Bear Grease - Ep. 201: This Country Life - Working with My Dad

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

It's time to go to work and we're riding along with Brent and his dad this week. Traveling all over Southeast Arkansas and visiting area farms was a fun activity for him as a kid. The lessons learned haven't been forgotten and Brent's sharing them now on MeatEater's This Country Life podcast. Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From Coon Hunting to Trotlining and just general country living, I want you to stay a while as I share my stories and country skills that will help you beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the Airways have to offer. All right, friends, pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I think I've got a thing or two to teach you.

Working with my dad. I spent a lot of time with my dad throughout the year hunting and fishing. It goes without saying that there are tons of memories from those outings and adventures and plenty of tales to tell. But I also went to work with him a lot on his job. We're going to talk about that today, but first, I'm going to tell you a story. Every summer when I was out of school, I spent as much time with my dad as possible. We were always fishing and hunting his hounds on the nights it wasn't just blue.

lister and hot. My dad was a coyote hunter, and I've talked about how you do that, at least how he and his friends did it down here, but for those that may be new to the podcast, here's a recap. Seldom did we ever see the coyote. Rarely did the coyote suffer any damage. We just listened to the dogs run until he got away or got close to the highway, private land that we couldn't hunt on, or we got ready to go home. Then we just coughed the dogs and went home. But this, This story isn't about one of those times we stayed out all night listening to and trying to keep up with a pack of walkerhounds. It's not about catching a mess of fish and cooking them up on the bank of the Sleyn River,

our river, or shooting a sack full of squirrels only to give most of them away because my dad wouldn't have at one of them had he been starving, slapped to death. He would keep a few and fix him for me, but even then he didn't like doing that. He hated skinning them. He really didn't like touching them. They looked too much like a rat to him, and if one fell in the water when shot out of a tree and got his tail wet, he wouldn't touch it. But he loved hunting them. Weird, I know, but he liked to give them a weight of folks that did eat them.

There was an old man that lived down the road that favored squirrels as much as I did. My dad would trade them to him for, what's a good family term? I know. Snake bite medicine. One mess of squirrels equal one pint jar of snake. bite medicine. Even enough about squirrels right now. In the summer, I would go to work with my dad.

My dad retired as a serviceman for Tyson Foods. The serviceman was someone who went around to area farms that were under contract to raise chickens for the company. It was my dad's job to check on each individual grower. When I was a baby, he first worked for England farms and Mr. Jack England in Risen, Arkansas. Over time, he would work for Val Mac Industries, Tasty Bird, and then the Northwest Arkansas-based Tyson Foods. He basically did the same job for all of them, and according to the Farms he serviced, he was good at it.

Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for all as farmers. Some of them, Dad would brag about to me. He was proud of how they farmed and raised the chickens. After all, the better their chickens did, the more money they made, the more money they made. The more money they made, the bigger dad's bonus was. Now, that equated to dogs, horses, hooks, and bullets for me. So it was in my best interest that when I was helping him, that I was really helping him. The dad had a weekly schedule that he made out himself regulated around the age of the chickens at each farm.

He worked from home, and unless he needed supplies from the office in Risen where the hatchery was located, or had to deliver feed samples to the mill and pine bluff, he would work like, a man possessed traveling to area farms inspecting the houses and talking to the farmers and just in general being the representative for the company to the farmer and the farmers representative to the company trying to maintain a good working relationship between both. He may have been an employee of the company but he always worked on the farmer's behalf. They were folks just like us, country people working hard and trying to make a living raising chickens, cattle and crops. A great, grandfather on my mother's side was an independent egg farmer that raised, processed, and sold his own

eggs to stores. I say that to say the poultry industry was big in our area and very important economically to a lot of families. It still is. But just like other things, some folks are better at it than others. My dad had an inspection book that resembled a policeman's ticket book. It was itemized with boxes to check on cleanliness of the house. I know you're thinking, How could a chicken house be cleaning with chickens in it? But trust me, it can be. And it can dang sure be dirty. He monitored the overall condition of the house, water and the feed systems,

and the apparent health of the flock. Had a space where a dad could write in suggestions to correct deficiencies. And a copy of that report would stay with my dad and get turned in with his activity reports for the month. It was my job to fill those reports out according to dad's observations. Now, he never dinged anyone, though, on those reports if he could keep from it. He'd talk to the farmer and tell them what they needed to do differently to keep from shining a bad light on them. Some of the chicken houses were old but well taken care of and for a chicken house, clean.

