My Grandma had a big farm where she raised sheep and chickens and hatched baby chicks from eggs.   There was a long building across the driveway from her house, it was called the "hatchery".

Grandma gathered the eggs from the hen houses and we took them to the hatchery.   She washed the eggs very carefully.   Then she held each egg up to a big light.   If there was a spot inside the eggs, that meant there would grow a baby chick from that spot.

She put those eggs in trays with a screen in the bottom of a tray.   She sold the eggs that didn't have a spot in them.

To keep the eggs from tipping over, she wadded up pieces of newspaper and wedged them in between the eggs.   She let me tear up the newspaper and make the wads of paper she needed.

Next, she placed the trays into big metal carts that had wheels on the bottom.   She rolled each one of these carts into wooden cabinets.   The wooden cabinets were each about the size of a small bathroom in most people's houses.   These were called the "incubators".   This was where the eggs would hatch into baby chicks.

Each incubator had a thermometer on the outside so Grandma could read the temperature inside.   The temperature had to be at 100 degrees and the humidity at 68 percent or the eggs wouldn't hatch. There was also a little window so Grandma could look in and keep track of what was going on.

Every four hours, Grandma had to go to the incubators and turn a crank on the outside.   This turned the trays the eggs were in, a small tilt at a time.   That kept the eggs at an even temperature as they incubated.

When the baby chicks started hatching, Grandma had to turn down the temperature a bit so they wouldn't get too hot and die.   Twenty-one days after the eggs were put into the incubators, Grandma opened the doors and you could see the baby chicks hopping around in their trays and hear them peeping like crazy.

Then Grandma rolled the big metal carts out of the incubator and got a whole lot of boxes to put the baby chicks into.   These boxes held 100 baby chicks, 25 chicks in each section.   My Grandma always put 26 baby chicks in each section.   She called it a "baker's dozen".   It was so if someone bought the baby chicks and four of them died, they would still have the 100 chicks they had paid for.

On Sunday mornings, a Japanese man named Tom came to look at the baby chicks and tell Grandma if they were boys or girls.   He picked up each chick, looked at their bottoms and then put the girl ones in one box and the boy ones into another box.   The girl box had a sticker on it that said, "pullets" and the boy box said, "cockerels".

I loved to hold the baby chicks in my lap.   They were so warm and fuzzy and tiny.

I sat on a stool and chattered away to Tom all the time he was there.   Later that day, many people came to Grandma's to buy the baby chicks.   Every Sunday, from February through May, Grandma got 4,500 baby chicks out of the incubator and by Tuesday afternoon, most of them had been sold.