.  At that point the dogs would surround the tree and bark like heck until the coffee-drinking story-telling hunters came to bail them out.  I thought it was a lot of fun but we were not coffee drinkers in those days and we did not have that many coon dogs so basically it was just a few guys hanging around the campfire along the creek but we did tell stories.

Now night hunting for us was riding in the back of the pickup on gravel roads with guns in our hands, yes guns and we were very young so get over it.  Anyway, dad and mom and sometimes Debbie would ride along and help spot game (game=animals) along the roads.  We basically had two targets that we tried to kill: rabbits and skunks.  We always saw other kinds of animals like badgers which were about the meanest and scariest thing you could get cross-ways with, coyotes, seldom a deer, bobcats, very rarely a fox.  Of course the rabbits were for eating and the skunks were for leaving wherever they were killed.  It was really a lot of fun and you just hoped that dad would not jam on the brakes too fast or take off too fast.

That brings me to attempted murder over a skunk.  When I was in college my roommate was Lynn Snyder (a Baptist gonna be preacher and now he is one full time down in Houston area).  In college in those days I always kept my 12 gauge shotgun handy in case I got bored and needed to go hunting.  Well one night Lynn and I decided to go skunk hunting and it was well after midnight.  We were driving a back road when we saw a yellow camaro which we assumed belonged to another gonna-be preacher.  The car was parked on one of those pull-ins where there is a gate along the road.  We saw him and his girlfriend parking.  They were making out if you know what I mean.  Actually I should explain because back in those days sitting in a car late at night did not necessarily mean you were doing something besides making out (kissing) and talking.  Anyway we decided we should scare them a little so we shot our guns close by but of course not at the car.

Dadgummit, it was not our friend.  We scared them half to death and they started chasing us.  They were in a Camaro and we were in a pickup so they caught up pretty fast.  Lynn decided this was stupid in that we did not do anything besides scare them so he proceeded to stop.  Well the Camaro stopped so fast that the car was sliding sideways toward us.  Lynn jumped out of the pickup with the gun in hand which was quit stupid and it scared them again.  They threw the car in reverse and went straight to the police station where they filed charges for attempted murder.  NOT COOL!

There are a lot of details in this story which are quit funny and I don't have the space in this story to tell all but one of the funny parts happened later when we were exonerated from this charge.  The guy who owned the Camaro was actually a friend of mine and his girl friend I did not know.  The guy worked with me in the computer lab at Wealtherford (SWOSU and in those days it was SWSC) and he apologized for causing me all the trouble but his girl friend was really mad.  Lynn and I spent a bunch of money getting this thing fixed.  The judge thought the whole story was funny but made us pay a fine for hunting at night from the road and our lawyer who  knew us real well from church discounted his fee but he laughed himself silly as well.

So what did I learn in the Osage or at college?

• Be careful when you are hunting skunks there might be stink on it even if you don't shoot a skunk.  Think about it?
• Make friends with folks who don't over react
• There are always consequences for bad behavior and you may get forgiveness but the consequences are still there.  That reminds me of a Christian principle:  Grace is free and sufficient but there are still consequences on earth for your bad decisions or behavior.

Thanks for your time,

gary@thepioneerman.com

It is time to go fishing

Olson home and barns outside of Grainola four miles

Living on Beaver Creek one mile north of Grainola and three west which is one mile west of Vea Harris's house is where we lived.  As soon as you topped the third hill from Vea or Eddy's house you could see our house about 1/2 mile from there.  Off to the left was a grass field where we had two ponds filled with catfish and a few perch.  Past the house and all along the tree line you could see from the hill a great view of Beaver Creek.  Beaver Creek is a small creek which you would never want to try and take a boat of any kind and try to float it.  The problem is that about every 100 feet you would have to get out of the boat and walk it past a very shallow gravel bed with water running over it and then there would be another area of small pools of water.  Sometimes those pools were three for four feet deep and sometimes they were 10 feet deep.

Cliff and Opal Olson in front of house built in 1958 or 59

There were three methods of catching fish when I was a kid growing up on the creek.  First you could go out by the barn typically where there was some shade or an old board or brick laying on the ground and you could move it over and take a shovel (sharp shooter) and dig for worms.  Now if you knew what you were doing you could catch a lot of catfish with worms and sometimes a bass or always perch.

The second method was to seine for minnows in the shallow water and in particular the best minnows were shiners with a little orange on the fins.  Now with those you could catch bass (both large mouth and small mouth) and always perch.  Catfish just did not seem to like the minnows as well.

Third, grasshoppers were plentiful but catching them was a challenge.  Dad rigged up a long pole with a small net made of screen wire.  I think I had just as much fun catching grasshoppers as catching fish.  Anyway grasshoppers were great for catching bass and of course perch but once the grasshoppers were dead you seemed to be able to catch catfish.

All in all it was a great time and place to fish as you could always catch something on the creek.  If we ever got bored we would look for flint rocks and arrow heads.  Now sometimes we even took a 22 rifle and hunted for turtles if the fishing got slow.   To this day I have never figured out how someone thinks there is nothing to do in the country away from the city, stores, and traffic.

Well if you have not tried fishing on the creek you are missing something special.  I better run but right now I am sitting out by the water looking at the moon and writing this story.

So what do you learn in the Osage?

• if you spirit gets a little down count your blessings and go fishing on the creek
• Sometimes it is nice to fish and sometimes it is nice to catch and on the creek you always catch
• If you think about it it is not about the catch but about the adventure

Thanks for your time,

gary@thepioneerman.com