75 Years Ago
Late Summer/Early Autumn 1927
by Maurice Telleen
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Autumn 2002

(From general news sources, the Breeder’s Gazette, and a book
entitled James & Alvin Sanders, Livestock Journalists of the Midwest, by Richard B. Helmer.)

As the clock approached 10 p.m. on May 21, 1927, a weary 25 year old aviator, flying a Ryan NYP monoplane, saw the welcome lights of Paris, France, beneath him. He touched down at exactly 10:24 p.m. and found nearly 100,000 people waiting for him. Two companies of French soldiers were unable to restrain the crowd from engulfing the young man and his airplane. Most of the crowd were French and this lanky young pilot was an American–a kid who had grown up in Minnesota, much of that time on a farm near Little Falls–but a hero is a hero. That night, anyhow, he belonged to the world.

The “Spirit of St. Louis” airplane replica hanging in the Missouri History Museum at Lindell and DeBaliviere in Forest Park, St. Louis, MO 63112. This is a great photo but to really appreciate it you need to ask yourself, “Would I have the guts to fly a small aircraft like this across the Atlantic?” If you answer a quick “Yes” you are either supremely confident or very courageous. A third possibility is that you might also lie about other things. photo by Balthazar Korab

Lindbergh had made the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris and he had done it alone. He had flown about 3600 miles in some 33 hours. He did it because he was challenged by the idea, because he wanted the money and because a group of citizens in St. Louis, Missouri, had provided funds to support his effort. The money was a $25,000 purse which had been sitting around unclaimed for eight years–ever since Raymond Orteig, a wealthy New York City hotel owner had offered it.

It was a great age for nicknames–so he was immediately dubbed “The Lone Eagle” and/or “Lucky Lindy.” He came home by ship to a hero’s welcome, courtesy of the U.S. Navy. The cruiser he was on board was met by four destroyers and more than 40 airplanes as it entered Chesapeake Bay–as well as cheering crowds along the banks. He got the usual ticker tape parade through New York City. His response was Coolidge-like. He said, “I’m glad to be home again.” The country loved him for his youth, his courage and his disarming modesty.

The Breeder’s Gazette of June 2, 1927, even got into the act with a full page story, including a picture of the Lindbergh farmhouse on the stock farm near Little Falls, Minnesota. Lindbergh had spent much of his youth there so the Gazette claimed the young aviator as a farm kid. Well, yeah, sort of. He was the son of a congressman from Minnesota who was also a gentleman farmer.

Lindbergh has long been of interest to me. Don’t be surprised if you hear more about him–I may just do a “Lindbergh piece” someday. It would be a good change of pace from writing about stud horses.

Accomplishment most always triggers mirror images. On June 29, two Army fliers completed the first flight from the continental United States to Hawaii, total flying time just under 26 hours. Although plans were in place to guide the flight from San Francisco to Hawaii by radio it malfunctioned –so they had to make the flight by dead reckoning, just as Lindbergh did crossing the Atlantic.

At least one other American flyer was lost over the Atlantic just a couple weeks before Lindbergh’s successful flight. And Commander Byrd, who seemed to prefer flying over ice to water, was busy doing just that in polar regions. That genie was now out of the bottle–there would be many more such “first flights” just ahead.

In baseball it was a year of home runs by a couple of New York Yankees as they cruised to the American League pennant and then went 4-0 over Pittsburgh in the World Series. On June 23, Lou Gehrig blasted three home runs in one game as the Yanks flattened the Red Sox 11-4. Gehrig was the 20th major leaguer to turn that trick. His teammate, Babe Ruth, was one of those other 19.

Then on September 30, as the season was reaching its close, his teammate hit his 60th home run of the season, thereby bettering his own record of 59 set in 1921. Ruth’s record of 60 homers in one season stood until the last game of the 1961 season when Roger Maris hit his number 61 up into the cheap seats. There was some grumbling about it because Ruth had hit his 60 in a 154 game schedule. Maris had an additional eight games in his schedule.

