Gregory Peck Was a Chicken

In my 13th year, as I was walking home from school one day, I heard my name being called. A
woman, a friend of my mother who lived along the road was calling me over to show me
something. I walked up her driveway to her garage and there in a large box, partly filled with
straw, were 4 or 5 tiny little “peeps:” newly hatched chickens dressed in the furry down of baby
chickenhood, each one dyed in thoroughly unnatural colors. The year was 1959. The season
was Spring, and the occasion was the approach of Easter Sunday.
I do not know where it came from, but there was a tradition among some folks at that time to
give chicks, dyed in a rainbow of colors, to children as an Easter gift. I assume it was a ritual in
farm country more than in the city. My home, in Bethel Borough, Pennsylvania, sat at the
interface between the outer edge of the Pittsburgh metro area and the endless farm country
which stretched at that time with little interruption across the entire state to Philadelphia.

My neighbor assumed that a young fellow my age just needed to have a baby chick to care for
and insisted I choose one from the box to take home. The choice was easy. A fluff ball dyed
robin’s-egg blue suited me just fine. I wrapped her gently in a borrowed towel tied closed with
a length of twine. The rest of the way home meant traversing a short stretch of deep woods on
a patch worn muddy by my boots after many days of making the trek to and from school
during the snows of winter and the rainy Spring. 

The path emerged from the woods at the corner of our 1-acre yard just near the seperate building which had originally served as a garage, but now played the role of garden and utility shed. Our house was a gambrel-roofed two-story-plus-basement structure fronting LibraryRoad (Rt. 88). My parents had constructed a one-story addition for the master bedroom and bath, and that stood over the “new” drive-in two-car garage. Our lot was bordered by an alley—paved in ”red dog” slag from the steel mills—which ran from LIbrary Road to Brightwood Road just a few hundred yards above their interection. That large triangular lot was wooded, and it made a perfect playground for the six Mouer children and some of our neighbors.

My arrival at our backdoor entry into the kitchen was met by my mother who was a little bit
horrified when I gleefully unwrapped a baby blue peeping chicken. While I know that my
parents had chosen this house and its location 8 years earlier to give their children more
country-style life experiences, Mom’s background had been urbanized by growing up in the
streets of Chattanooga, Tennessee and Richmond, Virginia. Her initial response to my gift was
first to make me get it out of the house and her second was to wonder out loud to whom we
could give it to be raised and butchered for supper.
Later that evening I found myself and my new friend with my father in our basement looking for
materials to construct a temporary chicken coop. Within the first week we had expanded to a
more permanent coop. Our yard had a pear tree, a grape arbor, a huge old Sugar Maple tree,
and a stretch of vegetable garden beds, sometimes well tended and sometimes not so much.
My
My baby chick very quickly outgrew her dyed down and transformed to an adult almost
overnight. Despite her obvious sex—she was a hen—I was recently reminded we called her
“Gregory Peck.”
The baby chick had apparently imprinted on me, as chicks normally do on their mamas. She
followed me everywhere. It didn’t take long to teach her to perch on my shoulder while I played
or did my outdoor chores in the family garden. It was quite a lesson to learn just how quickly
baby chicks become fully grown hens. We never had her wings clipped, so she could fly from
the ground to my shoulder and back again with ease, slapping me silly with her wings in the
process. She hung out with my siblings and I in the back yard when we were home, and she
coo’d and cackled away in her roomy cage filled with straw and rags.

It was a sort of idyllic life for a kid living in a still-rural edge of a big city. It just couldn’t last. Our
house had been built about 1910 and needed some serious tweaking to keep up with the 20th
century and a growing family. Even with the addition my parents had added, that house was
hard-pressed to do proper duty for a family of eight. My mother, especially, longed for
something larger, newer, more fashionable, more suburban. My parents contracted with a good
friend who was a successful home builder in the region. Our borough itself was undergoing a
period of transformation as we all learned to call our home town Bethel Park, rather than Bethel
Borough. As a family we watched the new house rise in a brand-new subdivision called High
Gate.

My school building was, at this time, called the Junior High Annex. It was the same building
where I had studied 1st through 5th grades. After a 6th grade year at a new elementary school I
was back in the big old brick building formerly known as Bethel Grade School. I knew that this
one late Autumn day I would walk from the home on Library Road to school for the last time
and that I would now ride home on a school bus to the newer, bigger home in High Gate. What
never crossed my mind is that I would never again enjoy days in my yard with a silly sweet hen
named Gregory Peck.

My Mom had to confess to me that she had given my chicken to someone from the moving
company. I asked her if that someone had children at home. She didn’t have an answer. I never
doubted what hand fate had dealt to Ms. Gregory Peck. I also never quite totally forgave my
mother and her endless yearning for bigger, better, more fashionable, more negotiable status in
the community. It was a life lesson I needed to learn, and I think I learned it well.
For that lesson, and so much more, I will always be grateful. But I never felt at home in that
new house. I did make good and lifelong friends in the new neighborhood. I’m sure I profited
peripherally at least from the elevated status our family might have shared in the new hilltop
neighborhood and the high-style fashionable new church we attended and the brand-new
campus-style high school I would soon be attending. There was a lot lost, however, without
trees to climb, woods to explore, and gardens to tend. I never felt at home in Bethel Park as I
had in Bethel Borough.

I graduated high school in June of 1963 and, at 17 years old I enrolled in a university 2000
miles away from the place where I had been raised. I went back to spend enough time in the
University of Pittsburgh to complete my doctorate, but have lived ever since in Virginia. Today I
live in a house about the same age as the one I was raised in, with a gambrel roof and an
external garage. My spouse and I have ßpears and berries growing in the yard, and we have
vegetable beds planted along the suburban streets where we live. I wake up in the morning to
the sweet garbled clucking of my neighbor’s chickens. And I feel wholly at home.