State

By TED CARTER Daddy Doc’s Chickens Nobody 1а1ксм1 about cockfights then and nobody talks about them now. lint they still go on. This story begins along about 1920. Our Daddy "Doc" was a family doctor — a general practitioner who knew about everybody in the western North Carolina mountains. A graduate of Vanderbilt University and the Univer¬ sity of Virginia, he was still and al¬ ways a mountaineer at heart with a mountainous love for his heritage. That was apparent in his love for the soil and the normal hill amusements. He was the lead tenor of a mountain quartet that sang religious songs at church on Sundays and at singing conventions. He played a good hoedown on the fiddle, too. In fact, he owned an extra-spe¬ cial violin that made beautiful music. There was a mother-of-pearl sunburst on the back of it and inside was a little stamp labeled "Antionius Stradivarius Cremona.” We lived on the main highway out of Asheville, just beyond the city lim¬ its. At that time Asheville was a city of 50.000 people, all living in down¬ town Asheville. Nobody lived in the suburb. We did. and our two acres was a mountain estate in miniature. We lived in a small grove of towering, black pines with a mountain wilderness behind it. We named our cedar shin¬ gled bungalow "Pineburr.” We grew up in that marvelous wildness. Daddy Doc’s "farm" had a big garden, a vine¬ yard. apple trees, a cow. dogs, bee- gums and plenty of chickens. Л Well-Kept Secret Not just ordinary chickens, though. Daddy couldn’t stand to have Rhode Island Reds or Plymouth Rocks around. To him they were lazy and dirty. His specialty was game chick¬ ens. He loved them because they were so self-sufficient, wild and independent. Often we’d try to slip up on one of those chickens, sometimes we’d nearly make it — but always, just at the last moment that slender bird would take off like a wild pheasant, go soaring off and far away, hurtling around across the valley. We never could catch them. Often when one of those semi-wild hens would hatch, and come in with a bunch of biddies, we'd go running to catch and cuddle one. More often than not we’d be met face-to-face with a wild and frantic mother. She was in¬ domitable. She whipped us. We’d have to slip around to catch one, when she wasn't looking. We watched the hens hide their nests. Even then it was rare if we found one. They nested and roosted like wild birds, both in the summer and the win¬ ter. We rarely had to feed them, but Dad always knew’ where they roosted. Often at night he’d go out alone with a lantern, climb some tree, come in with a gorgeously - colored young rooster. He'd pen the wild thing up, feed it well, then one day he’d take it with him. We'd ask about it, but Mom was secretive. She never said much; but she wasn’t secretive about her hatred for those chickens. In fact, most mountain women hate them. They take men away from the bosom of the family. That cannot be forgiven. Years later the secret of the game cocks came out sort of naturally. Dad¬ dy Doc liked cock fighting. Those pretty little birds with the cocky airs and a willingness to mix it were really champion fighters. They won their share of bouts, we heard years later. Some of them were famous. We never saw a cock fight in all our years of growing up at Pineburr. No¬ body talked about them then and no¬ body talks about them now either, but the cockfightcrs still hold them. Once we thought that cockfighting was an old English game, inherited by hill men from Elizabethan ancestors. It's really much older. The English got it from the Romans, the Romans from Persians and the Persians from the In¬ dians and the Chinese. Sport Is Still Alive The game-cock saturates American history. George Washington. Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Sumter were cock- fighters. South Carolina is the Game Cock state. The sport of cockfighting is still popular in many nations — Mexico, the Central American Slates, the Philippines. It has been outlawed in many states for many years now. but fights are still held in a scmi-clandcs- tine fashion all over the country, es¬ pecially the South and the Southwest. We had never seen a cockfight until recently. Sometimes they're held in THE STATE, DECEMBER 1. 1971 1 3