New Corydon visit recalled story

It had been awhile since I’d been in New Corydon.

I came in from the east, crossed the Wabash River, and turned west onto what would have been New Corydon’s main drag if the village had ever really had a main drag.

I watched for flood damage. The Wabash has not been kind to this gentle gathering of houses, outbuildings and remnants of a commercial era. Every spring the river overflows its banks, inconveniencing and threatening the good people who live there.

And then I saw the old brick schoolhouse, and the memories started flooding in.

And roughly 45 years melted away.

I was a kid again, a young reporter trying to get a handle on a job that seems so simple — figure out what’s happening and explain it to others — but can be so challenging to accomplish.

I had the advantage of being a homegrown Jay County boy, so readers were — for the most part — patient and forgiving.

And some of them were simply ornery.

Ed Eischen was ornery.

By the mid 1970s, Ed was a little older than I am now. He farmed, he told stories and he loved a good joke.

So when I wrote a column cobbled together from bits and pieces of notes and press releases, Ed saw me as the greenhorn that I was.

In the column, I happened to mention that the folks at Bob Evans Farms — the restaurant and sausage people — were having an event with an unusual featured attraction: A chicken flying contest.

Chickens, of course, can’t really fly.

But for the purposes of the contest, they got a push.

Rural mailboxes were mounted atop poles about 15 feet high. Both the front and the back of each mailbox had been removed. A chicken was then hoisted up to the mailbox, put in the back, then pushed out the front with a toilet plunger.

The chicken then “flew” or more likely fell, squawking wildly, until it was safely on the ground.

The winner was the chicken that “flew” the farthest from the mailbox.

It’s safe to say that PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, had not yet gotten wind of this. They would have had a field day.

But in about 1975 or so, it was just a bit of fodder for a young reporter’s attempt at a column.

Ed, who would have found PETA laughable, read the column, liked it and started the wheels turning.

New Corydon was having a village festival that year in the grassy yard around the old brick schoolhouse. And one of the featured events, I learned from Ed, was to be a chicken flying contest.

He’d arranged for the poles, the mailboxes, the chickens and the plungers.

All he needed were the judges.

I can’t remember the names of his other victims, but for years I had a ribbon that certified me as an “Official Chicken Flying Contest Judge” to mark that crazy, funny afternoon. It’s safe to say I never added that title to my resume.

But Ed and I did keep in touch.

It was only a few years later that he wagered a steak dinner that I wouldn’t spend the night in the attic of a “haunted house” he owned.

I took the wager and spent the night, but I never did get that steak dinner.

Then again, that’s another story.