The little white-haired lady wiped the blood, feathers and entrails from her fingers onto her floral print apron and went to check the weather through the open door of Ma Presley`s Pickin` Parlor.
She saw sunshine and blue skies, and disgust darkened her round, Pennsylvania Polish features.
”Another woodpecker day,” Dorothy ”Red” Presley said dejectedly.
Woodpeckers fly in balmy temperatures, but wild ducks and geese generally stay on the ground out of a hunter`s range, she explained.
And when the wildfowl are down in the center of the state, so is Red Presley, a bird-hunting, bird-plucking woman of no little renown in the Illinois River Valley.
”Weekend warrior” woodsmen line up by the dozens each hunting season outside the door of Presley`s place on Peoria`s south side.
They come with birds in one hand and cash in the other to pay Presley, 67, and her ninth and youngest offspring-24-year-old Roy-to do the dirty work of separating fowl from feathers.
Roy explained why: ”A lot of guys out there are married-I ain`t one of them-and their wives would kill them before they`d let them clean a bird at home. That`s why they come to me and Ma.”
The concrete floor of Ma Presley`s Pickin` Parlor-as Roy has dubbed it-is splattered with blood and feathers, and sometimes it is slippery with little balls of shot spilled from the birds during cleaning.
The air inside their tight working space is on the edge of ripe.
Even with hatchets in hand, Red and Roy are two of the most engaging conversationalists you`ll likely encounter.
”I love talking hunting,” said Red, whose hair once was.
”I should have been a receptionist for some outfit,” she added.
”Nobody is a stranger to me. White, black, green or blue, I like to meet people.”
Widowed 14 years ago from Bob Presley, her hunting and fishing partner and husband for 31 years, Red decided a while back that she missed the camaraderie of outdoors folks.
Rather than flee to Florida or otherwise retire, she went into a business that may put off the faint of heart, but is close to hers.
”My husband and I used to drive down to Cairo in southern Illinois once a week to hunt. I haven`t hunted since he passed away.
”I don`t have the feeling to go hunting anymore,” she explained. ”But I do like to get with that crowd.”
Last season, wild ducks had virtually vanished from the Mississippi Flyway migration route over the river valley because of various environmental and cyclical factors. Yet Red and Roy plucked and cleaned more than 750 birds for their hunting clientele.
On the first weekend of this hunting season, the ducks confounded the experts and filled the skies in great numbers. Hunters shot ducks and geese in abundance and then put the mother and son under the gun.
They took in 70 ducks and 110 geese in two days.
”We gotta pick, butcher, bag, tag and enter every bird in the ledger, and that`s a lot of work,” Roy said.
”Night before last I stayed up all night long, and most of the time I only get four or five hours of sleep during the season,” he added.
”I have dreams sometimes about naked geese flying over me, I really do.”
They charge $2.50 per duck, $5 per goose.
”We`ve got a class clientele-doctors, dentists, lawyers . . . some awful nice people,” Roy said.
”It`s well worth the $5,” said Larry Braden, a Keystone Steel and Wire employee, who came with claim tickets for two Canada geese. ”A duck, I`ll clean, but a goose, that`s a lot of work.”
New-fangled technology
Mother and son split the tasks. Roy does most of the plucking, with the considerable assistance of a commercial turkey-plucker that sits in one corner of the shop. Red guts the cleaned bird, often nicking her fingers on broken bones, and picks the valuable, delicate feathers so they won`t get damaged.
They go 60-40 on the profits, Red taking the larger cut. ”She pays the taxes because she gets a senior citizen discount,” Roy said.
Red and Roy work quickly, usually offering next-day service in the wood-frame half-garage that serves as their pickin` parlor. Their car sits in the other half.
The plucking machine, which they got in a swap for a dozen floating decoys, consists of a belt-driven rotating drum studded with 177 finger-like rubber plugs.
Grasping the dead bird by the neck and legs, Roy runs it briskly over the spinning drum, letting its fingers do the plucking.
”It does a duck in thirty seconds and a big goose in two minutes,” Roy said. ”If you pick a bird yourself, it`s a mess to keep the feathers clean, but the plucker puts them in a bag and all I gotta do is change the bags now and then.”
They collect and sell the feathers to an Iowa firm that pays up to $25 for a quarter ounce of wood duck matriculation feathers, which are used in hatbands and fishing lures.
In their three years as professional pluckers, the Presleys have made enough to pay off the costs of remodeling the parlor`s half of the garage.
”This year it`s all profit,” said Roy, who holds down another job bagging groceries at a Kroger`s.
The Presleys take pride in their plucking.
”Ma is very meticulous when it comes to the pinfeathers, and I want that bird to look store-bought when I`m done with it,” said Roy.
