As another follow-up to the cockfighting thread, here's an
article from the January 6 Houston Chronicle. This guy would
be a great character for a novel. Blanket, Texas, by the way,
is only a few miles from Brownwood, where I taught for a
number of years at Howard Payne University.
BLANKET - Too frail to walk much anymore, the old man cruises
around his small farm on a scooter, weaving his way through
the chickens that cluck and crow in a shrill storm of
barnyard noise.
He stops near one rooster, no ordinary chicken. Large and
magnificent with white, red and brown plumage, it is bred to
fight - and kill - in a bloodsport dating back centuries and
illegal in most states.
"The Chicken Man," as some locals call him, is 83-year-old
Mike Ratliff, who since 1968 has taught an estimated 8,000
cockfighters around the world how to breed and train game
birds at his School for Beginning Cockers.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4451102.html
Bill Crider
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:
rara-avis-l-digest@yahoogroups.com
mailto:
rara-avis-l-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email
to:
rara-avis-l-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 10 Jan 2007 EST