Jim 'Chickens' Johnson and the Rooster Tail

Postcard Memories is a weekly series of historic postcard views and photos submitted by René Hackstetter.

Eight-thousand chickens raised by one man.

‘Here comes chickens’…his pals would say. Hold off on the brooding jokes.

Jimmie ‘Chickens’ Johnson, has lived most of his life in the two-storey, cinder-block house next door to the fruit stand his folks started just south of Firth’s Corner, Midland.

A word to the wise..this is not about Chickens bringing the best lines of hockey players Midland had ever seen, nor his storied career as a hockey player who  

knew everybody. That would be name-dropping and Jimmie Johnson is a modest man.

Chickens is always on duty and in the early Spring he sits in the warm truck waiting in front of the stand.

Morning’s early in the country, so up at four and out the door he delivers vegetables and fruit to the Soo and back.

"Hey Darlin…how ya doin'?" Whether you resembled Sophia Loren or  Roseanne Barr, this was his standard greeting, "Hey Kid…how ya doin'?'"

City folk are refugees. Their language so different.

Can they the know the way of  the soil and learn the signs?

'Fresh Vegetables Here,' Johnson's says on the sign.

At Chickens, one smells the dirt, damp and produce. Farm people reek of barn and stall, nostrils sharpened by air and keen as any dog.

Johnson's, a major pit stop for refugees fleeing the City and  for those who venture beyond the Holland Marsh, the mob scene that is Barrie, and up the Old Penetang Road.

Beemers, Porsches, Benz’s  pull up. Waves of perfume from those who crowd in for the fresh fruit and vegetables, announce their presence like a candy factory run amok. Pale from weeks of supermarket food, these escapees have a hungry look.

Johnson's Farmers Market is a hostelry of sorts, a kind of way point along the route  to the Magic Islands of the Georgian Bay.

Chickens is really an old master, a gatekeeper, guarding these sacred precincts from the profane. He masquerades as the vegetable seller along the road, but there is so much more.

 At the back was the Rooster Tail, the dance hall Chickens ran for years until the cops shut it down.

This scribe can only pass these anecdotes of wild evenings, bands of all sorts playing until the dawn. Raymond Coté could say something but he’s not talking. These stories are for historians scratching for grains about an era now gone.

Every Saturday night, there would be the sound of music….and drums. If there were roosters involved, nothing was said.

René Hackstetter December 10, 2020.