Fathers’ Day Surprise

[Jack Cronkhite]

Been searching for this for years. Kids find the darndest things.

[Dean Romig]

Nice!!

That is a classic WHF cover. Lucky you!!

Not a Parker he's shooting though - Parker never made a front-stuffer shotgfun.



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[Russell E. Cleary]

ah, your profile title and magazine cover illustration title finally meet.

[charlie cleveland]

jack that is one of my favorite scences in shooting sportsman....wish magazines still put out such great art....charlie

[Jack Cronkhite]

Thanks all. Russel is there a simple way to rotate a pic after it’s posted when it’s not right. It seems to happen on a hit and miss basis. Kinda like my pheasant hunting

[Russell E. Cleary]

Jack:

I know of no simple nor complex way the image as you posted it can be rotated AFTER posting.

You might try removing the image as you posted it; then doing what I did, which was saving your image on a laptop computer, going to "edit", rotating it upright, saving it in that form, and re-inserting it.

Just unguided trial and error for me; no real knowledge.

[Dean Romig]

You can change the picture in your post.
Go into your picture file and pull up the picture, rotate it to the orientation you want it (it may already be oriented the way you want it) and crop just a tiny bit at one of the edges and then save it.
Now go into your post, click edit, click on Manage Attachment, delete your first picture then add the edited picture from your picture file, then save your post. This always has worked for me but others have posted another way.





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[Stan Hillis]

Great cover, Jack. Thanks for sharing it with us.

If that is the shot pattern on the end of the building, under the hawk and chicken, he sure missed badly! I'd say his gun has way to much drop for hawk killin'.

And, what in the heck is that in the background, on something like a sawhorse, that appears to be five or six canisters leaning outward?

[Jeff Kuss]

They look to me to be milk cans.

[Russell E. Cleary]

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX(ditto)

[roger mcmanimon]

Great Cover!

[Jack Cronkhite]

Milk cans. Maybe one used for cream after separation. Either that or pistons for the old John Deere 😵*💫
Stan guessing you must be a youngster compared to some of us.
Here’s a milk can story. Think I might’ve been about 8 years old. Somehow I had come into possession of a one dollar bill. Had it all balled up in my hand and wasn’t about to let go of it. Then came lunch. My uncle did up his own bacon and that was served. I had never tasted bacon like it. Figured something was off so I shook a bunch of salt on it. Even worse. Got told it didn’t need salt because it was already heavily salted bacon. So I reached behind me to pass the bacon to an eager dog but in the process that balled up dollar left my hand. Dog didn’t get it. It dropped into a full milk can with no lid on it. I’m desperately trying to figure out how to retrieve my prize. While others were in the midst of lunch conversation I slid my hand into the can and stirred around a bit. No dollar. I went deeper up to my elbow and felt the balled up dollar. Retrieved it with no one the wiser. Wiped my arm on my pants and tucked the dollar in a pocket. I may not have washed my hands before lunch and I may have gathered some eggs and shovelled some manure before as well. I decided I wouldn’t bother with a glass of milk from that can.

Just realized that national Sportsman magazine will be 100 years old in a few weeks.

[charlie cleveland]

great storey about that dollar bill...I don t think many of us worried about washing our hands in those days....in high school we went to a milk factory...first thing we saw was a man pulling the lids off the milk cans as they came into this room he smelled each can...I asked our guide what was the purpose of him smelling the milk can he said to see if the milk was still ok or not....I asked him what if he had a cold and his nose might be stopped up he replied lots of bad milk would get bottled up for us to drink....this was how the milk company tested their good or bad milk each day back then...true storey....I think about this some times as I drink some milk...charlie

[Rick Losey]

he tried a breach loader a few years later, sans beard

https://parkerguns.org/forums/picture.php?albumid=588&pictureid=8550

[todd allen]

Reminds me of my days living on a farm in the country. Any hawk that came near a chicken coop was called a chicken hawk, no matter the actual species, and was shot on sight.
I watched an elderly uncle blast a circling hawk outta the sky with his ancient Auto-5, yelling "Dang chicken hawk!"
Back in those days, the survivors of the great depression did not debate with varmints that messed with the family food resources.

[Stan Hillis]

Stan guessing you must be a youngster compared to some of us.

May be, Jack. I'm only 70. Raised on a farm, have farmed all my adult life, but never saw milk delivered, or kept, in a big can like that. Thanks for the explanation. He must have had several milk cows, eh?

