A purebred Shorthorn herd and showing cattle at the fairs was certainly something different for our family. It was no secret that I developed a keen interest in Shorthorns at an early age. The Shorthorn World was printed twice monthly and I couldn't wait for its delivery. I think I had it memorized before night fall every time. My involvement with the breed has lasted over 60 years. There has to be a support system in place for something like this to occur. It doesn't happen by itself. If you're lucky, you have parents that provide a sound base to build on, and you have a supportive and caring family, even if they get on your nerves once in a while. We were taught the three Rs, religion, respect, and responsibility long before we learned any Rs at school. I don't think I ever saw Dad sit down. There wasn't much he couldn't do. Typical farm work plus welding, electrical work, carpentry, you name it. Mom didn't spend a lot of time helping with work around the farm, but she was the busiest person on the place. If we ate it, we either raised it in the garden or picked it off the trees. She either froze it or canned it. She dressed the chickens, rendered the lard, and made everything from scratch. She still found time for Garden Club and I think she won the top award for flower arrangements every time.
Lonny is the one on the right.
As I got older there were other positive influences on my life. I had Mr. Cole for my baseball coach from the age of 9 through my sophomore year in high school. He had high expectations, was a stickler for detail, maybe even a taskmaster, but it was the most fun I ever had. We didn't win almost all of our games because we were such great baseball players, we just knew what to do. We had a very active 4-H club, but when I got into FFA in high school things jumped to another level. Mr. Harper was our Ag. teacher and FFA advisor. At that time the Colo FFA was among the very best in the state. He also had high expectations and expected much from us. It was a blast. The chapter had won numerous state and national awards prior to my arrival, so we had high standards to live up to. I was on the parliamentary procedure team that won a gold medal at State. We also won a gold at state and the national FFA contest with our program of work display. I was the high individual and a member of the champion team in the state FFA dairy and dairy products judging contest. I wish I had a photo of the look on the Waterloo newspaper writer's face when he asked me how many dairy cows were in our herd and I replied, "None." Our team was 3rd in the state FFA soils judging contest. We were the high team in the state FFA livestock and carcass judging contest. It was pure joy to be a part of those activities. The successes were “extra”.
After having done well at the county fair and the Iowa State Fair, I decided I would enter some other shows. The beef show at the National Dairy Cattle Congress in Waterloo was towards the end of September and Dad said if we got done chopping silage in time I could go. I entered our two Leader 21st heifers and Charlie Henson, a local trucker, hauled them to Waterloo. It was just me, two heifers, and a show box. The Cattle Congress held a herdsman’s dinner the first night in a huge house on or near the fairgrounds. All the cattlemen were there for a grand family style meal. It was at least two days until show day and I was all by myself and didn't know very many people. There were free rodeos daily in the Hippodrome. I think I got to know the personal names and habits of every bucking bull. There was a high diving mule on the grand concourse right outside the cattle barns. Several times a day a mule climbed stairs, maybe 20 or 30 feet high, and dove into a large pool of water. A dog ran up the stairs and jumped with the mule in the grand finale.
Show day arrived and our heifers stood 2nd and 3rd in a large class. My white heifer was in first place the entire time until being switched to second at the very end. Our neighbor Leland Kellogg came up to me as I left the ring and said, "Someday we're going to have to take you to the back of the barn and make a showman out of you." I did start meeting other people at the show and probably the first folks I met was the Studer family. One of them, probably Mike, had come to look at our heifers earlier and asked where we got them. I told him we had raised them and then went to look at their string. They were showing their first calves sired by Sutherland Prospector, a bull they purchased in Kentucky. Of course, I knew all about him. The calves were impressive. The Studer boys, Mike, Rich, Dale, and Craig, were about my age and we became pretty good friends over the years.
The next spring Dad and I took a trip to Wesley to see the Studer herd. You have to remember I had no experience with purebred cattle or showing them until I joined 4-H, about 6 years prior. At home our first show barn was a converted 6 stall farrowing shed. When we started showing more than 2 head, we confiscated a small corner of a barn. All of our pens were used for feedlot cattle or hogs, but Dad built 2 pens on the east side of the barn for our show calves. We picked out the steers about January 1 and the heifers in March or April. They ran with the rest of the cattle until then. We tried to have them broke to lead about 30 days before the fair. I can't begin to describe my thoughts as we turned in the Studer farm driveway just south of Wesley. Houses everywhere. Barns everywhere. Groups of cattle everywhere, all in immaculate condition. The main house was like something you'd see on the cover of a magazine. The show barn was absolutely amazing! Room for 15 or so cattle to be tied with box stalls on the opposite side. There was a staircase to the hay mow instead of a ladder. And there was another barn full of maybe 20 box stalls right beside the show barn. There was another barn to the north. As you came up the lane, there was another barn full of cattle with small paddocks surrounding it. It was in this barn I got my first look at Sutherland Prospector. He looked like he had just stepped out of a show ring. Absolutely stunning. I don't think I said ten words the whole trip. I was simply awestruck.
