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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

CLEANING OUT MA’S CHICKEN HOUSES

From the time I was about 6 or 7 years old, up until I graduated from high school, most Saturday
mornings would find me with a big heavy duty scraping hoe cleaning out the chicken manure from ma’s
chicken houses, where the chickens roosted, and from time to time the floors had to be cleaned and the
chicken droppings taken out and spread on whatever piece of land we were going to use next as a
garden. Chicken manure is the finest fertilizer in the world, and although you would not like to think
about it while eating some of the vegetables from our garden, those were the tastiest and most delicious
vegetables you could ever hope to eat.

It would take the better part of 2 hours to clean out each chicken house, and some Saturday mornings I
would do 2, but usually I would do 3. Ma would give me a nickel for each chicken house I cleaned out.
And with that being Saturday, I would take that money and use 9 cents of it to go to a western movie on
Saturday afternoon. I loved those old cowboy pictures, and still do to this day. I am about to give away
my age again by saying this, but some of the cowboys I enjoyed the most were Bob Steele, Tex Ritter,
Tom Mix, Jack Randall, Hoot Gibson, Bill Hickcock, Hopalong Cassidy, and when I got a little bit
older, Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers. Those movies were about all the same, but at that age (and this
age) they were awfully entertaining.

Years later, on my way to enter Baylor University for my Master’s Degree, I can recall crossing the
State line between Louisiana and Texas, and once into the State of Texas I guess from all those movies
in my boyhood I expected to see cowboys everywhere, and during all the time I was al Baylor, and later
with the Dallas Symphony, 1 never saw the first cowboy. The closest 1 came was seeing a colored boy
riding a mule.

Sometimes if I had a little extra after buying a ticket to the movie, and maybe spending another dime on
a bag of popcorn and a drink, I would go to the meat market and buy as many wieners as my money
would afford me to buy, and I would take them home and get ma to batter them and fry them, after
splitting them in half, and I would have wieners and grits for supper. That was my very favorite meal,
and 1 still like wieners even over 80 years later. I try not to eat too much of them, due to the high sodium
content, but when I was a boy I absolutely loved fried wieners.

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