"BATCHING"
Do you know what "batching" means? I don't mean the kind connected with computer operation. The meaning comes from the word "bachelor," which commonly is taken to mean an unmarried man. From that idea, of living without a woman, comes the term "batching." To Dad and me, in the fall of 1934, it meant doing our own house- keeping, cooking, and so on. Mom and my two sisters were living in Hinsdale, in a house rented from Dr. Cockrell. Dad and I were on the Burke place, two and a half miles out of town, taking care of the livestock.
Dad was working that winter on the Works Progress Administration historical program, digging out and reporting on the early-day history of Valley County ranching. He was away often, going through old newspaper files in libraries, and talking to old timers who could remember the former days of big ranching. Dad did his writing at home, in long hand, of course, for we didn't have a typewriter. He sent his reports in to some office. Later some of his stories appeared in the WPA History of Montana.
With Robert away working at Fort Peck Dam that year, I vibrated between the Burke place, and the house in town. I had the usual chores to do, taking care of the stock, and continued to walk back and forth the two and a half miles to school. But now I could go to the town house (hey, I never thought of that before! We had a "town house!") for lunch on school days, and Dad and I usually were there for Sunday dinner, after attending church.
Mom loved her work at the post office, and took pride in doing a good job. When the usual crowd came to the post office in the morning to get their mail, Mom enjoyed visiting with the people. She put in a good long day, too--from eight in the morning to about five or five-thirty in the afternoon. The girls enjoyed living in town because it meant they didn't have those long walks in the cold each school day.
The house they lived in had two stories, and had electricity, and water (cold water only) piped into the kitchen. The outdoor toilet was enclosed in a long shed out behind the house, which also included a storage room for all sorts of odds and ends. The house was heated in part with a wood and coal burning heater, in the living room. Part of my work now included helping to keep firewood on hand for Mom and the girls.
At the back of the yard there was a tall old red barn, long unused, but storing all sorts of old gear--harnesses, parts of a buggy, and other odds and ends. The yard was large, with a good-sized garden area,which we planted the following summer. Most important for all of us was the electricity! We had never before had a home where we had that convenience. On my short stays at the house, I could listen to the radio, something which we had not had previously. The set we had was an old Philco, shaped like a big mantle clock. Of course there was no FM in those days. Dad strung an antenna from the roof of the house to the top of the barn. On winter nights that old radio would pull in stations like KOA, Denver, and another one in Ohio, whose call letters I don't remember. I thought then, and still do, that radio is a marvelous thing. I wonder if God didn't get a bit impatient, waiting for man to "invent" it, when He had made the thing possible from the very beginning!
In this, my third year of high school, I had some choice of subjects. That year was the first in which agriculture classes were introduced in our high school, and I signed up for Animal Husbandry. Along with the agriculture subject, I had the usual English, chemistry with Mr. Shaw, and civics (government organization, and things like that). I liked all my studies, and earned good grades without really putting out much effort. In those days, very little homework was required. We did have to write "themes" in most of the courses; these were usually written outside of class. I could do most of my studying in the hours I spent in the assembly room,between classes.
Chemistry was of special interest to me, and Mr. Shaw had a good deal to do with making it interesting. He liked to conduct little experiments, to show us how things worked. The laboratory was very primitive, and lacked many things needed to do a really good job of teaching or experimenting, but he "made do," as they used to say.
One of my classmates helped make things lively. Tom was the son of Dr. Cockrell, our local doctor, and was a great "cut-up" in school, beside being a good basketball player. One day, after discovering a can of ether in the chemistry supply cabinet, Tom soaked his handkerchief with ether, and anesthetized himself, right in class! He sat behind me (I was always a front row student, by choice) and all I knew about what was going on was a peculiar odor in the air.
Suddenly, while Mr. Shaw was talking, Tom became unconscious, and slid down out of his chair onto the floor. Naturally that caused a big commotion! Several of the other students had known what Tom was trying to do, so they weren't as surprised as were the rest of us. Mr. Shaw quickly determined what the problem was, and just let Tom sleep. He was recovering, I remember, about the time class let out, as he hadn't gotten very much ether before he passed out. I don't remember what trouble Tom was in for that escapade.