Lou Gehrig got the nickname “the Iron Horse” by playing in 2130 consecutive major league games. His teammate, Ruth, was called “the Bambino”and “the Sultan of Swat.” The Yankee stadium itself was called “the House that Ruth built.” But that was a long time ago. Now there is a disease known as Lou Gehrig disease (the one that eventually took his life) and Babe Ruth has a candy bar named after him. Or is it a Baby Ruth, named after some sweet little girl rather than a portly, sweaty, baseball player in his early 30s? As people say these days –whatever.

Our Marines were busy in Nicaragua. President Diaz of Mexico even signed a treaty with the U.S. allowing this American intervention in their next door neighbor’s affairs. Either he didn’t want a successful revolution right next door or he didn’t have much choice with the big fellow to the north. He and President Coolidge got along pretty well.

President Calvin Coolidge and his wife spent a long summer vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The Breeder’s Gazette seemed to be pleased with his choice of a vacation spot and reported in detail on the warm welcome he and Mrs. Coolidge received from South Dakotans. I think the warmth was reciprocal. He was a rural type person (New Hampshire) and he enjoyed fishing, which can be pretty good in the Black Hills. Nobody ever successfully accused him of being a show boat but they did get him into an Indian headdress and a Stetson now and then. He and his wife, Grace, attended a small rural church while there and you get the feeling that one thing he liked about South Dakota was that it was a long way from Washington, D.C. He was also one of the few, maybe the only sitting president, to attend the International Livestock Show in Chicago. The Gazette had also eaten that up.

He has been accused of being indifferent to the plight of farmers during his administration. He twice vetoed major farm bills that would have bought surplus commodities and dumped them on international markets. Yet, while he was in South Dakota, he also stated that he would favor a $300 million dollar fund to aid farmers. So he was aware that agriculture was not sharing in the general prosperity of the 1920s. But if a bill contained provisions he found objectionable–he would veto it. Another example of that particularism was that he pushed for our membership in the World Court. But when the Senate placed what he called “unworthy conditions” on it–he just dropped the matter.

Then, on August 2, the fourth anniversary of his ascendence to the presidency via President Harding’s death, he called newsmen into his temporary office (in the Rapid City High School) and handed each a slip of paper on which appeared this sentence, “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.”

I am no fan of Calvin Coolidge but there are several things about that man that are easy to like. That is enough on so called world news–back to the Breeder’s Gazettes of that time. That great old livestock paper had been serving farmers, breeders and stockmen since 1881. It came every week. It was as dependable as shopping on Saturday night and church on Sunday morning. But that once a week business was about over.

The May 12 issue carried the announcement that Alvin H. Sanders, the editor and general manager, was stepping down. In one respect that was no great surprise. Sanders was then 67 years old and the magazine had been experiencing hard times for seven years. For the agricultural depression of the 1920s preceded the financial collapse of 1929 by that whole decade. The “crash” down on the farm had first occurred in 1920. Wall Street didn’t catch on until October 1929.

The two new owners, publishers and editors were Charles L. Burlingham, who Sanders had brought on board with the August 6, 1925 issue and Sam Guard, who had started out with the Breeder’s Gazette as a young man just out of Ohio State. But Sam had gotten restless and spent a few years wandering around between the then fairly new American Farm Bureau Federation, then a hitch with the Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation, and was involved with the start up of radio station WLS. Sanders expressed great confidence in both of them and I’m sure it was genuine.

But this was no simple generational transfer of the torch. It was losing money. Their advertising lineage had shrunk and with it the size of the paper. Any magazine of that type is a two crop farm–subscriptions and advertising. With the Gazette there might have been a third in the form of livestock sale catalogs in the early days. This wasn’t its early days.

