Henny Penny and Singing Jenny When Leora was a girl, she took over caring for the setting hens, ones brooding eggs to hatch, each in its own wooden box. She knew how to get a reluctant hen to stay on her eggs– give her a cartwheel ride until she is dizzy. She’ll sit. After Leora married in 1914, she kept track of the dates her hens stopped laying eggs and began to brood, keeping track of the dates about three weeks later when they would hatch. Even while nursing a baby, cooking, cleaning, washing, and ironing, by July 1916, she had sold 350 dozen eggs and began selling chickens for meat. Eight years and six more children later, she ordered two hundred Rhode Island Red eggs for hatching in an incubator kept in the living room. Leora made enough with her poultry money for a Singer sewing machine from the Sears Roebuck catalog. After the Depression years, Clabe and Leora returned to farm life near Minburn where Leora kept a flock of chickens. As her sons left for the military, they’d send requests home–someone take a photo of Dad with a fish or with Spats, let's have one of Mom and her chickens. A couple of hens followed Leora as she did her outside chores. She named them Henny Penny and Singing Jenny. Meadowlark Songs