One day Mr. Shaw wanted to show us how metal would burn. He lit a bunsen (natural gas) burner, and proceeded to burn steel wool. This is not difficult to do. Steel wool can be heated until red hot, and then waved briskly in the air. The result is that the steelburns, with visible flames. That, however, was only the beginning of this experiment. Next Mr. Shaw placed a little steel crucible on the top of the wood laboratory table, and filled it with a mixture of powdered aluminum and ferric oxide, which is really only common rust put up in a can. To light the mixture, he used a little ribbon of magnesium foil, tucked into the powdered mixture in the crucible, like a wick.
Then he lit the magnesium ribbon with the bunsen burner. Like the magnesium in photo flashbulbs, the ribbon burned with a brilliant white light. When the heat of the burning magnesium ribbon reached the mixture below, it ignited and flared up in a big tongue of flame almost to the ceiling. The heat was so intense, the steel crucible became red hot at the bottom, and burned its way very quickly about a quarter of an inch into the top of the lab table! That was something Mr. Shaw hadn't counted on! When the smoldering wood had been quenched, and the crucible cooled off enough for us to inspect it, we found a little chunk of iron in the bottom. All the aluminum had been consumed, and the iron in the ferric oxide smelted. It had been very interesting, and became a subject for discussion for some time! I think Mr. Shaw wished he hadn't tried that experiment, though.
Another time we were learning how hydrogen is generated, and were treated to minor explosions of hydrogen in a big bell jar. Then Mr. Shaw had the happy idea that we also could generate some oxygen, mix it with the hydrogen, and have an oxy-hydrogen torch that would produce heat and water. (You know, maybe, that water is composed of a mixture of two molecules of hydrogen teamed with one molecule of oxygen--that's why it is sometimes called H2O).
The idea sounded good. We set up the necessary equipment. The oxygen generator combined sulphuric acid, strong stuff, with zinc oxide. A tube led from the oxygen generator to a "y" tube, to which was attached a tube from the hydrogen generator. The mixture of the two gases lit readily enough, but there wasn't enough of the gas to make a very big flame. For some reason, I was watching the operation at very close range, and reached up to give the oxygen generator a little jiggle, thinking that would produce more oxygen. Maybe it did; I don't know. The flame backed up through the tube to the oxygen generator flask, which exploded right in my face, spattering me with sulphuric acid, some of which got in my eyes! It burned like fire, believe me!
Mr. Shaw acted very quickly. He put my head in the sink, and ran cold water into my face and eyes immediately, and with his fingers opened my eyes so the stuff could be washed out thoroughly. The only harm I suffered was some lasting redness in my eyes, but there was no damage to my vision, for which I am thankful. One student in the class was standing clear across the room at the time of the explosion. He had a piece of glass about an inch long from the flask stuck neatly in the middle of his forehead! What could have been a tragic event turned out to be almost harmless. Several of us had some acid on our clothing, and that didn't do the cloth any good, as you could guess.
That experience didn't keep me from further experiments with hydrogen. We knew that it was lighter than air, and one of my classmates and I came up with a neat idea. We would fill some rubber balloons with hydrogen, write something on them, and let them go in the assembly room! They would go up against the ceiling where no one could reach them! We got a couple of balloons filled all right, and decided that we would tease our basketball coach and his lady love a little. So we painted on the balloons "Mr. U_____ and Miss P_______,", (we used their names, of course) and released the balloons in the assembly room as planned.