Some were newer and not. Some of the conditions were due to just not knowing or having a grasp on the new techniques and equipment that helped maintain a more proficient chicken house and others, one in particular, was due to just plain laziness. I went to that farm several times one summer. You could kind of see what was coming when you turned off the county road and headed down the drive past the old junkie house that the farmer lived in and pulled up in front of his new junkie chicken house.

Dad didn't gig him on paper any of the times, but he talked to him one-on-one with me acting like I wasn't listening weekly. On the second to the last trip I made to that farm that summer, I could tell my dad had had his fill of the subpar conditions of that house and the poor health of the chickens. He told him over and over that if he didn't start showing some signs of improvement, that the company wouldn't renew his contract to raise chickens. Now, I didn't know it at the time, but had that happened,

he'd have had no way of making the mortgage on that new chicken house he was letting fall in decline. and he would have lost the land that sat on and he put up for collateral when he built it. I grabbed the inspection book and pen and started to bail out of the truck to get to work checking the boxes when Dad told me to check on our second to last trip there and Dad said, you stay in the truck.

I need to talk to Mr. Bob alone. Now, here's a disclaimer. His name wasn't Bob. But I shut the door and I rolled the window down as Dad walked around in front of the truck toward the chicken house door, reaching for the handle about the same time Mr. Bob opened it up and stepped out of it. I heard it all.

Bob, this place looks like a junkyard. The outside, while it doesn't look good, ain't as bad as the inside, and I've done all I can do for you. You're a good man, but you have got to do something, and you've got to do it before next week when I come back. I've run out of excuses for you, Bob, and you've got to. got me in a bind. They know I'm covering for you, and your last two batches of chickens have been terrible. Mr. Bob looked at the ground the whole time my dad was talking to him. I didn't want to be there. I was just a kid, but I could see the embarrassment on his face, and I felt bad for him. It was always so nice to me. He'd give me a quarter nearly every time he saw me. I remember that when he

brought his hand out of his pocket, I never saw more than one. And dad and I talked about that years later, and he said, son, he probably gave you the only one he had. Well, that day, Mr. Bob looked at my dad for the first time since we got there and he told him, this batch of chickens will be different, buddy. You got my word. Now, the next week we went back, and things started getting better. The chickens were being tended to and some of the junk around the outside was gone. What wasn't gone had been neatly stacked and organized. Even the grass had been mowed. A month or so later, that batch of chickens went out.

Dad said he was still the worst chicken grower he had, but it was the best batch that Mr. Bob had ever grown. I went back with Dad for the last time that summer to see Mr. Bob's farm. He was busy cleaning the old shavings and the chicken litter out of his house with his tractor, getting ready for a new batch of chickens that would arrive in a few days. He seemed happier. I know my dad was. I climbed up on that tractor and sat in the seat that Mr. Bob had just crawled out of,

and while he and dad talked, I was listening. He said, my dad said, Bob, you've done good. That's the best batch of chickens you ever raised. Mr. Bob told him, I thank you for your help, buddy. You've been good to me. Now, my dad, ever more the jokester, looked that man dead and eye and said, it's a good thing you had this turnaround. I only had two excuses left for you.

you before they fired me, Bob. Mr. Bob said, what was it? Dad said, I was going to tell him you were either planting them too deep or too close together. And that was the first time I ever saw Mr. Bob laugh. And that's just how that happened. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road.

I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God. He doesn't have a hand. Yeah. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't.

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Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Monday, Tuesday, and about half a Wednesday would start early in the summer. Breakfast was usually at someone's farm we'd show up to conveniently around breakfast time. It was always good, too, not a dud in the bunch. Whatever farm we found ourselves at around meal time was always a winner. Lots of farmers and their wives were cooked for us and dad had already vetted the good ones and arranged our schedule to arrive at certain times of the day. Between meals were good, too.

