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10/2/26
Shotgun Chicken
This morning’s story may be a little disturbing to some of you. I’ll have to admit it’s a little disturbing to me, but it’s illustrative of the axiom, “Boys will be Boys.” I told you a while ago about my cousin, Rick, and how we were like brothers as teenagers, and how we once hopped a train. This is about another thing we did that can’t really be described as an adventure, as we did it repeatedly. So, let’s just say it was a game we played during our summers together. Since you’re reading this, you can infer that I survived it. I assure you that Rick did too.
But first, I’ll explain how we got to the point of shooting at each other with shotguns.
As a small child, I spent my days at the home of my maternal grandparents, Ed and Margaret Hohmann. You know them by now if you’ve been reading these scribblings. My grandparents were still living as they did in the 1930s. They hadn’t bought any new furniture, kitchen items, tools, carpets, or much of anything else for thirty years. All the books in their house had copyright dates from that decade or earlier. The sheet music in their piano bench had titles like “Hello Ma Baby,” and “Ragtime Cowboy Joe.” The pictures on the wall had patches of lighter colored wallpaper behind them. Their clothes were from that era as well. The only relatively new items they owned were a television set, purchased in 1952, and Grandpa’s 1953 Ford, bought new, the same year. They even had a natural-gas-powered refrigerator in their kitchen. They could remember the old days with surprising clarity and told stories that I loved about their young days in West Virginia. Grandma had been an apprentice milliner at her cousin’s shop in Littleton. Grandpa had farmed their place at St. Joseph’s Settlement in his younger days. It was the stories about his family’s farm that I loved the most. He romanticized those days, of course, but I didn’t know the difference, so I never knew of the hardships they endured until much later. As a boy growing up in Montgomery County, Maryland, only fifteen miles from the Capitol building in Washington, in an area that was rapidly changing from rural to suburban, I imagined myself in Grandpa’s shoes, working and managing the farm. I think the attraction to rural life was precipitated by my obsession with country and bluegrass music.
That longing for my idealized version of country life caused me to jump at the chance to spend time at the Hohmann homestead. I was usually there for only a week at a time, but I loved every minute of it. Grandpa’s brother, Uncle Clem, sometimes gave me chores to do, but only those that a city boy couldn’t mess up. My second cousins let me ride their dirt bikes and I was sometimes permitted to drive a tractor. I did learn how to operate the cider press and dig potatoes, which were useful jobs, I suppose.
You can’t imagine how overjoyed I was when I learned that Cousin Rick’s parents, Uncle Dick and Aunt Joan, had rented a farmhouse near Middletown, Maryland, only forty miles from my hometown of Rockville. Rick and I tormented both sets of parents until they agreed that I could stay with Rick’s family for a couple of months during the summer we were fifteen. The farm was divided into four sections, one being the house and grounds, which included a pond with fish, two barns, vacant chicken coops, and a large garden area. The other divisions were three fields of about ten acres each that were leased by someone we didn’t know. One of the fields was fallow, so that became our playground.
Rick and I loved to fish, but we had our shotguns too and enjoyed shooting them. After three or four consecutive days fishing that pond, we needed a break and grabbed our guns. We didn’t hunt, just shot. It was summer anyway and there was nothing in season, except hunters were allowed to shoot blackbirds and grackles year-round, as they were a threat to the corn crops. But those birds were safe from us. We made so much noise pounding away at cans, bottles, fence posts, and air, that everything alive, other than humans, was miles away. Rick thought the fishing was bad on the days after our barrages because the fish were still scared. I don’t know about that.
I should say here that we were both using low-brass shells in our twelve-gauge guns, with No. 8 shot, better known as birdshot. Each of the pellets was about a tenth of an inch in diameter, a little larger than a grain of ground pepper. In those days, a box of twenty-five shells cost two dollars and fifteen cents.
We got bored with bottles and cans, so one of us (I really can’t remember which one) shot straight up, to see if the pellets would rain back down on us. Soon, both of us were trying it but never once did it work. We must have gone through half a box of shells before we realized we had better save some for next time. Somehow, Aunt Joan knew what we were doing. She must have either used binoculars from the second story window, or intuited it, as moms with that sixth sense are known to do. When we got back to the house, Joan told us that Rick’s father would be speaking to us that night about our behavior. That didn’t sound good.
After supper, Uncle Dick summoned us to his study and asked us to have a seat. He said, “What’s this about you boys shooting up the place?” We confessed to everything, even shooting straight up, because we figured he probably knew anyway. My uncle laughed and said, “You’re doing it all wrong.” Us, in unison: “What?” Dick said, “Vance [my father] and I used to play Shotgun Chicken.” Things were starting to get interesting. He explained the rules of the game. The players would stand on opposite ends of the field. Each would fire his shotgun at an angle, trying to get the pellets to rain down on his opponent. After each shot, each player would take three steps toward the other and fire again. That would continue until one or the other chickened out. What a cool game! Uncle Dick told Aunt Joan that we wouldn’t be shooting straight up anymore and she was satisfied. I had the coolest uncle in the world!
Our ten-acre playground field was about an eighth of a mile wide on each side, so the first shots never even came close. As we advanced, I could hear a few pellets hitting the ground nearby. Another round or two, and a few hit me but not hard enough to hurt. But before long the pellets began to sting. I tried turning by back to Rick when I heard his gun fire, but he hollered that it was against the rules, “Since When?” “Since Now!” I suppose he was right, because why even waste the ammo if there was no risk of blindness? I always chickened out first, because Rick was absolutely fearless. I suppose that’s why I’m still here writing this.
I reckon Shotgun Chicken, drag racing on country roads, hopping freight trains, diving off cliffs into flooded quarries, shooting the rapids in canoes, and the other dangerous things we teenagers did are becoming things of the past. Maybe that’s for the best. But Lordy, Lordy, we had fun.
Photos:
1. Me at 15 with my trusty Winchester 1911-SL
2. Rick’s yearbook photo from Middletown High School
Tom Mindte
October 2026
Me at 15 with my trusty Winchester 1911-SL
Rick’s yearbook photo from Middletown High School