Birds In A Bag

I’m sure boys have been dreaming up fun things to do in their free time as long as there have been boys. Here is story about another prank we pulled when I was a young teenager that was more or less harmless. I know none of you other seniors out there did this.

Birds In A Bag

 

While growing up in a small town as a teenager between 1956 and 1960, we had to find our own fun things to do. Of course getting in to mischief was always fun. Phillips,Texas, was a company town and nearly all the houses looked alike. They all had clothes line poles with wires strung between them to hang clothes out to dry as clothes dryers were in the very early stages of existence. The clothes line poles were constructed from 4 inch pipe and were in the shape of a T. Both ends of the horizontal member were open, and this created a perfect home for sparrows to nest and roost in. There was nearly always one in every end of every pole after dark. We found that after dark you could get a wooden broom stick, and put a paper sack over one end of the pole, then poke with the stick on the other end and a sparrow would be caught in the sack. We got good enough at it so we could catch the sparrow on the poker end with our bare hands. After we collected about 10 sparrows, we would find a house that had a screen door ( nearly every one of them did) and very quietly slip the birds between the screen door and the front door. Then we would find a hiding place across the street where we could view the front door of the house. One of us would ring the doorbell and then run away and hide. When they opened the front door, the birds went everywhere while the people grabbed and swatted at them. We could hear yelling and cursing coming from the house while we rolled on the ground laughing.

 

I always thought this was a fun thing to do until someone did it to our house. It took us hours to get all the birds out of the house. I never did it again after that.

 

Phillips Company houses with the concrete porch and screened doors.

This clothes line pole is similar to the poles we caught sparrows from.

Thank you for reading Birds In A Bag,

Hawg Jaw Bill