The year was 1963, and I was a Summer Assistant 4-H Agent in Fairfield County, Conn. One of that summer’s 4-H projects was raising capons for meat. In case you didn’t know, capons are neutered chickens. I knew nothing about chickens in general or capons in particular except that I was supposed to go to one farm and pick up a delivery truck, to another farm and pick up the wooden crates, and then to another place to pick up the capons. (The two full-time 4-H Agents were smart enough to avoid this trip entirely, which should have told me something right there.) I was to haul the capons to the county fairgrounds where the 4-H kids and their parents would pick up their individual allotments. It was one of those hot, humid Connecticut summer mornings, and it was only to get hotter and more humid.
The truck was an old stake-body with no protection from the wind. Oh, well, at least the birds would get some fresh air. Upon arriving at the “crate place”, I was surprised that there were a whole pile of crates! Boy, these kids must have ordered a lot of capons. I arrived at the chicken place and started loading capons, quite a few birds to a crate. The only way I could fit all the crates onto the truck was to stack them several deep, solid from front to back and side to side. Then I left for the fairgrounds, which was quite a long drive. By this time of the day the temperature was in the 90s, with the humidity pretty close to that. I figured faster was better and lit out, leaving a stream of white feathers in my wake.
The capons apparently did not enjoy the trip (neither did I), and by the time I got to the fairgrounds some of them were in sorry shape since the crates on top had airflow to the max while the ones in the middle didn’t have much of any. In fact, it looked like some of the capons didn’t survive their ordeal, with a few crates of birds worse than the others. Therefore, some sorting was necessary to ensure that there wasn’t more than one bird per crate that had expired, or nearly so. (A 4-Her is fair, even in the face of adversity.) This situation was distressing, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Being completely ignorant about bird physiology I thought they that chickens were like fish; their eyes would stay open regardless of whether they were alive or dead, and the kids wouldn’t be able to tell the difference until after they got home. But I soon got a shock: Chickens got eyelids! And when they go to that great Chicken Coop in the Sky, they do so with closed eyelids. My response to a couple of the 4-Hers, noting a prone capon with closed eyelids: “Maybe it’s sleeping.” What the heck, maybe it was…