I know that God wants me to work, and He has certainly provided entertaining occupations. My first paycheck came as a Turkey Herder on a chicken farm in St. Louis County.  Prior to that I had been paid with a baseball glove for scraping and painting the gutters and asbestos siding on our Selma Avenue home in Webster Groves; I still have that Ken Boyer baseball glove which was so big that it works great for softball games.  And even prior to that, when I was six and Sister Cindy was an infant, I was put in charge of the baby while Mom made a quick trip to the store.  Evidently I got the instructions wrong because Mom was really mad when she returned to find me playing ball in the street with Cindy sitting on a blanket in the front yard. 

 Anyway, my friend Don worked at the Four Winds Farm as an egg processor/egg distributor person – he would deliver chicken eggs sort of like a milk man delivered milk. Both of those professions are gone now and we are sad for the loss. Besides the egg business, the farm bought little tiny turkey chicks and raised them indoors in wire cages until they reached a certain size.  Then they moved the birds out to the open fields to grow plump and tender for your Thanksgiving dinner.

 Don recommended me for the specialty job on the days when they needed to move the white, domesticated birds out to the field. We had to go early in the morning to move the herd because as the day got hotter those turkeys didn’t want to move.  Each of us had two red flags on sticks that we were to wave gently behind to move the group along.  We were sort of like sheep dogs, but really just turkey flaggers. 

 As little chicks these turkeys’ wings and beaks had been clipped.  So they couldn’t peck the herders and they couldn’t fly away.  Ground transport was their only option.    Some birds were not persuaded by the flags; maybe they didn’t like red but more likely they just didn’t want to move.  The remaining option was the punt – catch them just right with your boot under their butt and you could send them to the front of the crowd.  They would flap their short wings just a bit and drop quickly to the ground. When they landed, they took several steps to get their balance and the herd would follow. Turkey punting was a great game.  Distance was valued and direction was important, but you had to be gentle to not bruise the valuable meat.  A shanked turkey punt did not look pretty.

 It is important to note these were “domesticated” birds, since all wiliness, courage, and other good qualities Ben Franklin saw in wild turkeys when he recommended them for national bird had been bred right out.  Some training was needed once they moved outside, to keep the birds from piling up on each other against a fence and to show them where the food was located.  As soon as they learned where to eat and that they shouldn’t make a mosh pit, they mostly walked around and gobbled and ate and pooped without any sense of danger. But possums were a real threat;  they would come in the field from the surrounding  woods next door, walk up behind the turkey, grab hold and just start eating turkey butt.  The turkey would  gobble, Gobble, GOOBle, GOOBLE as distress mounted but would just stand there and be eaten!

 Some employees would periodically take a weapon in a golf cart to patrol the perimeter.  The one time I went along, the unnamed but ever after remembered ranch hand wounded a possum with the rifle, wacked it on the head with a big pair of pliers, and declared, “I don’t think you’re playing possum now!”

 Once the herding was done, the rest of the day was spent cleaning out the trays where the turkeys and pullets were raised. For the littlest birds, there were columns and columns of trays upon trays of little pooping machines.  Pull out a tray, scrape the poop onto the floor, and rinse the sloped floor out the door into the small stream that flowed down to the appropriately and affectionately named S_ _ _ Lagoon.  I returned several years later to find the farm had been sold for a housing development with a fine “pond” in the middle of the houses.  I suspect the weeds and fish grow quickly in that pond.