The older of my two sisters, Jane, started showing about then. Our show heifers that year included Lo Rex K's Lily, a heifer I had purchased from the Beecher Family of Union, Iowa. Randy and Jane showed heifers we had purchased from Glen Struve at Manning, Iowa. Those two heifers were daughters of 7M Coronet Leader, a TPS Coronet Leader 21st son raised by Glen Moeller. He had been the champion bull at the Iowa State Fair earlier and Glen had purchased him from Dale. The first show of the season was the beef show at the National Dairy Cattle Congress in Waterloo. I believe that was the year the show was moved up to June due to some flooding work on the nearby Cedar River. Lily ended up being the reserve champion heifer. The champion was shown by the Zinnel family of Rockwell City. After winning the county fair, I just knew I was going to win the state fair, too. Wrong. My brother did with a 7M Coronet Leader daughter. All three of those heifers matured into some of our best producers.
Jane Flack with Lo Rex K’s Lily
Daughter of 7M Coronet Leader
Up until the early 70's there was virtually no mention of performance in cattle magazines or at shows. There were a few advertisements that mentioned growth, but not many. One of the first I remember was Melbourne Farms and their ad mentioning calves sired by their new Canadian bull, Remitall Captain Jim. They claimed his calves weighed 50-75 pounds more than the calves by their other bulls. There started to be more and more articles about performance testing, so growth rate soon became the buzz word at the fairs. We had used Leader 21 for several years and his calves were the growthiest we had. The Fair Acres Emblem calves were very good, but really didn't have the performance we needed. Dad had grown up near Lohrville, Iowa, and there was a long time Shorthorn breeder, Otto Johnson, who lived just east of town. We drove right by his place every time we visited the grandparents. He had entered a bull in the IBIA (Iowa Beef Improvement Association) bull test that had gained over 4 pounds per day on test sired by Nugget's Max 3211082. He was polled and actually weighed in excess of a ton which was almost unheard of at that time. Dad was able to talk Otto into selling him to us. The performance of his calves compared to our others was like night and day.
I had gotten married in the summer of 1972 and one of our first trips together was to the All Iowa Fair in Cedar Rapids. How romantic. Nothing says I love you more than a trip to the tie outs. Kathie was raised in town, but really couldn't be called a city-girl because the population of Colo was about 650. She really wasn't a country girl early. I suppose her claim to fame in town was a high school science project. The assignment was to reconstruct the skeleton of an animal. It just so happened that someone in town had lost a horse. She and her partner "stewed" the horse on the edge of town so they had a skeleton for the assignment. The odor hung around town for days, but they got a good grade.
Jane with a cow that was a daughter of Nugget’s Max
Our first Nugget's Max calves did quite well at the show, though we had no champions. The last class of the day was for a group of 6 head owned by one firm. I talked Kathie into holding a very tame heifer in the middle of the group. What could go wrong? Within 10 seconds of her taking the lead strap the heifer coughed and blew cow snot all over the front of her shirt. She just dropped the lead strap and left the ring. Didn't say a word. She never showed another one though she did learn to prepare tails during the time when we cranked them up into a little ball and glued them together forming a ball hard enough to knock you out if you got hit by one.
Later that year I Helped Larry Reap, Willow Crest Shorthorns, show at the Illinois State Fair. The anchor of Larry's string was Kenmar Leader 13B, a son of Kinnaber Leader 9th he had purchased from Harvey Fulton in Canada. The year before Larry had shown 13B as a junior yearling along with a 2-year-old bull, Kenmar Leader 21A, owned by Ralph Stirm. Both were very impressive. I think I remember that Illinois State Fair as being named the National Shorthorn Show. I had never seen so many Shorthorns in my life. The spring yearling heifer class circled the entire ring and then some. R. Lee Johnson won both the bull and heifer shows with offspring of Kinnaber Leader 6th raised by Thomas Farms of Canada.
The demand for more and more performance seemed to be here to stay. Advertisements in the Shorthorn World stressed size and performance more than anything else. One noted breeder said he was more concerned with the second 1,000 pounds on a bull than the first. Bull nicknames followed suit. Names such as George the Giant, Big Gene, Massive Major, Big John, and Wilt the Stilt were common. As the desire for size and performance reached an all-time high, breeders were constantly searching for more. There were rumblings that some Milking Shorthorn blood had found its way into the ASA herd book. The Steens had won the Iowa State Fair heifer show two years in a row with heifers purchased from the Haumonts in Nebraska. More and more breeders were turning to Canada to get their size fix. Many breeders were wanting to use the Milking Shorthorn influence, legally. Soon they got their wish.
Stay tuned for A Shorthorn Heritage (Part 5): Growth and Development