The Pig with False Teeth

My paternal grandfather loved to tell a good story. Although he was by no means a skilled raconteur, he just loved to amuse relatives when they got together for the holidays or some of the regulars at the bars he frequented in LaSalle, Illinois ( a small town approximately 90 miles southwest of Chicago) like the Dew Drop Inn, Rainbow Tap, and Popurella's Knotty Pine with one of his stories, whether it was surviving The Great Depression, serving in the Army during World War II, or his travels around the United States.

He had stories about his stepfather making bootleg whiskey during Prohibition, burying military surplus in the Mojave Desert during World War II, and playing semi-professional baseball. Most were true, some embellished (like the baseball one) but by large, they were all interesting tales. And some of his stories, like the one about a pig with false teeth would amuse his wide-eyed grandson who could hear it over and over and never get bored with it.

A self-made man who valued an honest day's work pretty much over anything else (other than my grandmother's cooking) he had made a decent living with a refuse and salvage business that he had prior to the outbreak of World War II and one he continued after he had been discharged from the Army in 1945 until his retirement in 1985.

Always looking to make couple of extra bucks when possible, he also raised pigs. Not too many-no more than a dozen at a time-but enough to make some extra money. Every couple of months he would drive down to some farm outside of Washburn, Illinois and buy a dozen piglets from some farmer (he put them in the backseat of his car on an old blanket for the drive home).

He had built a good-sized pigpen for the pigs to run around in and a special wooden ramp to load them onto a truck when it came time for butchering. He even bought a metal shed for the pigs so they would have a place to sleep.

What made it more lucrative, economically and feed-wise speaking, was that he hauled refuse from the Hotel Kaskaskia in downtown LaSalle and LaSalle-Peru Township High School which meant a lot of food scraps and waste that he could use to feed his pigs. The Kaskaskia alone threw out plenty of scraps and food that had passed the expiration date but was still edible; and the high school, well that was a different story.

"You would not believe the stuff the hotel and the high school threw out," my grandfather explained. He would shake his

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