My uncle
Clarence took me to a carnival and he won the game that you knock down milk
bottles with a baseball. So he ask me
what I wanted for a prize $1.00 or a baby chick. Well, I thought who wouldn’t want a baby
chick so I picked a purple one. They came in a variety of colors (Pink, Purple,
Green, Orange and of course Yellow). It
was an easy decision and I knew my parents wouldn’t mind because Clarence got
it for me. Over the years Clarence got
me a number of cool things including my go-cart, which I tell you about that at
another time. Anyway, my chicken was the
talk of the neighborhood. All my friends
wanted to see the chick.
We made a cardboard house for my chicken and
kept him in the basement. Cardboard was
the preferred choice whenever we built something including sleds. We performed puppet shows and sometimes we
would put my chicken on the puppet stage and let him walk around. This was back in the late 50’s and PETA
didn’t exist so having a chicken live in the basement and eating cereal wasn’t
and issue. Also, there were no chicken labor laws so we didn’t get hassled for
using him on stage. PETA wouldn’t have
approved of the dyeing the chick colors either but as a kid I thought it was
cool (maybe #5 red dye colored the pink chicks).
Sorry, I got distracted, on with the story. I don’t remember what else we fed Peep Peep
the chicken but he seemed to do fine, he grew bigger thru the weeks and
eventually lost his purple color when his adult feathers came in. Come to think of it I’m not really sure if Peep
Peep was a rooster or a hen, we lived in the City of St. Louis and there were
not a lot of chickens in the city, actually I didn’t know about any others but
I’m sure there were a few, I wasn’t the only kid at the carnival. Living in the city was fun but it wasn’t the
ideal place to raise a chicken. Winters
can be harsh in St. Louis so keeping my chicken in the basement protected him
from the drastic changes in the weather, but there was one event that we did
not predict.
Springtime in St. Louis has a number of
bad thunderstorms with a tremendous amount of rainfall and sometimes the sewer
system couldn’t handle all the water, so there would sometimes be flooding in
the basement. Well, you probably know
that chickens don’t fly very well, but let me tell you they are even worse swimmers. That’s right, Peep Peep drowned in a basement
flood during one springtime downpour.
We were sad but we gave him a proper burial in our backyard. So, here’s a cryptic note for PETA, water is
more dangerous for chickens than dye, just saying.
Decades later when I started making wine
I dedicated one of my first wines to my chicken by naming my wine Purple
Chicken Cabernet and put a short story of Peep Peep on the back label.
