25 Years Ago
Late Autumn/Early Winter 1976
by Maurice Telleen
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Winter 2000 - 2001

The Belgian year, completed on October 31, 1975, indicated that they had another decent year. Registrations numbered 1245, transfers 1783, and 130 memberships were sold. That was an increase of 35 registrations and 136 transfers over the prior year. One hundred and thirty new members signed on, a decrease of 26 from 1974.

Financially it had been a sort of break even year, with a modest $3576 of receipts over expenditures. Harold Clark left the board of directors after many years of service. He was replaced by J. Miles McGrew from Illinois.

In view of the “break even” financial report, modest increases in charges for registrations and transfers were enacted, to become effective on January 1, 1977. Interestingly enough,that was later rescinded at a board meeting before it ever went into effect, “because of an increase in business”. That is putting it mildly. Both registrations and transfers surged in 1976, and kept on doing so. Those registration and transfer figures would approximately double in the next four years and triple in the next ten. The draft horse was on the cusp of a decade of great growth. That was reflected in increased attendance at the sales and advancing prices.

The Percheron Notes reported that they had ended 1975 with 318 registrations (26 less than 1974) but with 441 transfers (18 more than 1974) and had received 37 new members. That Association had taken in about $1800 more than it had spent.

The Percherons were also getting ready to celebrate their Centennial Year, having been organized in 1876. James Barnhart (coming events casting their shadows before them) had a long historical review in that issue. One of the curious things in that breed was that while the American stud book came into being in 1876, the French Association was not founded until 1883...seven years later. It wasn’t exactly a case of the child being older than the parent, but it appeared that way. Think about that on a cold winter night. (They did, however, have private and government records galore.)

We have no figures on the other breeds but I’m sure they all shared in the general, but modest, prosperity. With the Belgians having approximately four times the volume of the Percherons, and the Percherons with probably a similar advantage over the Clydes, with the Shires and Suffolks behind them, it had the appearance of a one horse race. And you could buy a one year subscription to the DRAFT HORSE JOURNAL for six bucks...50 cents more if you were a Canadian.

We had taken to calling the Winter issue our annual “Stallion Issue”, but there was no long feature on some great sire in that issue. On the cover was a head shot of Sunny Lane Captain, junior and reserve grand stallion at the 1975 National Belgian Show. Captain was bred by the Schneckloths of Davenport, Iowa. The photo was taken by Eddie Schneckloth.

This promising young horse was killed in a traffic accident enroute to the Wisconsin State Fair following his win at Davenport. The Schneckloths had four mares carrying the service of this outstanding homebred two year old. And that is all there would ever be. So it was a “what might have been” stallion that we featured 25 years ago.

Just between the truck accident and some horses killed by lightning at the farm, the Sunny Lane Belgians took a couple of substantial hits in the 1970s. Needless to say, Don persevered.

Without a great old sire to celebrate, we started that issue with an article by a public relations person with the Sperry-New Holland Machinery Company at New Holland, Pennsylvania. It was all about adapting some of Sperry-New Holland’s new machinery to live horse and mule power. I can’t imagine another major machinery manufacturer doing this. But it was a case of location, location, location being the three most important reasons for it. The first two paragraphs tell the story.

“Quite a number of farms in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, have gone from tractors back to horses. This phenomenon can’t be attributed to any major movement away from mechanized farming. Essentially, it’s the continuing resolve of Amish farmers to continue using their way of animal-powered agriculture, which began on the county’s rich, rolling farmland just about a half-century before the Revolution.”

Speaking of the Revolution, we had an update on the Bicentennial Wagon Trains that were underway to Valley Forge. In order to get to their destination, which was a rendezvous in July at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the wagon trains from the far northwest had put in a “fall leg”. Four wagons arrived at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on November 2 after a 400 mile trek over the Lewis & Clark Trail from Fort Mandan, North Dakota. Eighteen wagons, from other northwestern states, arrived in Fort Laramie, Wyoming in late September...including one 2300 mile journey from Blaine, Washington.

