Editor’s Note: The Chestertown Spy has teamed up with the C.V. Starr Center for the American Experience at Washington College to share the stories of local residents who experienced World War II on the Home Front as an adult or as a child. Students and staff have already interviewed over a hundred folks who experienced World War II abroad or on the Home Front. Fourteen students are continuing to interview local and regional residents this summer about their memories of what life was like for them during World War II. Please contact Program Director Michael Buckley if you have a story or an artifact to share at [email protected] or 410 810 7156.
Mary Wood
Chestertown
“Someone said it was our patriotic duty to raise chickens. So we built this broiler house and got into the business of raising broiler chickens. They came in the mail in boxes about half the size of the middle part of this table. And you would get them out of the post office, little day-old chicks. They looked like ping pong balls with yellow feathers. Oh, they were cute. They’d go ‘beep beep beep,’ and you could hear them through the box in the post office. So by that time, we were living in Denton, which is in Caroline County. My husband had been asked to teach in the public high school in Denton, although he wasn’t a teacher. They figured if he had two law degrees he knew how to read and write at least. He taught school there, and we lived there. So one day, he said to me, ‘Well, I’ve got to go get the chickens.’ This is before the broiler house business. So we went to the post office, which I didn’t know anything about, and got this box of chickens. This was quite a big house for us. We were living on the downstairs floor, but there were several rooms upstairs. My husband had said, ‘Well, I’m going to build a chicken pen outside for them,’ but he never got around to it. So we put the box of chickens upstairs to the right of the stairs. The bathroom was here, there was an empty room here, and two or three other empty rooms down that way. The chickens got too big to stay in the box, so we gathered all the newspapers in the house and sprinkled them all over the floor of this room that they were in upstairs. And we got a feeder and water for them. They got bigger and bigger, more and more unattractive, and louder and louder.”
“One day the landlady called up and said that some people wanted to look at the house; they were thinking of buying it. My husband was in school, and I was alone, and she said, ‘I’m going to bring them over right now.’ So I nearly went into a panic — I did go into a panic. I turned on the radio as loud as I could and showed them all over the downstairs, every detail. And then they said they wanted to see the upstairs. So I ran ahead of them and said, ‘Here’s the bathroom!’ It was the dreariest bathroom you ever saw. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ The bathroom was here, and the chickens were in the next room, and then there was another bedroom. So I got out of the bedroom and stood in front of the chicken door and said, ‘Don’t you think the downstairs rooms are lovely?’ And the people I think thought I was crazy, which I kind of was, and the house was pretty dreary so they left. So I said to my husband when he got home from school, ‘Get that chicken house built, and get those chickens out of there!’”
Martin Hersey says
Thank you Mary and The Chestertown Spy as well. You got a laugh out of me.