The first thing the new crew did was reduce the mailings from 52 per year to 26. The weekly became a bi-weekly. That both saved mailing costs and made for a bigger issue. With the advent of radio with its daily market reports, the need for weekly market updates had been rendered obsolete by this new medium. Anther problem was that the Gazette, the great apostle of purebreds, had spawned a whole litter of puppies in the form of specific breed papers in both the cattle and swine breeds. The pups were eating much of the old dog’s breakfast where advertising and sale catalogs were concerned. And, of course, the third leg of the problem was that farming had not shared in the industrial prosperity of the “Roaring ‘20s”. The euphoria on Wall Street was not shared at the local sale barns and elevators. I’m sure Sanders was relieved!

Meanwhile the Gazette went on. The new ownership was doing a good job. It had kind of a new, more hopeful look and tone. By fall the bi-weekly format had given way to a monthly. And it remained that for the rest of its precarious life.

The weather in 1927 reminds one of 2002. A late, cold spring delayed plantings all across the country, floods and tornadoes added to the mess–with six square miles of St. Louis being flattened on the same day Ruth broke his own home run record. The tornado took five minutes, followed by torrential rains, leaving 69 dead and injuring 600. Ruth’s 61st homer, took about five seconds.

The St. Louis chief of police was not one to take half measures. He issued an order for looters to be shot on sight. So you had to be a little careful when you were poking around in your wrecked home or place of business. Had my old friend Howard Johnstone been there, I’m sure he would have had sweatshirts saying “Don’t Shoot. I Live Here” ready to go within 24 hours.

With the prospect of frost nipping the country’s corn crop, the Gazette was urging farmers to get a silo built if they could, if you don’t have one, rent the one standing empty down the road, or failing that–dig yourself a trench. They told you just how to do it. “The sappy stalk and those green leaves will make the best of roughage and the soft grain, when cut and tramped into the silo (or trench) will neither sour nor mold.” As for farmers who were without cattle–well, we’ve been telling you that you should have cows of some kind and/or cattle on feed as part of your diversified operation.

Sam Guard was a colorful, spirited writer with an idea a week–sometimes more often. Immersed as he was in cost cutting measures at the Gazette, and knowing that the draft horse associations had been through much the same sort of toboggan ride downhill during the ‘20s that his paper had, Sam saw a parallel. Five different associations with five secretaries doing essentially the same things looked redundant to him. So he wrote an article suggesting a merger to cut costs–saying it would save a lot of money. Then he went one step further, saying that breed type differences had been muted, the longer the breeds had been here, and suggested that maybe the ultimate good would be to create AN AMERICAN DRAFT HORSE. Sort of an amalgam of the breeds. What he left out of his equation was the intense breed loyalty felt in every one of those five camps. It made a lot of people angry.

Thirty seven years later–1964, when we started the Draft Horse Journal, with a generous boost from a then very old Sam Guard, I would occasionally run into an old timer who would say “Oh, Sam Guard, yeah, he was that dude who wanted to throw all the breeds together.” Sam was very kind to us and I really liked him. His proposed merger of draft horse associations was not good politics in 1927. But time changes a lot of things. I note that now there is quite a lot of office sharing in several breeds of both cattle and hogs.

Another case of coming events casting their shadows before them is found in a feature in the June 16 issue calling for a greater use of small combines for small grain. It took about 15 years but eventually most of the shocking of oats, followed by the threshing and threshing rings were gone. The big block was the cost of the machine. The obvious answer was for two or three or four modest-sized farmers to go together on one machine. That joint ownership idea met with about as little enthusiasm as merging breed offices. Eventually cannibalism replaced small co-op ventures such as that where farming is concerned.

Wayne Dinsmore crowed that instead of 180 pulling contests and 18 dynamometers in 13 states (1926 numbers) that there would be 250 to 300 contests in 16 states with 21 dynamometers in 1927. Wisconsin had been number one in 1927 with 39 pulls. It is still one of our leading pulling states.

