50 Years Ago
Late Summer/Early Autumn 1954
by Maurice Telleen
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Autumn 2004

(From general news sources and the Belgian Review and Percheron Notes of that period)

Air travel had come quite a ways in 25 years-from planes brought down by lightning strikes in New Mexico and big awkward dirigibles circling the globe in 21 days to the debut of the Boeing 707 with cruising speed of 600 mph and room for 219 passengers plus crew. The maiden flight was made on July 19, 1954, and this bird was built to fly. The jet age had arrived.

Another truce that wouldn’t work was signed in Geneva at about the same time as we vaulted into the jet travel age. The French as good as admitted that they had lost the war in Vietnam. The country was divided along the 17th parallel with the French ceding the north to the communist insurgents. It was a long, drug out affair that was supposed to be supervised by India, Canada and Poland. The emperor Bao Dai was left in control in the south with French support. It was a sorry agreement almost designed to fail. In that respect, it lived up (or down) to expectations.

The old colonialism was on its last legs elsewhere too. In July of that year, Britain and Egypt signed a Suez Canal pact that ended 72 years of British military occupation. Within twenty months, the British forces totaling some 80,000 soldiers were to be withdrawn. This agreement was a lot more real than the one in Vietnam.

And in Korea, the United Nations Command (mostly us) withdrew, leaving the two Koreas much the same as before the war which claimed a half million deaths. I guess the positive thing was that it marked the first time the U.N. had acted together to resist an unprovoked invasion.

So all around the globe, the cold war was festering. It colored everything. Both the superpowers had their surrogates everywhere. It was not a world at war, but it wasn’t a very peaceable kingdom either. West Germany’s rehabilitation was, however, considered done as the NATO nations reached agreement on admitting them as full partners.

As for the constant ruckus, I think we had gotten used to it, and sort of tuned out on the “crisis” of the moment.

Society can’t live on high alert every moment of every day. There comes a time to get on with whatever was at hand. In our case, we got married (How is that for normal?) and started our life together in Fremont, Nebraska. I was employed by the Nebraska Dairy Breeders Association (a bull stud) and Jeannine was discovering that substitute teaching gigs in the Fremont School System were few and far between. There is always a “good old boys or girls club” and it turns out that the “old guard” pretty well had the sub dates sewed up. Nothing sinister or even unfair about it-had we been living in Fort Dodge, Iowa, where she had taught-then she would have been part of the old guard.

Was there any draft horse presence in our lives? Not a bit. In spite of being dippy about them as a kid growing up, I had other fish to fry-and they basically were out of sight and out of mind. The purebred dairy cattle business and collecting and shipping bull semen was what was putting beans on the table.

Had we been paying attention, we might have noticed that they were stubbornly hanging in there, both on Amish farms (which we knew nothing about at that time) and in breeders’ pastures. I think the registrations and transfers had actually bottomed out-or were at that point.

I have a fairly complete set of Iowa State Fair reports from the WW I era up through the 1960s…along with memories of many of those specific fairs. 1954 is one I don’t remember. I was pre-occupied that fall, so I had to rely entirely on the old report in print.

Had it been a weather forecast for draft horses, that old report would have simply said, “the end is near.” There was a total of 115 draft horses shown, compared to 148 the year before. The Shires had disappeared from that venue with WW II, there hadn’t been a Shire show since 1941.

The Percherons declined precipitously after the war and joined the Shires in oblivion (so far as the Iowa fair is concerned) around 1950. In 1953, only one young man led out a Belgian colt in the state 4-H show. That ended that. In 1954, only 24 Clydesdales (Anheuser-Busch, Frank Martin and Charley Willhoit) were led out at Des Moines. So the Clydes were notified that their lease had also expired, effective in 1955.

That is the way things went in the 1950s. Kicked out here, kicked out there. So who was going to use that big old barn and all those stalls? No problem. There were 124 Shetland Ponies alone shown at Des Moines in 1954…nine more than all three of the draft breeds could muster. (I don’t think there was even a Shetland Pony show in Des Moines before WWII. Shetlands were strictly for kids, not shows.) Saddle horse numbers, both English and Western, were also growing fast so, if anything, there was pressure to convert the draft horse stalls to light horse and pony use.

I don’t think anybody expected the rebound that the draft breeds would make, or that they were “touching bottom” at that very time. The rebound was fueled by several things; the durability of Amish communities, the hitch itch, that usefulness depends on a willingness to use them, and the fact that the outside of a (big) horse is good for the inside of a man (or woman).

But, as for 50 years ago…the draft horse picture was pretty grim.

The Belgian Review and the Percheron Notes had some good fall shows to report. We will run a few photos from the fall of 1954. The shows and the sales at Indianapolis and here in Waverly were rallying points that kept hope alive-along with a very stubborn streak in people who were going to continue to have draft horses whether their neighbors did or not. Those neighbors just might be wrong, you know.