The Red Flannel Rag

Uncle Rob had built chicken houses on the farm before he died, so Mom started

raising chickens for sale. Her first flock was five hundred chicks. She raised them to six

weeks old. A poultry buyer came to look at them and paid her the top price. She cleared

five hundred dollars on her first sale.

Two years later, the same farm that Mom had wanted to buy came for sale again.

Meantime, the land had been split and the best pasture sold to John I. Myers. At this

time, the farm had only seven acres. Mom and Dad bought the farm. She decreased her

herd to four cows and continued to produce milk. Charlie Henkel still drove past the

house to haul her milk to market.

During the summer of 1954, the polio epidemic reached Hopkins Gap and the

surrounding area where we lived. Several children in school with me were stricken with

the disease. Mom panicked. She heard all the stories on the news about children being

in iron lungs and dying from the disease. As usual when she got scared, she went into

action. She quarantined us for the whole summer. She didn’t let us go anywhere. She

met visitors at the road and wouldn’t let them come in the house.

By the following summer, the Salk vaccine was available. She would not let us

take the shot because she believed that the vaccine could cause us to get polio like it did

some children when it first became available. She always bragged that she kept us from

getting polio.

Dad was working hard at a local feed mill; but his bring-home pay was only forty

dollars a week. There were five children to support and a house payment of twenty-five

dollars a month. I was in high school taking courses to be a secretary. I had to pay a fee

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