The Pig Shed, Reminiscences of Robert Hodge – Story 6 of 10 This is the sixth in a series of stories that Robert Hodge wrote in the 1980s about his childhood experiences growing up in Lawrence.
“When we moved, in 1936, to what became the home place, there was a roadside market shed from which truck garden produce had been sold by the previous owner. The shed was well constructed, but located some distance from the house and my father had no intention of using it for its designed purpose.
“After a year or so, my father decided he would raise some pigs to supplement our cash income, our food source and to make use of the garbage and garden weeds. He had the roadside shed moved to a point beneath two Jonathan Apple Trees quite near the house, constructed a board slat fence extending to the third apple tree and bought an old sow already bred.
“The birthing of the piglets was quite an event for him, he kept going to the shed, then returning to the house to report how many pigs there were. I was not allowed to go see them—the mama would be too nervous and might lie on the pigs if I went out there! The next day, however, I did get to admire the wee pigs with their curly tails. The slat fence was not designed to contain such little ones, so much time was spent chasing them, catching them and returning them to the pen until my dad could add more boards to the base of the pen.
“Cold weather came, and most of the pigs were sold, but one or two were butchered. At first, pigs were butchered right in our backyard, although in subsequent years they were taken to another man’s home for the butchering process. It was both interesting and disturbing to see the pigs shot with the rifle, scalded, scraped, hung up in the apple tree, eviscerated, cooled and cut up into hams and other parts. My grandfather, who was a meat cutter for a local grocery store, did the cutting or supervising. Sausage was ground, seasoned, fried and packed away beneath layers of rendered lard in large stone crocks. The tenderloin was fried in celebration and never had I tasted anything so good!
“The pig shed was used often during the next ten years or so, but not every year. When in use, we were resourceful in obtaining sufficient food for the animals. In years when most of our ground was put to Irish potatoes, the culls (non-marketable) from the sorter were retained, cooked in the wash boiler on a hot plate on the back porch and the cooked potatoes were mixed with the shorts. Another year when a large corn field had been harvested, we spent days after school going over the field in search of overlooked ears of corn, filling several gunny sacks full, and used them to supplement the garbage and “shorts” (wheat middlins or wheat germ). There were, in the summer time, always the garden weeds to be pulled and hauled to the pig pen.
“During the years when there were no pigs, the pig shed was utilized for a number of my “imaginative” enterprises. Raking out the manure and installing old linoleum for a floor, it was converted into a “play house.” It also served as a “school” in which two neighbor boys, a cousin and my sister were subjected to my ideas of what teachers should do and how they should do it. This project was put up with for a time by the “students,” but they usually ended up going home “mad,” especially when I was ready to issue report cards.
“The pig shed served as a workshop where a coping saw and wood from orange crates and wooden cheese boxes (remember my grandfather worked in a grocery store and I had an “in”) were converted into book ends and door stops made from designs traced from coloring books. Try as hard as we could, we never sold any other than occasionally to a sympathetic aunt or grandma.
“The pig shed served as a library, where comic books and “big-little” books were given cards and pushed off on gullible neighborhood kids, hoping they would forget to return them so overdue fines could be collected. This project, like all the others, was neither popular nor profitable.
“When Santa Clause brought a box of rubber stamps of the alphabet, and later, a small printing press with a handle to turn and a bell to ring, the pig shed became a newspaper office—another short-lived and financial failure.
“A different aspect of the pig shed was based on the ease of getting onto the roof. This was generally understood to be forbidden, but the understanding was never enforced, so the low branched apple tree at the end was used to climb up. Now the roof sloped gently from the back upward toward the front, but there was a steep overhang, designed to protect the open side when the building had been used as a produce stand. The distance from the overhanging edge to the ground was probably eight to ten feet, but from the roof it looked a mile.
“It was discovered early on that one could jump from the shed to the ground without hurting one’s self, BUT, it took a lot of courage to take the leap. The worst part was when you left the main roof and got onto the overhang. It was so steep; it was a point of no-return. You slipped, ever so slowly, but ever so surely, off. Many a time I have balanced there, heart pounding, especially hearing it in my ears, wondering why I had done this again while slowly, I was sliding to the edge. At the last minute, a jump was given and down on the ground I landed, usually to simply return and do it again.
“I believe it is this ‘feeling’ that makes many of the rides or activities at amusement parks so attractive.
“The pig shed is no longer there. I do not remember when or why it was taken down or away, but in my mind, I have stored away the many projects, practical and impractical, and the many tests of courage for which it was responsible.”
