“Chicken Eggs 29563-360×480 (4899748717)” by Emilian Robert Vicol from Com. Balanesti, Romania – Chicken Eggs_29563-360×480. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
For no conceivable reason, I’ve decided to relate another childhood memory, something I haven’t done here in a while.
I grew up on a farm outside Kenyon, a small town in southeast Minnesota. We operated what they now call a “diversified agricultural operation,” which means we grew and raised whatever we could think of that would earn back worth the trouble.
One of the things we raised was chickens. I’m not sure how many we had; maybe about a hundred; probably less. The numbers fluctuated, I’m sure. In any case, one of the daily chores was to “pick the eggs,” to gather them from the box nests we had for them in the chicken coop. I have breathed a lot of powdered chicken manure in my time; it accumulated on the floor and we just walked on it. It dried fairly quickly. A doctor told me I have a spot on one lung that’s common in people who’ve worked with chickens; it might come from those days.
After the eggs were gathered in a pail, we took them into the house and down to the basement. There we would wash them in a special solution, swishing them in a bucket with many, many holes, inside a larger bucket of the washing solution, clockwise and counterclockwise until they looked clean.
Then the person doing the job would take them to another room in the basement, where we kept the Big Egg Carton. There was a stool there for sitting on and a bright light hanging from the ceiling. Each egg would be examined for cracks, and any lingering crud on the eggs would be sanded off with a sandpaper block. Then the eggs were placed in cardboard trays inside the big carton, several layers stacked one on top of the other.
(Eggs with cracks were kept for our own use. We kept them in a regular egg carton, the kind you see in stores, on a counter next to the stove. We didn’t bother to refrigerate them. We used them up pretty fast.)
When the carton was full, we’d load it in Dad’s Studebaker pickup and take it to town. There, in the southeast corner of town, near the railroad tracks, was Carl Larson’s poultry operation.
Carl Larson’s place of business was a large (by local standards) one-story building with a loading dock in front. The warehouse was to the right, and the office to the left. You had to climb up on the dock to get in.
Carl Larson was a famous man in my world. He was a tall, fat man with a gray “butch” haircut (what you’d probably call a flat top nowadays). He always wore bib overalls. I saw him occasionally in church, for instance at Christmas, and it seemed strange to see him in a suit.
Dad sold his eggs to Carl. There were figures on a chalk board in his office, above the big roll top desk, telling what eggs were going for in South St. Paul that day. When our chickens got too old, we’d bring them in too, in wooden crates with slatted sides, and he’d buy them cheap and send them up to the Cities to be bought by Campbell’s Soup. “They tie a string around their necks and dip ‘em in the soup,” he’d say. “They don’t dip ‘em very long, either.”
You didn’t just do business with Carl Larson. He liked to talk. He liked to hear the gossip and pass it on. He had a booming voice and was a people person. He especially liked kids. Every farmer who did business with him was expected to bring his kids along, and every kid got a nickel from a drawer in the big roll top desk. Dad didn’t like that much – like many Depression kids he hated the idea of taking anything resembling charity – but he knew Carl would be hurt if he didn’t go along with it. We put the nickels in piggy banks, and the money eventually found its way into personal savings accounts our folks established for us. I’d like to say I went to college on it, but it never really amounted to much. The kindness was the primary benefit.
I learned later that Carl had a son who’d been on the Bataan Death March. He survived too, and wrote a book about it in his old age.
Carl is long gone, of course, and so is his egg operation. But he constitutes one of the pleasanter memories of my childhood.
My, how things have changed. A farmer where I used to live kept over 150,000 laying hens. He was the smallest producer in his coop. But with the nearly obsolete equipment in his barns that was how many his family could manage without hiring any outside help.
Great story! You nailed it perfect as I remember. With that nickel that he handed out if I happened to have a nickel in my pocket I would ask Carl if he would exchange two Nuckles for a dime. That way I would go to the Grain Elevator next door and get a pop out of the machine which If I remember correctly it only cost a dime. I can still hear Carl’s loud thundering voice, “How are you doing today”
Thank you for the memories!
Bryan Haugen. Kenyon Minnesota
How fun to read and remember. I spent a lot of time at the ‘egg station’ because Carl was the Grandpa to my cousins….Butch’s kids (he was the Bataan survivor). When you say booming voice, you aren’t just a-kidding. There was none like that one. And his grandson, Dan, has pretty much the same booming voice. We used to play upstairs in that egg station. Talk about dust and chicken stuff? But fun? An adventure for a young kid in a small town exploring the world. I wish kids could have some of those experiences today. Go spend that nickel! thanks.
What a great way to start a day. Reading about “Gramps” was a real treat. The egg station was a very special place, not only for our family, but for many, many folks in and around Kenyon. That place was like a historical shrine until it was purchasedp after his passing and replaced by a more modern structure. We all should have spots on our lungs. Cousin Ricky and I would spend many hours in the back rooms shooting rats and collecting pigeons from the attic that you could get to via a very old elevator. It worked and carried heavy loads upstairs. It was located close to the best egg candler in the world. Her name was Irene if I remember correctly. She examined every egg that came through the station for imperfections by holding the egg next to a box with a light inside and a hole in the side where she put the egg for examination. He had metal cages in the back where chickens were stored for shipment to slaughter houses. The area was never cleaned and it was a dirty, dusty place where chickens and rats co-existed for years. He had a big chopping block, with a gruesome looking hatched stuck in the top. It was where he got a kick out of showing us what happened when a chicken had its head chopped off. I still have the weapon he used. You didn’t have to swing it very hard as it provided enough of its own power just from the weight. He had a large chest freezer located behind his creaky rolling office chair and the biggest roll top desk in Minnesota. The freezer was filled with frozen chickens and more importantly with popsicles and ice cream treats for lucky kids visiting this wide open office with a little back room close by where he and his buddies would meet for libations at times. As I recall, he passed away in this area. I was lucky to have two grandpas cut from the same cloth, but I knew Carl the best since Ralph Mork passed when I was quite young. Enough for now. Thanks for remembering a kind, compassionate, large and loud man who drove the same gray Chrysler New Yorker to work every day since the late 40s.
M<y older brother jim worked for him. I remember Jim bring home chicks from there and having them in the basement with a light on them. I don't know what happened to them after that! While reading this I could almost smell the "egg place"!
Thanks for the memories, folks. There was a lot more to that place than I ever knew.
Oh my gosh! This is my grandfather, I am the daughter of Clarence Larson, Carl’s son. I too, have wonderful memories of the “egg station.” We always got an ice cream bar when we visited. We got to see how eggs were “candled” by his long term employee, I believe her name was Irene. I wish we had that big rolltop desk! Thanks for writing about this.
Milo Kaufmann,* my favorite prof from the U of I, kept a file(s) in which he recorded remembered images from years gone by, and sometimes these became the germs of developed writing — poems, etc. Your piece here is narrative but also descriptive and it possesses some of the “energy” that, I think, Kaufmann was getting at. (An example he mentioned, as I recall, was a piece of old piano sheet music, which depicted 19th century-type soldiers facing each other across some dark area.) Some such images might be fairly fugitive — there might be a lot less story remaining around them, apparently, than you have here. Worth recording!
*If anyone finds that name faintly familiar, it might be due, not to his scholarly writing (including a major study of Bunyan), but to brief pieces that he wrote for Christian magazines. When, as a grad student, I met him, I remembered his name from papers that I’d had years earlier from church distribution.
Thank you.