After all, I was a growing boy, and I never met a quarter milk in a bag of powdered donuts I didn't like. I needed the energy. One of my jobs was to climb the feed bins on the outside of the chicken house and looked down inside through the top hatch and count the section of metal rings above the current feed level so Dad would know how much feed to order for them. The sun would beat down on that galvanized metal and the only cool thing about that job was climbing the ladder.

Even the ladder was hot enough to scald a hog. My dad hated climbing those bins and in his later years of working. and he kept a box of rocks in the cab of his truck. He pulled up beside a feed bin, and instead of climbing it, he chunk rocks at it, listening for the tone it made when he hit the medal and repeated until he found the spot where the feed stopped. Then he'd order the appropriate amount of feed.

I bet he didn't climb one feed bin ladder of the last five years he worked before he retired. There was a lady near Star City, Arkansas, that worked on a man's farm, and I would love to know her history and how she wound up here, but Miss Hudson was from Ireland. And she had the most beautiful accent and way of talking. It was hard for me to understand her at times,

but I love to hear her talking laugh. My dad was good at making folks laugh. She dressed like she was straight out of central casting for what you'd imagine an Irish grandmother would look like. She smiled a lot, and when she looked at me, she had the kindest eyes I believe I've ever seen. I noticed it even as a little boy and I think of her often now as a grown man, but I never really knew her.

She was just one of a number of folks that I'd see every summer making the rounds to all the farms. They weren't all as nice as Miss Hudson. This incident happened after a feed truck driver got stuck in on gravel road that the farmer had built between two chicken houses. The road was there for the feed truck. used but had been freshly graveled and unfortunately big rain had come the day before the feed truck got there keep in mind that these feed trucks aren't they're not pickups they could be as big as a concrete truck or a 18-wheeler depending on how much feed they were delivering now this truck driver drove right up in the middle of the freshly gravel road after the rain and absolutely buried that

truck to the axles the farmer came off the chain screaming minute, cussing that poor truck driver something terrible who was doing everything he could to apologize for his mistake. He told him to never come back to his phone and it upset the driver so bad that he walked away leaving the truck there and quit. Some time later, the office got in touch with my dad and he went down to talk with a farmer and tried to resolve the issue. By the time he got there, a wrecker had removed the feed truck and the farmer was there with a shovel by himself repairing the damaged road. A dad didn't say a word to him.

He just grabbed a shovel out of the back of his truck and started in helping him shovel gravel back in the deep ruts. A few minutes went by before anyone said anything, and finally dad said, you know you made that driver quit. The old man kept shoveling and said, well, I didn't mean for him to do that. You tell that fellow, I'm sorry,

and he can come back here anytime or better yet. I'll tell him myself. A few minutes went by and he continued saying, I don't mean to be this way, buddy. But in 1941, I was working for John Deere and I was making $40 a week. Now, I know that don't sound like a whole lot of money, but in 1941, that was a heck of a wage, son.

Then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. I got drafted into the service and I totaled a 90-pound pack from the Belgian border to the Baltic Sea for $600 a year, and I'm still mad about it. The list of colorful characters that I met and grew to know was as varied as any group of people could be. They were good folks, for the most part, some better than others,

the same of which could be said for the people my dad worked with. And I got to know lots of them over the years, and they more or less saw me grow up. too many to mention, but it was like one big family. And everyone knew my dad, and most of them called me little buddy. My dad was the strongest person I knew, but he had one weakness. He suffered from undiagnosed musophobia. A condition where a person shows extreme fear, panic, and anxiety of rats and mice.

A possum just ran over my grave thinking about it. Now, most folks would call out a shutter when something gives you the willies and your body has a sudden tremor. My grandmother, Mama Sly, said that happens when the possum runs over your grave. I told her once when I was a kid that I didn't have a grave, and that saying didn't make any sense. She told me to be quiet. Anyway, it was widely known that my dad had this fear.