[Mark Britton]

On my farm where three springs come out of the ground together, you can still see the channel that was dug out to store the milk cans. The Pillows had a dairy farm. Mr Pillow who I never knew was a veteran for the south in the civil war. His daughter Mary was like a grandmother to me.I can still see and hear her in my mind playing the piano and singing Dixie to the top of her lungs. I'm only 61

[JAMES HALL]

Check out the spilled bucket at his feet.

[Arthur Shaffer]

Great cover, Jack. Thanks for sharing it with us.

If that is the shot pattern on the end of the building, under the hawk and chicken, he sure missed badly! I'd say his gun has way to much drop for hawk killin'.

And, what in the heck is that in the background, on something like a sawhorse, that appears to be five or six canisters leaning outward?

I think if you look closely, the building is his greenhouse, and he has shot the glass out. It looks like you can make out the inner frames and some plants through the opening.

I am 72 and can remember as a kid in Eastern KY dairy farmers sitting milk cans beside the road every morning for the dairy truck to come by and pick up. These were small farms where they milked by hand. There were always several of the large cans and one or two 2 or 3 gallon cream cans. Just a few years later in the early 60's the state required refrigerated milk tanks. My Dad (a local builder) built several of the milk houses for the few big dairies that stayed in business. The switch to large farms, automated milkers and chilled milk tanks, and the disappearance of local milk trucks with glass bottles all seemed to occur at the same time here.

[Dean Romig]

This one’s 22 1/2 gallons. Found next to an abandoned dairy barn in Maine 55 years ago.


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[Gary Laudermilch]

Milk was sold by the pound and I believe the cans were to contain 100 pounds of milk. I remember very well wrestling the cans to the loading platform for pick-up every day. It was a chore for a 10 year old kid. Seems like it was 6-8 cans per day but I could be wrong.
That was long time ago.

[Jeff Kuss]

After the change to milk tanks, many of the old milk cans were used for used oil. It was quite common to find oil filled cans in old barns.

[Richard Flanders]

My first job at 15yrs old - for all of .50/hr - was baling hay on a dairy farm one woodlot and two fields away from our house. They'd call early, like 0600, if they needed me and I could be there in 12minutes if I ran all the way across the fields and through the woodlot. We got fed lunch daily - OMG, was that a feast! This farm lady was legendary locally for her cooking. Lunch was almost always finished with a peach pie about 3" thick and fresh from the oven. It was so hard to go back out and climb onto the hay wagon behind the baler... One of my jobs at lunch was to go into the milk house and dip a gallon jar of fresh cold milk out of the holding tank - it was sooooo good! You don't know what milk is supposed to taste like until you've experienced that. And that farm is still operating and is, I think, the only active dairy farm in the county. Bravo! I made all of $500 that summer and in the end I had every penny of it in a bank account. There's some things you just never forget.

[Dean Romig]

I’ve had a lot of fresh raw milk. When I was little and watching the farmer milking a cow by hand he would say “open up!” and I would open my mouth wide and he’d squirt a stream of warm milk right from the nipple to my mouth. Hardly ever got a drop on my T-shirt.





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[Mike Koneski]

Great cover, Jack. Thanks for sharing it with us.

If that is the shot pattern on the end of the building, under the hawk and chicken, he sure missed badly! I'd say his gun has way to much drop for hawk killin'.

And, what in the heck is that in the background, on something like a sawhorse, that appears to be five or six canisters leaning outward?

Looks like the old feller will be replacing some glass in his greenhouse!! :rotf::rotf:

[Michael D Hankinson]

I grew up on a little dairy farm in West Michigan in the 40s and 50s. Milked those cows by hand till I joined the Army in 1961. My first shotgun was a single shot 20Ga Savage Hammerless. I would be milking a cow, watch a Ring Neck fly into our pasture the creek flowed through. Finish that cowm grab the shotgun and go after the Phesant. We had both 5 and 10 Gallon cans which we put in a cooling tnk. Best of all a few times each summer we might get a watermelon and cool it down in the milk tank. Nothing better after hauling hay than a slice of cold melon. No RST shells then, Blue Peters were my go to #5s.

[charlie cleveland]

them were the good old days....wish kids now could experience those times....charlie

[Jack Cronkhite]

Well T A R N A T I ON !! gents. Quite the trip down memory lane. Cheers Jack:)

[Stan Hillis]

I thought it looked like a greenhouse, too, but thought to myself ""If it is, indeed, a greenhouse that must be a prosperous farmer, for that day".

Growing up in the South, and understanding the frugalness of country folk in the era that painting depicts, I couldn't imagine the expense of that much glass, and the other associated costs in building it. It would've been considered extravagance here, in that day. Maybe in New England the economics were different for small farms.

