“Talking turkey” sounds like a Thanksgiving cooking segment on an afternoon talk show.
But it also was quite literal — at least on a turkey farm southwest of Oak Shade in Fulton County.
The farm was owned and run by Ira Jones, his wife, Isa, and their sons, Ralph and Maurice, who raised thousands of turkeys decades ago and conversed with the birds as part of the process.
“Turkeys are just like babies,” Mrs. Jones told The Blade in a story published Oct. 29, 1948. “They like to be coddled and nursed. They thrive on it. We spend lots of time out on the range with them, especially when the birds are young and just learning to get up on the roosts to rest.
“We just sit around on the roosts and talk to them,” she added, "and in a jiffy they are all up where they belong, contented and happy."
A Blade photographer on the assignment memorialized Mr. and Mrs. Jones and Maurice amidst a flock of their broad-breasted bronze breed of turkeys, most of which, presumably, were the guest of honor on Thanksgiving dinner tables throughout the area.
Sadly, the Jones family farm does not appear to have survived, either.
At its peak, the story noted, the farm handled a flock of 17,000 turkeys, and come September would ship them in and around Toledo and as far as Detroit and Cleveland at a rate of a thousand a week.
But a 2004 story in The Blade about the closing of the Britten Turkey Farm in Perrysburg Township noted that such fowl places had mostly gone the way of the dodo bird.
“I’m about the last one in the area that I can think of,” John Zachel of Zachel Turkey Farm north of Morenci, Mich., told The Blade. “The small people are going away, and it's a sad thing.”
First Published November 25, 2019, 11:00 a.m.
