Last fall, Hartford’s Jim Dow—a steel fabricator, fixer of things, and collector of even more things—put an item on the town listserv and on social media offering his collection of 64 chicken wish bones (and one turkey bone) to anyone who wanted them. It got no takers, but did attract the attention of a Valley News reporter and photographer. Alex Hanson’s story about it in December in turn caught the attention of Eliza Dunn, who decided to go talk to Dow about the wishbones and how it all came about. Boning chickens after they’re cooked, he tells her, is his job, and when he was done he’d hang the wishbone on the rim of a coffee cup. “I have no legitimate defense for collecting them all these years, it was just easier to hang them up there,” he says. Then his wife, Sue Buckholz, noticed them…
Eliza Dunn is a junior at Dartmouth from Hingham, MA. This is one of a series of podcasts produced by Dartmouth students in Sophie Crane’s winter 2024 class at Dartmouth, “Tell Me A Story: An Introduction to Nonfiction Radio and Podcasting.”