The Great Chicken Scramble

 

by Pa Rock

Reminiscer

A week or two ago I posted about an old Army buddy whose van had the back seats removed and a water bed installed on the floor of the vehicle.  He took a turn too fast one evening while rushing to a remote location for a date, causing the water to slosh to the side - and his van overturned.  I told that story as a lead into a more recent news story about a transport truck containing 800,000 loose dimes that turned over in Texas when the driver left the roadway and then jerked the wheel to recover - and his vehicle spilled its cargo over a busy Texas interstate.

Those tales, both of which were true, reminded me of one more truck and driver that underwent a similar experience on a beautiful Ozark, pine-covered hillside in the late 1950's when I was but a lad in elementary school.  It happened outside of my hometown of Noel, Missouri (the Christmas City of the Ozarks), and the truck was carrying packaged frozen chickens.  It was a large semi truck and trailer that should not have been on that small and very curvy country road, and the hill was steep.  When the truck and its trailer left the road, they rolled over at least once on the way down the hillside and the trailer doors came open scattering frozen chickens over a wide swath of swath of rugged terrain.

Noel was a nice little town in which to grow up, but it was never an overly prosperous community.  When word reached the streets about the accident and its result just a couple of miles outside of town, many residents rushed to the scene and began carting off frozen chickens.  Those fortunate enough to have home freezers ate chicken for months to come.  The driver, as I remember it, was not seriously injured and walked away from the accident, and when he returned his entire cargo was gone.

My family lived about four miles outside of town in the other direction, and we missed out, but that's okay because we didn't have a freezer anyway.   However, we had friends who ate well all winter.

Back in the day chicken was very common for family meals because it was cheap compared to beef - and there were no vegetarians - or if there were they kept that fact hidden.  Some meals were based around hamburger, but I was in college before I encountered my first steak.

Noel's first industry - which came along at about the time of the chicken truck overturning - was a chicken processing plant which became the major employer in the community.  The plant remained in operation for over sixty years before recently closing.  That business pumped plenty of regular pay checks into the local economy, but it also fouled the air and water, and significantly lowered the water tables in the area.  I worked at the "chicken plant" for three months or so during the time between when I graduated from college and reported for active duty with the US Army - but that experience is a whole other blog posting.

And yes, we still eat lots of chicken at our house today, but we get it at the grocery store and not by scrambling up and down some rural hillside like starving coyotes!    Rosie and Gypsy like chicken, too!