”I put the heart and gizzard and stuff inside the bird for giblets or pate,” he added. ”Some of these giant geese have gizzards the size of baseballs.”
Crawling with business
All five of the Presley boys (the girls were spared) plucked birds growing up, Roy said. ”We didn`t have a machine then; we plucked by hand, over a garbage can.”
Red had some early training in the field too. As a farm girl growing up in Mt. Pleasant, Pa., she hired on to do housework for an Orthodox rabbi and his family.
The job included wringing the necks and ”dry picking” the family`s kosher chickens.
”It`s a funny life that I`ve lived,” said Red.
Her present plucking operation was a logical outgrowth of the longtime Presley family business that sprang from the humblest of beginnings-a steamer trunk full of nightcrawlers-into a thriving operation that continues to grow. Ma Presley`s Pickin` Parlor sits just behind and across the gravel alley from the family firm that is a Downstate institution: the South Side Worm Ranch, a sprawling, outdoorsmen`s wonderland with goods ranging from duck calls and decoys to dew worms and camouflage duds.
”It is the place to see and be seen for sportsmen in this part of the state,” said Jack Endres, a lawyer and woodsman from Beardstown.
”They have a long history of being oriented for the hunter and fisherman, with contests for bass and crappie and deer,” he said. ”It`s also nice to go in there and tell your lies.”
Operated by Bob and Red from the first years of their marriage, and now in the hands of their son Tim, the South Side Worm Ranch has six full-time employees, a million-dollar inventory, ”and Red Ball Waders that run $135,” Roy said, proudly.
The worm ranch grew out of Bob and Red`s outdoor life, she said.
”When we were first married, Bob worked for the Illinois Terminal Railroad for eight years, but his real love was for hunting and fishing,” she explained.
”He had an old steamer trunk in the backyard that he kept full of nightcrawlers and red worms. People would come by to visit, and Bob would give them some fishing worms.
”After a while, people started offering to pay for them. Bob didn`t want to take their money at first, but I said why don`t we start charging for them?”
At first, the creeps
It was a time when many residents of the Illinois River Valley still fished for their suppers. The bait business turned out to be one of the few good things going, Red said.
”The business moved from the trunk to a trailer to a shed to a garage to a cinderblock building and then a new building altogether three years ago, and next year they`re putting on a new addition,” Red said.
Red worked with her husband as much as she could with nine children to look after, and the children all worked in the business too.
Often, at least one of them slept in the worm ranch, just down a hill from their home, to provide 24-hour service to their customers, she said.
Her husband, who grew up in Taylorville, came naturally to the hunting and fishing trade, Red said, but it took a little adjusting for her to deal with merchandise that squirmed.
”Dad was the Tom Sawyer type, and Ma was a little Catholic girl from the hills of Pennsylvania,” Roy offered.
”You ought to have seen me with the wax worms,” his mother said. ”I had to count them out, and I was so afraid of them.”
Bob taught her everything about hunting and fishing, said Red, who delivered their first child just three hours after coming in off the river from a morning of fishing with him for bullheads and channel cat.
”Whenever the old man wanted to hunt and fish, I`d go with him, and now I`m glad I did because I didn`t know just how short a time he`d be with us,” she said.
When Bob died of a heart attack in 1976, the outdoors writer for the Peoria newspaper wrote that ”Peoria has lost an ambassador,” Red recalled.
”Oh, I loved that guy,” she said. ”That`s the reason I`m not remarried. I can`t find a man like that. Not one with that big grin. Not one who loves to hunt and fish and talk to people.”
Talking up a storm
Red operated the store for five years after her husband`s death, but it got to be too difficult with three children still in school. ”I tried to keep the business going, but my kids were more important, and when he died, it just took it out of me.”
She sold the business to the only person she would ever have sold it to, her own son, and went traveling around the country, visiting family and friends.
”I stayed away from it for two years, then, after a while, my bones were aching from not doing any work, no strenuous work anyway,” Red said.
One of her husband`s old hunting buddies suggested the pickin` business, Red said. They had once provided such a service at the Worm Ranch, and nobody else seemed to be doing it in the area.
It appealed to her for a couple of reasons. It was something to do, and it was close to the life she and her husband had had.
”Sometimes I think about Bob being gone, and I get down in the hole and depressed,” she said. ”I used to get out one of our 12 picture albums from our hunting and fishing trips, to calm me down.
”But now, when a customer comes in, we`ll stand there and talk,” she said.
”There`s a lot of people, when their mate dies, they should get out and do things they used to do together. That is my purpose in this.
”My husband used to say, if you can keep a kid busy, you can keep him out of trouble. It worked pretty well with the kids,” Red said.
”This is my way of keeping busy. To keep from going stir crazy.”