The only trouble was that it wasn't very difficult to trace down the culprits! The balloons were used as targets, and shot down with paper clips fired from rubber bands. The principal lectured us strongly, though he could hardly keep from laughing. But we didn't do that again! But let's get back to the batching. That winter I learned to do simple cooking, especially with things cooked in a frying pan, or boiled in water. We had plenty of vegetables from the garden to eat--potatoes and carrots and even some musk melons (our name for cantaloupe) stored in the cellar under the house. And beside those things, we had eggs and milk and cream in good supply. We didn't lack for food. I did help to increase our meat supply that year by shooting pheasants and grouse frequently. We had a small stack of wheat hay down on the hay field. Dad had tried raising wheat that year, in place of the usual alfalfa, but the grain was so poor it wasn't worth harvesting or threshing. So we had cut it with a mower, raked it, and stacked it as hay. The stack contained a lot of wheat, and the Chinese pheasants learned quickly that it was a good place to feed. Jack rabbits, also, came regularly to the stack on winter nights.
Since we were fattening the birds ourselves, we saw nothing wrong with harvesting a few of them. So sometimes I would go down to the haystack on Saturday mornings, hide in some loose hay, and wait for the birds to come out of the nearby brush. I think I always shot only the male birds. Whatever, they were very good eating! Also, there were a few grouse around that winter, and I shot two or three of them. We ate pheasant and grouse simply fried in the skillet; we didn't do any fancy cooking with them.
It was in that fall and winter that I developed an intense interest in learning to mount animals and birds. I saw ads in the outdoor magazines I read, of how just about anyone could quickly learn the necessary techniques through a correspondence course from the Omaha School of Taxidermy. So I wrote to the school, and received their literature. The course sounded fascinating, and I wanted to take it, but the cost was far beyond my ability to pay--something like fifty dollars. So I didn't do anything about the course, simply because I couldn't.
It was only a couple of weeks later that I received another letter; they were offering a special price! I could have the course for only twenty dollars, or something like that. Again, I didn't reply. Well, the end of the matter was that I could take the course for just five dollars, they were so interested in me, etc., etc. That I could handle. I sent in the five dollars, and a little more, as I needed some initial supplies of arsenic and glass eyes and other stuff, per their letter. It wasn't long before the whole course (a little booklet of about twenty pages) and the arsenic,etc., came, and I could launch my new hobby.
I'll have to give the school credit that the booklet adequately explained how to skin animals and birds, how to preserve the skin with the arsenic powder (deadly poisonous stuff!), how to put in glass eyes, and so on. What they couldn't do for me was show me how to put those animals in life-like poses such as I had seen in their advertisements. That requires real artistic abilities that I didn't have, or had never cultivated. But I struggled with it manfully. Here is where the pheasants, snowshoe rabbits, and great horned owls came in. I did learn to do a fair job of skinning birds, though the great horned owl I tried to mount proved to be very difficult. The instructions said that the skin of the head must be kept intact; in other words, the skin from the body and neck must be pulled over the head, without making any cuts. The book failed to explain how the relatively huge head of an owl could possibly be pulled through the narrow skin of the neck! It simply can't be done!
I did manage to mount an owl in a taking-off--or maybe it was a landing--position. I fastened the whole thing on a board, and proudly presented it to the school, where it was to serve as one of the objects used in Future Farmers of America club meetings. I was vice president of that club that year, and needed an owl as the symbol of my office, you see. Do you know that a few years later, in 1938, when I visited the school with the men's quartet from Northern Montana College, that old owl was still in use? He looked pretty bedraggled and woe- begone, but still had his wings stretched out as if he might fly!
I didn't have such good results with the big white pelican I shot and tried to mount. That was a messy job, trying to skin that big bird from a short slit in the skin on its stomach. When I got to the task of getting that huge head and bill and its sack out through the long neck skin, I was stumped. I decided belatedly that there was no way it could be done. So I just mounted the head and neck only, on a plaque to hang on the wall. I had to cut the neck skin at the back, but managed to sew it on the form without too much trouble. It really looked pretty good, in my opinion. It was something like a big game trophy.
But I had something new to learn. I had applied lots of arsenic to that pelican's head skin and the big sack under its bill, but evidently not enough. As it hung on the wall of my bedroom the next year, the sack under the bill began to change color. From a lovely yellow-orange, it changed to a pale green, and then to a bright pea green. At that point my Mom said it had to go! I hated to part with it, but there was no choice. With that my career as a taxidermist came to an abrupt halt.