March 12, 2013

3 of 65

REMEMBER TO EAT YOUR VEGETABLES

My father came from the Quad Cities area in Illinois and my mother from East Texas.  They were both Marines and met in Washington, D.C. right after World War II.  They married in September of 1946 and moved to California.  About a year later they moved back to Moline, Illinois, where I was born on March 12, 1948.  A few months later, we moved to Dallas, Texas.  My brother Lonny was born there on May 19, 1949.  After another year and a few months, we all moved to the Denver, Colorado area where my brother Jim was born on September 16, 1952.  At about that time we moved to Arvada, a suburb of Denver.  My parents lived there for the rest of their lives.

Right after I finished kindergarten, our family bought a small house on 5 acres a few miles Northwest of Arvada.  I remember it as 3 rooms and a path.  There was a kitchen, a living room with a coal stove to heat the whole house, a bedroom – and out back was the outhouse.  We also had a large chicken coop which had indoor plumbing, even though the house had none.  We had a hand pump to get our household water from a well.  Within a short time, my parents did add a bathroom and indoor plumbing.

For most of my childhood, my father was employed as a railway postal clerk.  He worked in the mail car of a train running between Denver and Amarillo, Texas.  He would go down to Amarillo sorting the mail one day, spend the night there and then come back sorting the mail that had been picked up in Amarillo the next day.  He had nearly a week between his shifts, which gave him time for other pursuits.

One of the first things he did was raise game birds, like pheasants and quail, that were used at field trials for hunting dogs.  Part of the chores for my brothers and me was to feed those birds each day.  They became like pets and we missed them when they were taken away.  I don’t think we really understood that they were going to be shot by hunters.  Later, his project for supplemental income was to raise chinchillas in our cellar.  Again, we kids looked on them as a kind of pet and we missed them when they left.  I don’t think we understood that they would be turned into coats.

We had chickens for eggs and for eating.  We did understand that those would one day be killed.  Many times we watched as one of the birds was decapitated, after which it would run around “like a chicken with its head cut off,” as they say.

This was rural America and we were a typical meat-eating family.  I understood that animals were something less than people, so I did not feel that there was anything morally wrong with using animals to support and feed human beings.  Later, after I had left home and was attending college, I began to wonder about the morality.  It was not that I thought my parents were immoral people – and obviously what I have written here is only a miniscule part of our family life.  I also want to point out that we had a nice garden from which we gathered fresh, delicious vegetables when they were in season.

No, it was not that I questioned my parents’ morality.  It was more that as I looked at the war in Vietnam, the pollution that was choking the planet, the perceived oppression of the weak and poor by the strong and rich and all the other concerns of the 1960s, I (like so many others) began to doubt the morality of the entire society – including the way we were treating animals.  I decided several times to become a vegetarian, and did so for varying lengths of time.  The last time I tried that was in the early 1970s – and I have avoided eating meat from then up to the present.

I will admit that for the first few years I might have had just a bite of turkey at Thanksgiving in order to be polite.  I quit that after a while.  Now I realize that we are probably just as cruel to plants, but I know it is necessary to eat something.