One person thought it would be funny to play a trick on him at the feed mill in Pine Bluff. This guy was not on my dad's Christmas card list to begin with, and this trick would see that he never made it on there. Now, rats are attracted to feed. A feed mill that produces tons of feed is going to have an issue with them. There's just no way around it. The Pine Bluff Feed Mill was no different. I remember Dad let me climb up an access ladder to the top of the building once,

and I looked down at the ground behind the mill and saw several big ones running around. And I mean big ones. There went another possum. But Dad walked into the office there one day to deliver some feed samples and the fellow in question here saw him coming and had saved a particularly large specimen they'd killed earlier that day in the mill.

The man hid behind the door with that big rat in his hand and when my dad walked in, he just laid it up on my dad's shoulder. Dad ran back outside through the door while the man laughed and laughed saying, What's your hurry, buddy? My father looked at him and told him, looked at him and told him, you're going to regret that. He dropped the feed samples in the parking lot where he stood and turned around and left.

Now, months went by, and my dad never brought that up, never mentioned it to him, never said anything to anyone. It was one of those things that everyone knew about, but no one said anything about. Now, one thing my dad wasn't scared of was snakes. Snakes of any persuasion, it didn't matter. I've seen him catch all kinds from grass snakes to cotton mouths and rattlers. As luck would have it, one day my father was driving to Pine Bluff to deliver some feed samples when a particularly large rat snake was crossing the road in front of it.

Now they routinely grow to six feet in length here and this one was fully grown. How opportunity. He had him caught and stuck in a bucket with his feed samples in short order and continued his journey. Walking in the office, he saw the man that had laid the rat on his shoulder sitting at his desk on the phone. My dad poked his head in the doorway and the man motioned for him to come in and pointed to a chair for my dad to sit in. that said he walked in his office and dumped that bucket of quart-sized Ziploc bags and one huge angry rat snake in the man's lap and says, I can't stay. I'm in a hurry and walked out the door. Now, I look back on those times often.

They're good memories. Some just as good as when we were hunting and fishing. The common denominator being that we were together just having fun. Now, I make a concerted effort to do the same with my children and my grandchildren and not really, anyone I happen to be sharing a space with. But the little folks, they're the ones that matter most to me and the ones that you and I can make the biggest impressions on just by sharing our time and our interest. When a kid is about to drive you crazy, asking a million questions, and going 90 miles an hour, put yourself in their spot. Think about how you wanted someone to talk to you when you were that age, or if you can't remember back that far, how'd you want them to talk to you now?

They're going to ask someone, and if we're going to stand even the slightest chance of making the difference in this entangled mess of life we find ourselves in today, we need to be the ones to answer you and me. It's up to us. Mr. Bob, I don't know what became him after that summer. He sold that farm and got out of chicken business. Dad told me later on in life when I asked him about that story I told you all at the beginning. I hope he moved to the mountains or the beach and did whatever his passion was. It certainly wasn't raising chickens and farming.

But he proved that he could do it, and my dad didn't do it for him. As a parent, I'm tempted to make things easier for my daughter Bailey. By doing things for her, that's not the way to make her better. I need to be more like dad Mr. Bob and show her the tools that she needs to use to be successful and help guide her along her path. But I can't tote her. She has to take the steps herself.

Watch where she's going. Whenever she needs some help, she just needs to know that all she has to do is turn around. Hey, did you know that my friend Ryan Kyle Callahan has fired up the meat eater auction house oddities? and there's some pretty sweet items up for bid. The money raised is going to the Land Action Initiative in support of the Corner Crossing Legal Defense Fund.

That decision will have implications on public access everywhere, and I think it's a good cause. That's why I and my friends at the Cash Bayou Coon Camp, sunspotlights and case knives, have teamed up to offer to the highest bidder a two-night coon hunt date to be determined with lodging at the legendary Dick Whitmore Cash Bayou Camp, a case, bone stag, trapper, pocket knife,

and a copperhead hunting light, just like the one I wear, made by my friend Michael Roseman and Sunspot hunting lights. We're going to feed you all day and take you hunting all night. It's going to be a good time, I promise. Meteor Live Tour is about to kick off out west so you can check out and get the particulars on both the auction and the live tour at Meat Eater.com.

I thank y'all for listening, and until next week, this is Brent Reeves, signing off. Y'all be careful. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest.

It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sound. that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make

those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps' cut and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did and you'll find out that the Steve

Rinella cut is an easy to cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.