I think I need some chickens.
No, not the Styrofoam tray, plastic-wrapped, meat-department kind, but dirt-scratching, egg-laying, good-eating chickens.
The thought arrived during the recent fuss in Denver and Aurora over whether people in these hard times should be allowed to keep chickens in residential areas.
It put me in a reverie about my own childhood. My old man always kept a coop in the backyard, and he and Mama would tag-team them on Saturday afternoons — him wringing and her boiling and plucking — just in time for Sunday dinner.
Daddy, raised country, kept chickens in our little slice of inner-city Los Angeles until the day he died.
Henny Penny, as he named the last one he ever bought from the little feed store on Western Avenue, he spared and gave free rein in the backyard. This ultimately mangy, doglike piece of chicken flesh would become his constant companion — and outlive him.
It is how I found myself at Pollard Poultry & Feed, 1812 S. Parker Road in Denver.
Amid the new and newer mid-rises and shopping centers on South Parker, it is easy to miss. Don Pollard has been there for 53 years.
Now, I don’t know what a crotchety old man truly looks and sounds like, but Don Pollard, 80 years old, is probably as close as it gets.
He never leaves his chair behind his front counter. If I want to know from chickens, they are out there, he says, pointing east.
Past the lawn mowers, rakes and firewood that he also sells, there they are, maybe two dozen, in cages. They are priced from $6 to $15.95 each.
“You got a dog house?” Pollard asks when I inquire how I would ever house such animals. “All you need is a tarp to cover one side to keep them out of the weather,” he barks.
Things used to be easier.
When he started out, fresh off his parents’ farm in Milton, Mo., folks would walk into his store and buy 200 to 300 chickens “at a crack.”
“You’d get a guy like you in sometimes, but even they would buy 50, sometimes 100, at a pop,” Pollard says. “But that was a long time ago.”
Today, the most chickens he sells at one time is two or three.
“It is absolutely frustrating,” he says.
That city people are buying these days means nothing.
“Chicken business has just gone south,” he says. “It went somewhere, at least.”
He knows, he says, of the Denver and Aurora fuss over chickens. Only then does he reveal even a hint of excitement over city folk raising chickens.
“Everybody needs chickens,” Pollard says. “You care for and feed chickens, your troubles melt away.”
OK, I tell him, I want chickens that both lay eggs and taste good on the dinner table.
“You don’t want the white ones out there,” he says when I tell him I like their $6 price tag.
“Those are frying chickens!” he exclaims.
If I want eggs and meat, he says, I want the $15.95 Rock Island Reds — those of Henny Penny’s lineage. I pass.
“That is the problem,” Pollard says. “City people are always coming in here, haggling over the price! I wouldn’t buy another baby chick to raise and sell if you paid me!”
He still has not moved from behind the counter.
I apologize for bugging him when he has work to do. He never looks up from his paperwork?
“Well, you are a bugger,” he says, his mouth as twisted as if he had just eaten six dozen lemons.
Maybe I need to revisit this chicken thing.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
