From The Vault Of Art Shay: Pigs On The Wing

By Art Shay in News on Mar 27, 2013 6:00PM

Hal and Ernie hoke it up for \<em\>Life\<\/em\> magazine. They loved music and poetry and when drowsy, soporific Proustian text.\r\n

Plighting their trough to their adopted pigs, city pig farming escsped censure except when some nasally offended neighbor called the cops. One, on a bad-tail day, called 911 and held the phone up to show and tell the full effect. Most 911 operators refused to believe the complainants.\r\n

My pal Algren lived in a lakeside hovel at Miller Beach and one day called to say he had a \<em\>Life\<\/em\> story for me. His preamble: \"I\'m sure you -and the editors -know that swans mate for life. Well this swan &mdash; Shirley by name &mdash; was bereft on a neighbor\'s farm lake a few hay ricks down by of all things a stray, most likely malign, teen-aged archer. The kid shot the fucking male swan in the throat and it died, leaving the wife pig distraught, my farmer friends judged. Well suddenly they thought of Melvin, their male pig, who was so far mateless ... and set up a cautious meeting with Shirley the Swan. One thing led to another (feed pellets, kernels of corn, etc.) and Pelham, the Pig, became Shirley\'s suitor, swimming like a swan as best he could. Nelson asked gingerly if push had yetcome to shove; he wanted all the details for Simone de Beauvoir, who of course was rooting for an historic inter-species fuck that she could boast of to Sartre, to whom she reported faithfully, if that\'s not stretching the word-three times a day by post. And, as Nelson liked to point out, in an impossible language like French. Anyway, that\'s how Pelham and Shirley swam into my ken.

\r\nSometimes Pelham, an inveterate consumer of beer (which, after all, has a goodly base of nourishing grain) would bring his swan darling a libation, but she would usually eschew it. (Eschew is halfway between chewing and drinking, as I explained to a patient grandchild.)\r\n

This poor baby, by dying, in effect, due to rough shipping of hogs from farms to the Stockyard, helped change the haphazard way farmers used to ship their pigs in the 1950s. \<em\>This Week\<\/em\> magazine, a supplement with 12 million subscribers, politicized it through Congress and won. Not like dealing with guns or ammo clips or the registration of nutcases.\r\n

Pigs &mdash; real and uniformed &mdash; bedeviled the 1968 Democratic delegates.\r\n

\"Pigs\" became an unfair and terrible nickname for officers who seved and protected even Trojan horse style swine housing other pigs.\r\n

(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. This week, Art reflects on the other white meat.)

The two city boys— let's call them Hal and Ernie — who raised prize-winning pigs and placed high several years in national competitions were a musician and a sporting goods salesman. They sometimes played gigs at the old Sherman House and often ate with the pigs, squatting down on creaky knees hog-wise and brought them bales of sumptuous garbage from their West Side neighborhood.

Pigs are as sociable as many teenagers and more fun to be around. The brothers brought them mostly slop from Balkan-owned bakeries and other generous generators of nourishing day-old garbage, flattered at being asked to contribute. Keeping straight faces, the nationally rated hog judges “hogged” the spotlight briefly, but assessed the pigs on health and conformation, as do any other animal judges. I think in their best year (sometime in the 70s) they placed third with a bevy of Spotted Polands. [An aside: Once there were more Spotted Poles along lower Milwaukee Avenue than in all of Warsaw. You could sometimes listen in on their (vodka) spirited arguments at the Chekhov Theater's intermissions.]

The pig owners played guitar and drums for their charges and read them Proust in the original pirated Polish, which they claimed gave the animals a rhythmic sense that appealed to judges who had expected the contestants to go hog wild.

I learned that hogs enjoyed sloth but liked to sleep on clean turf. The owners avoided some problems by encouraging Jewish donors of garbage to hold back kosher chicken fricassee, matzoh ball and veal garbage. Left on their own, hogs are non-sectarian and indiscriminately omnivorous. Their musical tastes are equally broad: One of the owners introduced a song in his Sherman Hotel act that had at least one recondite line.

"Hogs that eat garbage neat, are themselves excellent to eat."

All this was before Miss Piggy came into vogue. Shoat that she is surely would have been the hogs' Madonna or Taylor Swift, and the litter would have been on Twitter. Pigs are also very kind, often at the cost of their lives: Two of them donated aortal heart valves to me 18 years apart, proving even without aortic valves they have a heart with a built-in sharing gene.

When I die I just may leave my current pig's valve back to some deserving swine, turnabout being fair play in the great big sty in the sky.

If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago's Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.