My Dad Con't

Dad was born in 1921, in St Paul, Minnesota. He loved to tell stories about his childhood all the way into adulthood so I actually know a lot about him when he was growing up and what his life was like. His father died when my dad was only 13 or so, of prostate cancer, but his mother lived to be quite old and his grandmother (maternal I think) lived to be 98 or 100 I think. It's kind of funny how some people only consider "white" people to be authentic Americans, or they assume that they've lived in this country longer but in my family it's completely the opposite. On my dad's side I am like 6th generation American while on my mom's I'm only 2nd. My dad's side is truly the melting pot; Black, Cherokee, German, French and Irish. On my mom's side I'm German and French and when my mom married my dad, my grandmother, who came to the US from Germany when she was 18, wasn't thrilled. But my mom didn't care what color my dad was, lucky for me and my brother.
So my dad would tell us stories of when he was a kid and a neighbor asked him if he could kill a chicken and my dad figured, how hard could it be? So he said he could and she offered him a nickle to kill it for her so she could cook it for dinner. And he grabbed the chicken by the neck, like he'd seen people do, and swung it around trying to snap it's neck, but apparently there's more skill required than you'd think and the chicken was just flying thru the air by it's neck making lots of noise. So then he asked the woman for a hatchet to cut it's head off, but all she had was an axe, so he's trying to hold the chicken and manage the axe and basically is just maiming the poor thing but he finally kills it and by then it's so messed up it's useless for eating but hey, he did kill it so the woman still pays him his nickle. I know this is a sad story for the chicken and not PETA or ASPCA approved but keep in mind this was like 70 years ago or something and that chicken was going to be dead anyway, plus, it's still kind of funny.
My dad actually had a lot of different kinds of stories like that, of how much it snowed in the winter and having to walk to school in it (most parents/grandparents have those stories, 10 miles uphill...), he also had a bunch from working on the railroad, started as like a porter I guess, but he got to travel quite a bit, to Chicago and back and other cities too and eventually he ended up a cook on the trains which led to him cooking for most of his life, at home and workwise. In fact when my mom and he met, he was a cook at a restaurant and she got a job there as the hostess and was being a little harassed by another cook and my dad told him to leave her alone or he'd hurt him, aw, so romantic :) But I guessed it worked because she ended up with my dad.