Others were just about to leave. The California and Hawaii wagons were slated to leave Pasadena, California, others were leaving from Houston, Texas, and still others from Shreveport, Louisiana and Lakeland, Florida...all in January.

A little later (March and April) the wagons from the midwest and the southern Atlantic seaboard states would start, and so on with the New England train starting from Augusta, Maine in May. It was quite a job of coordination to get all those wagons to the place where Washington and his troops spent the bitter winter of 1777-78.

There was a fair length logging story from New England and a little blurb about country singer Loretta Lynn’s Belgians at her 3500 acre ranch in Tennessee. We were welcoming her into the draft horse community, but unfortunately she didn’t stay long. Her songs have endured much longer. There was even a big two page ad about her dude ranch and the Belgians.

It was a 100 page issue (big for that time) and contained a lot of state columns and short features about people using their horses. The entire fall sale section took up less than two pages. There were only three..the established Waverly Fall Sale, Howard Johnstone’s annual fall sale in Topeka, Kansas and the brand new one in eastern Ohio.

There were over 600 head of drafters and mules sold at Waverly. We listed about 50 that sold for $1500 or more but I’m sure there were several more than that in that price range. John Kriz took a semi-load of matched teams back to Connecticut, topped by a pair of sorrel Percheron geldings from Dick Hennen, Shakopee, Minnesota at $1750 apiece. We will run a photo of the top horse in the sale.

Howard’s sale was down at the old and pretty Kansas Free Fairgrounds in Topeka. Howard called it the best sale since its inception (it was his 7th) with horses, mules, harness and equipment sold into ten states. It was, without a doubt, the most informally run sale on this continent. It was always sort of a spontaneous event. Elmer and Darrel Eberspacher, Seward, Nebraska, topped that sale with a $1200 Belgian filly foal selling to John Lutter, Zell, South Dakota.

But the highest price of the fall was achieved at the brand new sale...the first annual Buckeye Colt Sale in Dover, Ohio. This is the only one of the three with “an average” price. There were 104 colts (2 and under) in the sale and they averaged $839 with 23 of them selling for $1000 or more. Rained all day, big crowd, these colts were sold to buyers from twelve states in 4 1/2 hours. The top selling horse (at auction) came out of this sale. She was a two year old Belgian filly to Eli Miller, Amboy, Indiana, from Abe A. Yoder, Sugarcreek, Ohio at $3500. Talk about a sale getting off on the right foot...Dover did it 25 years ago this fall.

The only show reported was the Royal Winter Fair. We will run three of Ed Schneckloth’s pictures from that show. The Royal sort of marked the end of the draft horse year...the last great gathering of the faithful.

Dick Sparrow had a half page ad stating that “THE 40 CONTINUES”. The sponsor for the coming year (1976) was the O’s Gold Seed Corn Company of Parkersburg, Iowa. That’s about it, draft horse-wise, from 1975. It was a good solid year and they were about to get even better.

Of course, other things kept happening in the world, too. So we will give them a little attention before we wrap up this go-round of 25 Years Ago.

There is no law against considering the World Series as the beginning of this late fall/early winter time frame. The Cincinnati Reds won the World Series, defeating the Boston Red Sox. It was a full length series...took all seven games to settle the issue.

We can also designate New Year’s Day as the end of late fall/early winter. UCLA beat Ohio State 23-10 in the Rose Bowl. Ohio State was a regular visitor to Pasadena in the early 70s. When they weren’t the Big Ten representative, Michigan was. Must have been the big two and the little eight. As for the Pac Ten, it was generally a California school, most often USC. The boys from the midwest were getting beat with regularity in the 70s. The explanation was that those California people could practice all year long without getting frostbite. Some years earlier the Big 10 teams beat the Pac 10 with equal regularity. I forget what the explanation for that was. Probably our rigorous winters were credited with making them tough.

But there were more serious things than baseball, football and horse shows going on. New York City was broke and President Ford threatened to veto any bill that would bail them out neatly. Instead he proposed a bill enabling the city to file for bankruptcy which would enable them to maintain essential services with, no doubt, some government help. In other words, a bailout but with the stigma of bankruptcy.