Fred Holbert reported that they were looking to import 100 stallions that fall, 80 Belgians and 20 Percherons. He left for Europe in August to finalize the deals and arrange for shipping. So Holberts, at least, were buying Guard’s “Sun Up For American Agriculture” kind of enthusiasm. This business in the ‘20s of importing stallions while good mares in this country were, in many instances, going unbred, always puzzled me a bit. The explanations, I suppose, are that raising stallions isn’t quite the same thing as raising a crop of rams, boars or bull calves. With them, if the buyers didn’t materialize there was always the local sale barn and the price dock wasn’t that bad. With stallions, potential buyers were few and far between. So Holberts went from zero imports in 1923 to a hundred in 1927. Holberts were not even a little bit dumb, so it must have made some kind of economic sense for them to do it. And they kept buying (and selling) American bred colts during that same time.

I’ve mentioned my old pal Howard Johnstone once, I may as well do it twice. This little notice in one of those 1927 Gazettes reminded me of him. “Effective May 1, 1927, the First Battalion, 83rd Field Artillery, on duty as a demonstration unit at the Infantry School, Fort Benning, Georgia, will be changed from tractor drawn to a horse drawn battalion. This conversion is desirable because the instruction in the Infantry School deals primarily with the Infantry division, in which all the Field Artillery is horse drawn.”

This happened just 75 years ago! In a mere 14 years from that time, this country would be going to war again–and NOT with horse drawn artillery. As for Howard, he was one of those ROTC shavetails from Kansas State that went through Fort Benning on his way to Europe as an infantry officer. We had the privilege of running his memoirs of his experience as a POW of the Germans in WW II in the DHJ. (Howard’s story appeared in the Winter ‘93-’94 and Spring ‘94 issues.) If nothing else, the perusing of old magazines serves as a reminder of the speed with which the world has changed in such a short time. It jars all sorts of nuggets loose, such as ours of 1st Lt. Howard Johnstone.

I’ve got just a couple more jarred loose nuggets from 1927. In their May 5 issue there is a little news item entitled “The Successor to Lagos.” It reported the recent purchase of J. O. Singmaster, Keota, Iowa of Bronze, an imported coming 4 year old stallion from Truman’s Stud Farm, just across the river in Illinois. Singmaster’s great herd sire, Lagos, had died and he was truly great–as a show horse, a sire and an equine personality. Their loss was both financial and personal I’m sure. The article states that Singmasters “made a careful canvas of the best studs in the country in their desire to find a stallion good enough to fill Lagos’ place.”

Bronze, the stallion purchased by J.O. Singmaster to fill the void created by the death of Lagos. Singmaster showed this horse to 1st in the 4 year old class at Chicago in 1927 and reserve senior champion. Then came the big sell off. The heart of the great Maple Grove Percherons was sold, including many of the top daughters of Lagos. Quite a few of them, along with Bronze, went to Mr. Muddox in California. Quite a few of them also went to J.E. Burke, Waupaca, Wisconsin. They continued to win for their new owners. This picture of Bronze is from the Muddox ad in the 1929 Percheron Review. I suspect this photo was taken in California. Bronze had been grand champion at the 1928 California State Fair.

Jeannine and I have been on the old Singmaster farm and at one point, when I was young and more foolish, another fellow (now deceased) and I even had a half-baked plan to “dig up” Lagos. He is buried there with a headstone so it isn’t quite as dopey as it sounds. But dopey enough. The other guy said Lagos was in a glass case–so we were going to dig very carefully.

Anyhow, getting back to Bronze. The Gazette said Bronze tipped the Sales at 2210 lbs. in breeding form. There was rarely a mention of how tall a horse was in those days. Their final comment was that “Bronze promises to add fresh laurels to that great record”–of Singmasters.

A prophecy that didn’t make it. Singmaster was, apparently, in roughly the same precarious financial situation as the Breeder’s Gazette. In other words, next thing to broke. He did show Bronze to 1st prize 4 year old at the 1927 International. But, come 1928, ‘29, ‘30 and most of the Singmaster’s top horses were in the hands of J. E. Burke, Waupaca, Wisconsin, and H. C. Muddox & Son, Sacramento, California. There was no real sequel to Lagos at Maple Grove Farm. That story was close to over.

