Bob would cut the crown off of the roosters. You cut it off because if you left it on the other roosters thought it would be a target. They would use it to pull the rooster down. You take it and cut it off and throw it right on the ground and the roosters would eat it!
We would spiral the roosters to make sure they were good. Spiral means you throw them down against each other. You had to learn how to pick up the cock without getting spurred. Then you would throw them down at each other and they would fight. But then you would pick them up before they would get hurt. We would put salve on them if they got hurt after they fight, and we would spiral them and that would help them heal up. And we would break them up before they would start to hurt each other; we spiraled them because we wanted to see what bloodline was good and what bloodline wasn’t for fight. The rooster told you, we didn’t know. We were testing our own roosters. Then we would sell them for the cockfights.
Word-of-mouth is how our business worked. Cockfighting was a big thing there in that part of Ohio. People can see from the road all them barrels and all them roosters tied to cords. They would come and talk to us about roosters and they heard from someone else that we raised good fightin’ cocks. And when the people would come we would throw them down and let them fight so the people could tell if they was a good fightin’ cock or not. You would tie spurs to the rooster’s feet when they fight. But we wouldn’t put the knife (razor blades) on them when we showed them because we didn’t want them to kill each other. We would just practice them to see who would fight good and who would walk away.
We sold fightin’ cocks, but we also fought our own roosters at cockfights. I remember one fight where Bob’s uncle came up from North Carolina. Bob’s uncle was a cock trained. That’s what he did in North Carolina and we were in Ohio and he come to our first fight to train our rooster. Those birds would fight until death; that’s how it was with them. I’ve seen a good trainer give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a bird to save the bloodline. Bob’s uncle Ike was an old rooster fighter. Someone that spiraled a new rooster had to know what they were doing or the rooster would attack them. Ike knew how to tie them knifes on the birds so you wouldn’t stab yourself. On the back of the leg there’s actually a spur that grows out and that’s what the animals normally fight with. And you had to know how to tie the knife up a certain way over the spur and up the roosters leg and keep it on so that the rooster could bend its leg and be able to stand up. That bird would come after you with that knife. You had to know how to pick up the bird without cutting yourself, and how to tie the knife on while you’re holding the bird. Because if you didn’t tie them on right they would fall off and that bird would get killed. And the ones that survived you knew that was a good bloodline and you try to heal it back up and mate it with something else.
Uncle Ike came up and stayed with us right before we went to our first fight because the chickens had to have two months of training before the fight. There was certain methods you had to use to spike up your rooster. You keep them on a regular diet with foods that you think are doing the best benefit for the rooster and give them longevity and fighting. Some of the rooster owners would use drugs to keep them up – illegal drugs. You could shoot a rooster up with cocaine and it would fight for a long time and get really crazy. There was all kinds of strange drugs but I never seen them do it for sure. Vitamin B12 is what we gave our roosters. It was hard to make it swallow something without pecking it. So we would give them shots of vitamin B12. But then there would be other vitamins we would give to him too. There was like a regiment of stuff we would give to them; the birds would be in training like a Boxer. You get the rooster up every time at certain time and spiral it. You would be on a regiment every time for about six weeks. So the right foods, the right vitamins and the right training, and the right exercise. If you want your rooster to win it needed to be in tip top shape. And that’s why Ike came up from North Carolina to help us do our first rooster fight. Ike said this is what he does for his cocks and he wins, so he was helping to train Bob to train his roosters.