Life Sketches by Terry Berkson Retired Poultry FarmerRecalls ‘Roger’s Colossus’in Face of Avian Flu Epidemic Recently, Roger and Diane Vaughn—who operated the only small commercial poultry farm situated along the Route 20 corridor between Albany and Syracuse—retired. Theirs was one of about 15 remaining egg-laying operations in the state. At one time, there were 15 small farms like theirs within a 15-mile radius. Then, the average setup consisted of about 300,000 birds, which made the Vaughns’ flock of poultry look…
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Life Sketches by Terry Berkson Made in the Shade: There’s More Than One Way to Curb a Rooster I once had this beautiful tropical fish that was mutilating and eating up the rest of the fish in the tank. It looked like he would have to be flushed down the drain, but before doing so, I tried threading a piece of dental floss through his tail with a sewing needle to create a drag that would slow him down when…
Life Sketches by Terry Berkson Heart of the House: Uncle Harry’s Gift of Conversion a Godsend In 1932, my Uncle Harry graduated from New York’s City College with a degree in aeronautical engineering. For more than a year he tried to get a job in that field but, likely due to the Great Depression, he was unsuccessful. So, he turned to the heating business where thousands of homes and industrial buildings were converting to oil to take the place of…
Life Sketches by Terry Berkson The Ritz Crossing In late November of 1965 my dad, in his yellow taxi cab, ferried me and my duffle bag down to the Brooklyn Army Terminal where I would board the USS Darby bound for Bremerhaven, Germany. Several other soldiers who had also gone to Preventive Medicine School were among the 1,400 troops that were about to cross the Atlantic. The water was calm for the first few days but, in spite of the…
Life Sketches by Terry Berkson Out On The Ice One bitterly cold morning, Joe Gravelding, my muskrat-trapping partner, didn’t come to call for me. It was the weekend, so I figured he slept in knowing he could count on me to go and check the line. When I left the house, my dog, Pinkie, began to follow me. I threw a few snowballs at him and yelled for him to go home, but he kept trailing me. Pinkie might sound…
Life Sketches by Terry Berkson Puffball hunting Yesterday morning I looked out the window and saw that a puffball was emerging from the ground at the edge of a hedgerow bordering our back lawn. It reminded me of an incident that occurred many years ago. I had taken my son and his friend, Junior, puffball hunting on a farm just outside of Warren off of Route 20. What’s different about a puffball from others in the mushroom family is that…
Life Sketches by Terry Berkson Cats in Key West Several years ago my wife Alice and I made a trip down to Key West, Florida and among other sites visited the house where Ernest Hemingway lived and worked on great writing projects like “A Farewell To Arms.” It was an interesting two-story structure, one of the few in Key West that was made out of stone blocks that had been cut and removed to create a cellar. There was a…
Column by Terry Berkson A Miller’s Knot Bumped into Buster Whipple several summers ago at Joe’s Pizzeria downtown. He was up from Florida to attend his grandchild’s graduation. We hashed over old times, among them, days I used to work with him on his family’s farm. We were doing hay the year I was eighteen and headed for Brooklyn College in the fall. “You’re a good worker now,” Buster had said as I threw a bale onto the wagon. “But…
Add a chicken in a cherry tree! Life Sketches by Terry Berkson Late one afternoon several Christmases ago at the height of a driving snowstorm, I left my typewriter and looked out the kitchen window. There was a large bird roosting in our cherry tree. It wasn’t a crow or a pigeon or a morning dove. I knew those Brooklyn birds well. This was something much bigger. The tree stood at the back of the yard against the fence, which…
Life sketches by Terry Berkson: Too stuck up for Thanksgiving Several years ago, two friends from Richfield, Tiger Goodale and Rootie Marriot, came up the drive with what they thought was a good story for me to write. They had been in the Genesee, one of the local watering holes, when this guy came in and told how he or some other one-legged man — they didn’t make it clear — was up in a tree, building a stand for…