|
Gallivan's Radium Laying Mash for Chickens
1 | Page 2 |
3 |
4
My uncle did the bookkeeping for the store, and pretty well confined
himself to a solitary office with his files and a safe. My father, being
younger, smaller, but physically stronger, did the muscle work in the
store. It fell to Dad to be in charge of the mixing room and its end
product, the new laying mash. Dad realized the importance of the
undertaking, and how it might help the two families survive economically
for the next little while. He decided to take precautions against the
competition.
The first thing to do was to keep secret the ingredients of this
miraculous product. To that end, Dad made sure that no copies of the
recipe were left lying around for curious eyes to see. His copy was in
thick pencil in large careful hand-printing on a big piece of jagged
cardboard.
The cardboard was thrust through the head of a nail jutting out from
beside the door inside the mixing room, and there it stayed for
approximately the next 30 years. The amounts of the ingredients were
exactly delineated. The printing faded somewhat over the years, and if one
had to double-check an amount, it would be necessary to use the heel of
your hand to wipe away the fine dust accumulated on the cardboard.
The dust was not dirt, as the mixing room was swept and kept very clean,
but the total interior of the room and everything in it was white from the
fine dust of the mixed and ground materials. To enter the room was to
imagine oneself in the habitation of ghosts; more so if you happened to be
there on a mixing day, when dad and his helper were coveredface, hair and
overallswith the white powdery substance.
The walls and ceiling were white, the stacks of neatly piled gunny sacks
were white, and you could write their name in the dust on the large-sized
scale where the gunny sacks were weighed. Those rooms were as dusty as the
mixing room, but the dust was not as fine, as it was the sweet-smelling
dust common to the loft of any barn on any farm. The smell was made up of
a variety of odourous ingredients: hay and straw, oats, wheat, flax, bags
of barley chop for pigs and oyster shells for chickens, mixed together
with the smells drifting in from the open bins in the front of the store,
which held samples and small quantities of dog, cat and rabbit foods, and
grains we liked to chew on while we were playing.
[continue]
[<<back]
Copyright © 2003
Heritage Community Foundation All Rights Reserved
|
|
|