Page 4 - Lexie O'Hare Went to Boston

ISSUE : Issue 42

Published by Ronald Caplan on 1986/6/1

And then, I paid rent to Jordan Marsh's and they kept putting my rent up, you see-- and they needed the building. So I let them have it. And I went up to New Hamp? shire and bought a hundred-acre farm, took three dozen pedigree chicks around my steam pressure cooker and started a hen? nery- -(No, no, Lexie, that's too quick!) Look, I haven't forgotten a thing about ithat place. (Did your husband go with you?) No, my husband had passed away in 1933. (You went to New Hampshire...) In 1936. I had friends up there. We had vacationed up there with people I was nursing--and I. just took a trip up there one day, and I found this place for sale. A hundred acres and new buildings--never had been lived in. And a dairy bam. I had my parents (in Cape Breton). I had been home that summer and built this lit? tle house--had it built--and moved my par? ents off of the big farm (in Forest Glen). My mother was 88 and my father was 81. And I had to have something else--what these two hands could do--to support them. So I went to New Hampshire. There were neigh? bours around. They had henneries, they call them; and talked to them, and there was the Agriculture you could go to for in? formation. First thing was get lumber and get build? ing brooding houses, and change the bam from a dairy to a laying house for hens. I hired people to do that. I just happened to meet the right people. I didn't know a thing. I was pushed into it somehow. I can never figure it out, not even today. I met a returned man, he wasn't doing anything-- times were pretty hard--you wouldn't remem? ber 1936--it was after Depression and all that--and he worked for $2 a day. Built the brooder houses and built shelters. Or? dered the chicks. How many did I have the first year? About 500. Changed the barn from a dairy barn to a laying house. The water at one time was piped in, but it was lead pipe. It wasn't working, so had that all repaired. And all this work done, to the bam and to the house--and I was in business. But the first days weren't very good. I had to have them in a bedroom, three dozen chicks, you know, and all kinds of paper on the floor. Only for a few days. See, we only kept the chickens just the one year. And we sold everything all off each year in the fall--when they'd get low on laying eggs--and clean out the pens and every? thing, and start all over again. Then I had a wholesale and retail route throughout Boston, of chickens and eggs. I had two men and a girl all the time. She did the driving on the route. I got an old Essejc car and chopped the body off it and put tanks on it, you know, and filled them full, and she went around the range, we called it, filling the waters for the chickens. (And on the egg route...?) Oh yes. Well, it was too much travelling, it didn't pay well enough. So I knew an awful lot of people in the automobile business, through my husband. All these places were along Commonwealth Avenue, the show shops they call them. I knew a lot of them. And I made a deal with one of the fellows work? ing down where my husband had worked, that I' d give him his chickens and his 'eggs, if I could unload so many crates of eggs there. So that worked out well. And he'd collect the money, and he'd have the money WHERE TOMORROW'S STYLES ARE FEATURED TODAY Jacobson's Ladies'Wear SERVING CAPE BRETON FOR OVER 55 YEARS Imported English & European fashions Imported cashmere coats Hudson's Bay blankets * Eskimo-made jackets Pure wool imported suits from Scotland All famous Canadian & European designers Jacobson's (4) 330 CHARLOTTE STREET * PHONE 564-8132 Tweed & Hickory Tartan skirts and kilts (including CB. & N.S. tartans) Icelandic coats and sweaters Peter Scott lamb's wool and Shetland sweaters Imported pure wool skirts, sweaters and pants SYDNEY 263 CHARLOTTE STREET * PHONE 564-6308

Cape Breton's Magazine