By Bob Allen
To buy the book, click here.
Welcoming the Peep Peeps
— Excerpt —
I vividly remember how exciting it was to climb around on the rusting boxcars that were always parked on the railroad spur by the Southern States mill and never seemed to go anywhere. I also recall holding my ears whenever a diesel locomotive pulling a long string of coal cars came streaking through town and the engineer let loose a deafening blast of the air horn.
Later, when times went from tough to impossible for small farmers, my father took a job working swing shift in one of the East Baltimore steel mills. But during the chicken-farming era, one of the things we’d often pick up at the B&O station was a shipment of as many as a thousand baby chicks.
The peep-peeps, as we called them, were shipped from somewhere out in the Midwest. It never ceased to amaze me how these little critters in their cardboard crates, fitted out with little water and feed slots, endured their long rail journey and arrived as unruffled as any first-class human passenger.
When we got the chickens home it was always my job to shoo them out of their crates and into a small cardboard-lined enclosure in the brooder house, where they had ample warmth, food and water. I felt like I was the chicken’s one-man welcoming committee.
— End of Excerpt —
