There was not a lot of entertainment; most of it was at school. The most exciting was exhibiting my chickens and ducks at the Chatham and Ridgetown fairs. I collected in various ways seven or eight different varieties of thoroughbred chickens, and would show them at the fairs.
At a Chatham fair I saw my first white Pekin ducks. I traded a pair of chickens for a setting of Pekin duck eggs. I only raised three from this setting. I was very anxious to exhibit a pair of them that year, but they were all females. They were fine specimens that fall and I was terribly disappointed that I hadn't a pair, no drake. The only way to tell a Pekin female from a drake (they are both all white) , is that the drake, like all breeds of duck, has two or three curled-up tail feathers. In desparation, I took Aunt Elsie's hair curling iron that you heat over a lamp and put nice curls on three tail feathers of one of the female ducks. I exhibited the homemade drake and a female as a pair and got a blue ribbon on them at the Chatham and Blenheim fairs. I didn't tell any of the family for fear they wouldn't approve of my changing the gender of a duck.
Each year we went to the circus, the Chatham and Blenheim fairs, the Sunday school picnic and our church social which was usually held in the woods.