I’ll close this column out with a tale about showing beef cattle–something we Telleens never did. But you couldn’t help but notice some things.

In the purebred beef show circles it was the age of ‘nurse cows.’ I can still recall those old Holstein cows tied, more or less out of sight, at the overnight rail in Des Moines. They were there to provide nocturnal nourishment to animals tied in the cattle barn. Some of those bull calves were likely big enough to breed them as well. Or almost. My dad, who was showing Brown Swiss, had a hearty contempt for beef cows who “needed help from a hired girl” to raise a calf. In retrospect it seems ridiculous. It also seemed ridiculous at the time.

The show ring has always bred a goodly crop of nonsense; some of it merely outlandish and some of it counter productive. In all species. In those pre WWII days, nurse cows were common companions to many of the professional beef show herds.

So, to solve this problem, the University of Minnesota reported a major breakthrough– “Minnesota’s Wooden Nurse Cow.” I will quote from their report in that 1927 Breeder’s Gazette.

“During the past two years we have used a self-feeder system of raising purebred beef calves at the University which has given excellent results, and has enabled us to do away with nurse cows. The self feeder has five compartments in which five concentrate feeds are fed separately, allowing each calf to mix his own ration. We call this feeder our Wooden Nurse Cow.

“The calves have shown a remarkable ability to balance their own rations. We believe they have done a better job of it than we could have done for them, and there has been less trouble from calf scours and other calf ailments than under any other method of feeding previously used in the herd.

“Calves assisted by nurse cows show more flesh and bloom up to 4 or 5 months of age than do calves raised under our plan, but after four months of age the self-fed calves, which never received any milk except that of their own dams, gain rapidly and at 8 or 9 months old are usually in excellent flesh and bloom.

“When they have taken on a degree of flesh which makes further self-feeding unnecessary (usually at 8 or 9 months of age), they are given box stalls, two calves to a stall, and hand-fed three times daily in the usual manner.

“The five feeds provided in the Wooden Nurse Cow were cracked corn, coarsely ground barley, ground or rolled oats, wheat bran and pea-size linseed meal.”

Such were the hurdles of fitting young breeding beef cattle in those days. Professor Vaughn’s article is much longer (winded as well as by word count) but you have the kernel of it there. It was, and is, practices such as this that turn a lot of people off of showing.

In a somewhat similar vein, I think the same charge and skepticism can be leveled against amateur athletics in our own time. And not just at the college level, but in high school, and even much younger. The demands to excel via weight rooms, extended practices, viewing films of the next opponent and on and on can be quite burdensome. It doesn’t appear that being competitive is adequate, now they must excel. It would seem to me that a good bit of the fun of participating in sports would be gone. There is, in many cases, a distortion of priorities that–in the long run–may not serve them well. In a good many instances we should give the games back to the kids–as games–to enjoy. Not all obsessions are magnificent. Some are crippling.

Dick Sparrow agrees with me. Enough is enough–in anything. We just talked about it a couple days ago when he called to tell me that “Yes, Brown did have a wreck at Iowa.” (See last issue–Earle Brown). He didn’t know about the tipping over the wagon business, but his dad and uncle wound up with the wagon that Brown’s man ran into. Knocked one wheel galley west. They still have the wagon–but the wheel has been worked on a time or two.

The rest of Dick’s story was that the old tale had it that Brown’s driver had worked those horses over with a whip back in the stalls. He was going to have them ‘on their toes and ready.’ Now Dick is not a total stranger to the whip, but like the man said, “Enough is enough” and that was a case of more than enough. Kind of like nurse cows being suckled by bulls almost big enough to breed them in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and the extreme demands placed on many of today’s prep athletes. As Howard Johnstone, that treasure house of quotations, used to say, “Do your best, but you don’t have to be an S.O.B. about it.