Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

This is a member of my dad's cat collection. (It used to be my mom's cat collection, but Dad felt she was neglecting them by feeding them only twice a day.) This is Pinkie.

He's window shopping with his neighbors, the bird collection: zebra finches, parakeets, and red rumped parakeets, or some name like that. The bird collection is continuously fed.

As far back as I can remember my dad has raised birds. There were always chickens, but not necessarily the kind you think of when you think of a farm or dairy (big layers like Plymouth Rocks, White Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds); Dad preferred the fancy bantam chickens.

(Photo stolen from this site)

He also raised white doves and fancy pigeons, the above-mentioned finches and parakeets, as well as love birds and cockateels. Dad has always planned and built all of his chicken coops and aviaries himself, which he has at least painted to match the house, or I think Mom would kill him.

I recently sat down with my dad, armed with a note pad and pen to get the fine details of one of his childhood stories. As often happens with Dad, the story began in English and ended in Swahili, so to speak; we covered a lot of ground and the rabbit trails were many and far-flung. But I learned something I thought was significant, and I'd like to share it with you.

When Dad was 14 his family moved to Hawaii for two years for my grandfather's government job. Since this is the larger story I'm working on I'll save that for another day; the move home is what caught my ear as Dad related his story. They had to move to Oahu (1948) and back (1950) by ship since commercial air travel was in its infancy, and remote Hawaii may as well have been the North Pole in those days. The government paid for everything, including moving their furniture. The only hang-up of their plans was the ship's policy about not transporting live fish in fish tanks, so 16-year-old David, my future dad, made arrangements with someone on a cargo ship to transport his new pet fish home to San Francisco, where David would go to pick them up later.

But David was able to take his parakeets onto the Lurline for the voyage home to Berkeley, in their cage, in the family's quarters.

I thought about that for a minute. "You had parakeets back then, Dad?" I asked him.

"Yeah," he answered. "I bought them for a quarter apiece in Honolulu, and raised them while we lived there."

"Had you ever seen parakeets before you moved to Hawaii?" I asked.

"Well . . . I guess not," Dad answered, a little impatient with this line of questioning, since we were really supposed to be talking about traveling on the cruise ship Lurline.

"And how about the tropical fish? Did people have tropical fish in Berkeley in those days?"

"No, I'd never seen a salt water tank before. This isn't important --"

"So you were probably the only person in your neighborhood to have tropical birds and fish. I would imagine your friends must have been fascinated by them. How did you keep them once you got them home?"

"Well, we had had a Victory Garden during the war, just like everyone else, and that included chickens. The chicken coop was empty, of course, when we moved back to Berkeley, so my dad helped me convert it to an aviary for the parakeets. I kept the fish tank on an old metal patio table in the corner of my bedroom. I must have gotten some kind of heater for it."

"Did you meet anyone else who raised tropical fish or birds?"

"Well, there was a guy in Alameda that the pet store people told me about. I used to go out to see him, and I bought some more birds from him. I started raising the birds and selling them to a high-end pet store in San Francisco. Every time I had birds to sell, my dad would take a cage of them on his lap for the bus ride into San Francisco where he worked, then at lunch he'd take them to the pet store and sell them for me. I got four dollars for each bird. I made $500 the first year, which was a good month's salary in those days, and $200 the second year. It started my college fund. But people don't want to know about this stuff!"

Maybe they don't, but maybe they do. In any case, I now have a better understanding of the origins of the menagerie that was always present in some combination, throughout my childhood and up to the present. I'm just thrilled to death that there were no snakes in Hawaii.

No finches, parakeets, or cats were harmed for this post.