[Daniel Carter]

In researching an AAHE 12 ga. owned by a friend i found the original owner to be a world renowned hybridizer of roses from Richmond Virginia. He had acres of greenhouses heated by a central coal fired boiler and according to the newspaper article the first of it's kind in 1890 something.
Depending on what is raised and the control of environment ( orchids) it would be required wherever it was.

[Garry L Gordon]

An enjoyable thread. Keep the stories coming!

[Richard Flanders]

My grandparents had a farm in Michigan that my family eventually moved onto in the early 60's. I can remember in the middle and late 50's visiting the farm when it was being worked with draft horses in wheat fields - my grandfather didn't like the new fangled tractors. I can vividly remember watching them work the field nearest the house and of walking around the giant horses when they'd bring them into the yard in harness. After they quit growing grain they still had cows that were tended and hand milked by a crusty and aged farm hand named John Gruber who lived with his wife in a small house below the farm house. They put the milk into cans like that and put them into a horse trough full of cold well water in a pump house that had originally been driven by a wind mill, but by then was driven by a 3HP electric motor that must have weighed at least 250#. There was no running water in the house, which was built in the early 1840's and had no insulation aside from soy bean stalks in the walls; it all had to be hauled in with buckets, which I did a lot when staying with them. This cold water bath kept the milk cool until the milk truck picked it up. To get the full cans from the pump house to the daily milk truck they were put onto a brilliant little cart that had 3ft diameter light-weight steel wheels and a low-slung deck that was no more than 4" off the ground and which would hold 4 cans. That way you didn't have to pick the heavy cans up at all as the cart deck would rock forward and rest on the ground. You just tipped them and rotated them onto the deck. Even I could do it as a 10yr old. I sure couldn't hoist them out of the cold water bath though! I can't remember if they dumped the cans into a tank on the truck or just took them and brought them back the next day. I think they just took them and brought them back rinsed out. The cans on this magazine cover are being drained and dried after being washed out. I feel very privileged to have experienced and seen all that before we all bought our pasteurized milk in cartons at Krogers....that wasn't that long ago really. Seems like yesterday to me; that's how much that all stuck with me over the past 65yrs. If that pump house were still there, I could walk in there today blindfolded and know right where to reach for the pump switch.

[todd allen]

This has been a great thread! Lately, I have been thinking about how many of us grew up around, and were influenced by family, and family friends who were born in the 1800s.
We are like a bridge that spans, and touches 3 different centuries.
That's something to ponder. Us oldsters are like a link in a long chain.

[randall rosenthal]

My grandma was born on a dairy farm in the Catskills in the late 1800's. No indoor plumbing or electricity. no paved roads. cars existed but no one they knew had one. Before the Wright brothers. She lived to see a man walk on the moon. We have had a great technologic leap in our lives but i doubt any generation will ever see a leap like that again. meanwhile my 120 year old Parker defies time......

[Russell E. Cleary]

These are insightful observations.

I believe it was the American historian Frederick Lewis Allen who wrote that prior to World War I, 90% of Americans grew up on farms. A more recent source I found said that by the 1980s it was down to 2%.

So, what was once a way-of-life for the majority of the U. S. population, is now as just a memory for an aging cohort, and is actually practiced by a slim segment among us.

[Stan Hillis]

I grew up on my grandaddy's farm. I live in the same house on that farm that he moved into in 1919, and farm the same land he bought that year, and have for some 51 years. My son farms with me, and as of last August his son farms with us, too. Legacies are strong, and the roots run deep.

But, none of us know anything (aside from what I've learned here) about milk cans.

[Garry L Gordon]

I grew up on my grandaddy's farm. I live in the same house on that farm that he moved into in 1919, and farm the same land he bought that year, and have for some 51 years. My son farms with me, and as of last August his son farms with us, too. Legacies are strong, and the roots run deep.

But, none of us know anything (aside from what I've learned here) about milk cans.

Stan, we live in the heart of farm country here on the Missouri/Iowa line and have friends and acquaintances who have farmed family land for generations as you describe. That trend is sadly waining and many of the next generation are seeking other lifestyles away from the farm. Lots of land here, especially in Missouri, is being taken over by large scale farming operations, those that produce and process on a large scale (some owned by foreign countries, like China). Still, Missouri has a high percentage of small, family farms, and it continues to be a way of life cherished many good people who love what they do...and the land where they do it.

And, I do know what a milk can is, but not by first-hand knowledge. My father told me about his experiences on the farm, and about "his" cow, etc. We find old cans with some frequency in the overgrown ditches that hold a covey now and then.