Thursday, January 23, 1936

HENRY IS HOME FROM CLEVELAND. MORSE AND HELEN GO TO A SHOW. THE HENS GET SOME TONIC.

---

Sunshine most of day but very

cold. 19 below in Chicago.

Don't know what it was here.

Henry returned home from

Cleveland to - night.

Morse and Helen went

to show at Lowell to-night

Began feeding the hens the

tonic and worm medicine.

71 eggs to-day.

---

It's really cold. Collecting 71 eggs in those temperatures must have been uncomfortable. But let's talk about the number of eggs Edna is collecting. It seems that every day she is getting between 70 - 80 eggs. That's a lot of eggs. I asked my good friend Kim Rhoney, who keeps chickens herself, how many hens it would take to produce that many eggs every day. According to Kim, you can expect about three eggs per week per hen. That means Edna probably had around 180 hens (give or take).

My dad says that his grandmother was the sole proprietor of the chicken business on the Johnson farm. She kept the earnings herself, separate from the other money generated by the farm.

As such, the health of the flock would have been her responsibility, too. On this day, she made note about given her hens tonic and worm medicine. She may have purchased the worm tonic (left: worm medicine circa 1930) on her trip to Alto and Hastings on January 21.

Helen and Morse went to Lowell to she a show on this day in 1936. According the Lowell Ledger dated, January 16, 1936, the film playing at the Strand January 23 was She Couldn't Take It, a screwball comedy starring George Raft and Joan Bennett. Billie Burke, who three years later would play Glinda in The Wizard of Oz was also in this film.