We Raised Fightin’ Gamecocks
You ain’t seen nothing until you seen a cockfight! It’s fast as lightnin’. You tie your razor blades under the rooster’s leg right at his spur, and you gotta hold that rooster just right or he’ll try to cut your fingers off. Everybody’s got bets on your rooster and they’re all crowded round the ring, and then you throw the cocks in. They strut around inside the ring each sizin’ up the other, and then one of them makes a move – is like lightning! The fight could go a couple of rounds, but most of them are over in 30 seconds. The birds move so fast and everybody screaming and hollering and then one of them gets sliced and there’s blood flyin’ and then it’s all over. Our birds almost always won. We raised one of the best Gamecock bloodlines in Ohio.
RAISING GAMECOCKS
We was living in a trailer on the corner property on the side of the Loop Road; it was a road that did a great big giant loop out in the country. It was an old gravel road. A lot of people would go out there at night and drink on that road. That’s how far out in the country it was. One time I picked up a whole trash bag full of beer cans. Each can I found I would crush it. By the time I walk the loop back I had a great big black trash bag full of beer cans. It gave me a great big giant bruise on the back of my leg because the bag was so heavy and I was carrying it and it was bumping on my leg. It got so heavy, I wanted to just leave the sack on the side of the road and not carry all them cans back at the same time, but I knew if I drop that sack someone would’ve picked it up right away. Someone would’ve stole it. People was always thievin’ there.
Behind the trailer was like part of an old trailer – that’s the best way to describe it. It was the same color as our trailer and it had walls and everything like a trailer and it had an entire roof. I think Bob’s grandpa built that. They used to have cows on the property. And if you went further down there was a natural spring, and Bob’s grandpa put a bathtub there. It would fill up and run over and that’s where the cows would go to drink.
We kept all the stuff that had to do with chickens in that older trailer. We kept in it the chicken corn feed, and the hay, and stuff that you give to the chickens to keep them healthy like vitamins and salves (bag balm) to help the chickens heal after a fight. We didn’t leave the door open all the time, in the wintertime we close it because the rats would come in trying to get the corn. We had great big cans of corn.
We had a great big giant electric fence because we didn’t want the dogs get in there and other animals like weasels, chicken hawks; they would get inside and kill the roosters. So we had a great big electric fence about as big as a house going all the way around the old trailer shed making kind of a yard.
We set the roosters inside the fence on empty barrels turned upside down. Each rooster had a cord tied to its leg and a space in front of the barrel. You couldn’t let the roosters loose together. If two roosters got together they would fight until one of them was dead. So they was all tied on cords. They were tied with a rubber cord to their foot and to the barrel, or else tied to a steak pounded in the ground. So they could only go about 5 feet. We had a bunch of barrels and roosters all over this yard. They were plastic barrels and we would cut a hole in them and they would perch outside where the door was on a plastic tube, or they would perch inside on the tube. They always perched when they slept– just like a bird. They would never just go into that barrel and sleep, but they would perch. Some of them would sleep on top of the barrel. And where the hole was in the barrel, that’s where you put the water tray on a hook. And the feed you would just throw on the ground. But we have to go around every single day and make sure that they had water. We used to take that spring water and carry it up in buckets at a time from the old cattle bathtub and give it to the roosters.