The Chicken Place

After my parents decided to sell their chicken ranch in the San Fernando Valley, they ran a chicken store on Temple Street near Boyle Heights. This was around 1946. Previous to this, they sold shoes. Then WWII got in the way, and when it was over the returning servicemen bought chicken ranches because it was the next best thing to buying an oil field. That’s what the brochures said. Since the ranch only lasted a year or so, you’d think my parents would go back to selling shoes, but I guess they weren’t done yet with hens, so they returned to Echo Park and bought the chicken store instead. By now you’re asking, “Did they sell live chickens for pets or fresh eggs?” No. This was a retail store like a deli or a pastry shop. It had live chickens in the back, in cages. A housewife would walk in and tell my mother she wanted a young, fat chicken. My mother would snatch an unlucky bird out of the cage, bring it out for inspection, and if the housewife thought it was plump and healthy enough, my mother would instruct a hired hand to murder…I mean, butcher it right then and there (out of sight, in the back). Then the patron would walk out with a freshly deceased bird wrapped in brown paper. I had little to do with this endeavor other than learn to eat things you can’t find anymore unless you travel to places without toilets. My apologies in advance to the faint hearted, but we thought it was a tasty treat to gnaw on fried chicken feet. I know, it sounds disgusting, but on the other hand, people still eat fried pig fat, so don’t judge me. Since we had access to newly dispatched chickens, we also had access to the eggs that were not yet lain. These were added to chicken soup. They were no different from the yolks of hard boiled eggs. You eat those, right? However, you probably don’t remember seeing a chicken plucker reaching inside and removing the eggs. I wish I didn’t remember. Other than salty fried chicken feet and egg yolks in their original containers, the only impact the retail chicken store had on me were the pets my mother brought home. Customers would walk into the store with creatures they no longer wanted which my mother would promptly adopt. Since Ma was unfamiliar with the concept of “outside,” the acid test for the newcomer was whether or not it was housebroken. Of course, none of them were. I am the only person I know who had a pet “inside” chicken who pooped under the dining room table and a pet crow who refused to stop flapping around the kitchen. Each one showed up when my parents came home from work, remained with us long enough for me to chase them so I could hug them, and then be gone by the time I got home from school the next day. There were no end of chameleons and turtles, but those are common toys, right? At some point, my parents evolved from chicken retailers to chicken wholesalers. They hired a staff of chicken pluckers and focused on the task of finding restaurant owners who wanted freshly dead meat. My father’s favorite customer was the lady owner of a Mexican restaurant who demanded from him the oldest, toughest, stringiest dead chickens he could supply. Then she would make magic with papaya seeds, secret seasonings, and slow cooking. He said she served the tastiest chicken the world had ever chewed. Before they got fancy and relocated to upscale South Pasadena, my folks wholesaled chickens from a seedy old building somewhere in the bowels of the manufacturing district in downtown Los Angeles. I always thought it was located on Place Street, but my recent research turned up no such spot. Perhaps it was on [something] Place. All I know for sure is they started referring to it as going to “The Place.” Other children’s parents went to work; my parents went to The Place. (“Where’s Daddy?” “He’s at The Place.”) Sometimes they took me with them. There was a building across the street supported on piers and underneath it was an expanse of black, oily water. My father pointed it out to me and said I was never to cross the street because if I fell in no one could save me. Then he went inside, leaving me to cross the street anyway just to make sure. He was right. I would have to roll under the child-tall stilts between the building’s floor and the pool of smelly water upon which it sat. The opening was big enough for me but not for a rescuing father. I never told him I went to see it, but he didn’t have to worry about a return visit. I was convinced death by drowning awaited me there. Why would such a thing exist in downtown L.A? I have no idea. An ice processing plant perhaps? A place for the Syndicate to stash bodies before carting them out to sea? Whatever the reason, somebody needed a pool of cold, dirty, dark, scary water underneath Their Place. My parents did allow me to run around the room where the chickens were kept in cages, but not into the “processing” part of the plant. One time I snuck in anyway. Then I learned why they told me to stay out. For someone of my fragile constitution, I know far too many ways to kill things. During one visit, my dad took me to the chicken room and pointed out a cage where a fierce Possum sat snarling. He said I could play near all the other cages but warned me to stay far away from that one because the Possum was dangerous. Of course as soon as my father left and no one was looking I had to try to pet it. (No one was ever looking, now that I think of it.) Possums are really scary, especially when they try to bite off your finger! Daddy later explained that the rats living downtown were so big the cats refused to chase them. He had brought in big, tough tomcats to patrol the chicken cages but those felines took one look at the rats and fled. So he lured in a Possum or bought one from a Possum catcher, kept it locked up during the day, and set it free at night to scare away the rats. I guess the Possum was OK with the deal; it got fed chicken parts in the morning. On the other hand, it looked to me like it really wanted to return to the land of the free-roaming night stalkers. Apparently, my father was in the chicken wholesale business with two of my mother’s cousins. They probably got fed up with hearing him tell them why they were wrong, so they quit the company, joined a competitor, and took all the customers with them. This left my father bankrupt and almost dead on a craps table in Vegas…and that was the end of the chicken business. It was also the last time I saw any of those relatives. Life is full of reasons behind reasons. If the stress of bankruptcy hadn’t brought on a massive heart attack, my father would have had no reason to lie in bed for six months, memorizing the Constitution, reading about the Supreme Court, and making me quiz him about every Chief Justice. He might have remained an unhappy chicken wholesaler all his life, rather than going back to school and becoming an attorney at age 55. The chicken business had giveth and taketh away, There’s a whole other business he slipped in between chickens and the law, one that literally involves life, death and a liquor license, but let’s save that for another story. It’s a good one.