President Ford gave a speech at the National Press Club scolding New York’s city and state officials for their slipshod management. It was not popular with city officials, and not just in New York. City centers were in deep trouble all over the country as the flight to the suburbs continued. On a clear day you could see the tax base erode right before your eyes. Once proud neighborhoods became slums (or overpasses), busy city centers became deserted urban canyons, and corn fields and meadows became shopping malls and backyards. It continues. I’m sure there was enough sleaze in city politics to go around but that wasn’t the whole story. Anymore than you can say that all the farmers who have been forced off the land were “poor” farmers. Truth is, it included some very good ones.

On October 20, the Supreme Court ruled that states could allow spanking in their schools. It was hedged with ‘fair warning’ and giving preference to other methods of discipline, etc. but that, under certain conditions, spanking could even be administered over the protest of parents. Of course, that was before kids were fully armed. I would guess that Bobby Knight, recent basketball coach at Indiana University, often cited this court decision. It might also be one of the reasons for his win-loss record at Bloomington.

We were in sort of an economic doldrums and Britain even more so. Then came the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and suddenly extracting the oil that was known to exist under the North Sea became ‘practical’. Prior to that time, the expense of undersea drilling had ruled it out. The embargo changed that mind-set. So on November 3, 1975, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth formally opened the first underwater pipeline, bringing the black gold under the North Sea to Scotland’s refineries. The Brits were quite excited about this, hailing it as an economic bonanza. At virtually the same time, President Ford toured the Trans-Alaska pipeline and hailed it as a great step in liberating us from our dependencies on foreign oil. Obviously, all our oil problems were solved 25 years ago...so what is all the current fuss about?

That fall also saw the death of General Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain for around 40 years. Like all of Europe, Spain was ruled by a monarchy in the 19th century, but not a very successful one. There were decades of turmoil as the country slipped into kind of second class status in the eyes of many. In the early 20th century they tried a republic or two and that didn’t work out so hot either. Finally after a bitter civil war in the 1930s, Franco emerged as the strong man. Spain was officially neutral in WW II but it was no secret that Franco was more at home with Hitler and Mussolini than with FDR and Churchill. Both those evil dictators had supported his side in the civil war that brought him to power. But Franco was a practical politician, not a screwball, so he maintained neutrality during WW II.

After the war we got pretty cozy with him. Hating the Soviets and Communism was a big plus in the 1950-1980 era, worth billions of dollars in foreign aid, he did both very well. We had a number of such relationships during the cold war.

Franco had chosen his successor and be darned if, two days after his death, Juan Carlos de Borbon wasn’t named KING. So it had lurched from monarchy to anarchy to republics to civil war to dictatorship and finally back to monarchy. I suppose it is a constitutional monarchy, similar to the others that persist. Very confusing. I don’t understand it myself.

Liberals lost their favorite chief justice on the Supreme Court when Bill Douglas retired after serving for 36 1/2 years. He was vigorous, outspoken, feisty, brilliant and liberal. Many Republicans really hated him. President Ford, when a member of Congress, had twice done his best to get Douglas kicked off the court. Douglas must have been very sick to quit and turn in his resignation to an old adversary, thereby permitting him to name his successor.

As the year ended Ford made a Pacific tour, his two major ports being the Phillipines and China...one ruled by a dictator and the other was a bastion of world communism. Ferdinand Marcos and Mao Tse-tung were his hosts. Ford’s job in Manilla was to extend the terms for our use of strategic air and naval bases. His job in China, I suppose, was to meet the chairman before he died and maintain the relationship that his predecessor, Richard Nixon, had established between the two major super powers. You can’t always choose your partners when you play in the card club of international power. It isn’t a black and white world. Percheron folks have always known that. That is why so many of them fancy greys.

In Defense of History, short form

“Daddy, who was Hamlet?”

“Bring me the bible, you little

ignoramus, and I’ll show you

who he was.”