From the horse aspect, 50 years ago has turned into a dry well. There was very little going on, heavy horse-wise. As for print on the trade, it had virtually ceased to exist. In any commercial sense, it was the same as dead. The BELGIAN REVIEW was the lone exception. In the case of both 75 and 25 years ago, there is plenty of commentary to provide a sort of a bird’s eye view for a retrospect. Not in 1951. So I guess I’ll have to go with a ground squirrel’s eye view, as far as horses go.

I remember that summer very well. As are most times, it was a summer of transition, far greater than we appreciated. Maybe some of the folks cruising at 40,000 feet with the big corporations, the so-called think tanks (if such existed) and in some of the universities had a handle on the big picture. Some of them. Others at that altitude, I’m sure, didn’t realize the scope and depth of the changes underfoot anymore than we did. I’ve since become convinced that a fair number of dummies make it to fairly lofty altitudes. Some are born there—or on second or third base as the baseball version has it.

The country was still full of young men who fully expected to take over dad’s farm, or uncle John’s, or buy one of their own, and to spend their lives and raise their families in the time-honored vocation of farming. That is why they called them Future Farmer chapters. Of course, they figured on doing so with a tractor or two and a nice automobile, not horses. Maybe a chore team, at most.

But they expected to milk their own cows, feed their own cattle, farrow their own pigs and feed them out, and raise their families as part of the small communities and trade centers they were born into. They were not, at least not the ones I knew, thinking of farming a couple sections, owning a half million dollars in machinery and cash renting a township, assuming debts that would scare the pants off their fathers, and putting little kids on school buses with a 35 mile commute both ways just to get to the school house. They appreciated their neighbors. For the most part we were busy ground squirrels, not visionaries with industrial-sized dreams.

I recall that summer of ‘51 as a summer of very hard work and a couple of important transitions. My brother, now deceased, had been farming the neighbor’s place but hankered to own his own land. He bought a 120 acre farm with a good set of buildings. It was about 50 miles from home, up near his father-in-law’s farm. His wife had been a school teacher in our town. Few of those elementary teachers escaped in those days. The new ones were examined by the local young men as carefully as a horse buyer inspects a bunch of fillies. A very high percentage wound up staying there for life. It was an autumn ritual, sort of like a homecoming football game or picking up hickory nuts—but more interesting than either of those.

At home it was “the summer of the spade.” Dad had a decent well but we did not have running water in the house or drinking cups in the barn. That was rectified that summer. As for the house, it had a cellar, not a basement. I can still remember Mom making a hasty exit from the cellar when she found a big bull snake who had taken up residence there among the canned goods. He was promptly evicted. But she was kind of gun shy of that place for awhile.

In the summer of ‘51 we installed a water system and put in a full basement under the house. We did much of the grunt work ourselves. I’m sure there were backhoes in 1951, but we didn’t hire one. We dug the water lines by hand. There is an art to it. I also recall a dirt elevator in what became the basement. It too was hand fed. By fall the cows had drinking cups and we had hot and cold running water in the house. That is transition. The way we did it, it was also a lot of hard work, but with little cash layout. With the war grinding on in Korea, my dad was pleased that I had declined the invitation to sign on for a hitch in the reserves, when I was discharged some three years earlier. So was I. I recall a great feeling of accomplishment when the jobs were done.

As for the bull snake and his relatives, I suppose they were disappointed. Since it was a lot harder to get into a new basement than into an old cellar, the local snake community did not regard our summer’s work as progress. It is all in your point of view.

Naturally, you have to give up something to get something else. With all that back breaking spade and shovel work, along with the regular farming, there was not time to show any cattle. For the first time in four years, there were no Telleen Brown Swiss at the Iowa State Fair and Spencer. Both had become regular ports of call and Dad loved to show. We went down on Swiss day but only as spectators. I would guess, however, we found at least an hour or so to go over to the horse barn and see who was still carrying the flag for Dobbin. The Belgians, Clydes and mules still had a show—but the Percherons and Shires had become casualties, both sort of sentimental favorites at our house.

I suppose you could say that our personal universe was pretty small. If that is the case, we didn’t feel handicapped by it. We were, in fact, pretty darn proud of both the major transitions that had been achieved in our family that summer.

We will now ascend to 40,000 feet and take a brief look at what the movers and shakers were up to on a larger stage.

What a month April of 1951 was. President Truman finally reached the end of his tether with a headstrong General MacArthur. On April 11 of that year he canned him, removing him from any command of any sort. The straw that broke the camel’s back, or at least provided the excuse, was a letter MacArthur had written to Joseph Martin, Republican leader in the House of Representatives, complaining about Truman’s leadership, stating that there was no substitute for victory in Korea, suggesting that Asia, rather than Europe, be put on the front burner for a while. And, of course, he proposed to “unleash” Chiang Kai-shek on to the mainland of China. Sort of conveniently forgetting that Chiang had been beaten and driven from the mainland just a couple years ago. The letter of course, became public.

MacArthur, about as humble as Caesar and as modest as a brass band, returned to this country to ticker tape parades and public adulation. There were a few powerful Republicans interested in him as their next candidate for president. On April 20, he delivered that tear jerker speech to the joint houses of Congress about “old soldiers just fading away.” Just fading away was the furthest thing from his mind. Truman meanwhile, had to suffer in silence—something he was not overly good at. But he did what he had to do, as usual. Which, in this case, was just putting up with it until it had run its course.

Right during all this turmoil, Senator Arthur Vandenburg of Michigan died in his sleep at 67 years of age on April 18. Ironic that he should die at the very time the bi-partisanship of foreign affairs that he had been so instrumental in forging, was under siege. Vandenburg, a Republican, had served as chairman of the Foreign Relations committee when his party was in the majority. He had been a member of the senate for 23 years, a U.S. representative to the United Nations Conference, a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference and president pro-tem of the senate. He was considered a leader of the internationalist wing of the G.O.P.

None of this made a whole lot of difference to the GIs in Korea. Matthew Ridgeway, who had been commanding our 8th Army in Korea, was named to replace MacArthur and the war ground on and on. There were advances and withdrawals, all of it costing lives, but none of it really changing the nature of it. According to a United Nations estimate , this war, not quite a year old, had already produced a million casualties, considering both sides, civilians as well as soldiers. In June, President Truman extended the draft to 1955, extended the length of service to two years and lowered the age to 18 1/2. It had all the earmarks of both sides settling in for a limited but protracted war.

The Chinese, meanwhile, “liberated” Tibet—from themselves, I guess. Tibet had surrendered to the Chinese Army in the fall of 1950. In the spring of 1951, a long winded agreement was announced that was supposed to allow Tibetans to run their internal affairs and even practice their religion if they severed all pro-imperialist ties. In other words, “they may allow us to live if we abandon our heritage wholesale, kowtow, and keep our fingers crossed.” Tibet was in for some big changes.

In April, a federal judge in New York sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death for passing on atomic bomb secrets to the Russians and in May we ran extensive tests at the Enitwetok site in the Pacific toward producing a hydrogen bomb, much more deadly than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.

The cold war was never much colder that it was in 1951.

By June of that year there were 107 television stations operating out of 63 American cities. Those stations were capable of reaching 62% of the American population. Antennas were sprouting up everywhere. One of the immediate effects of commercial television was a big drop in movie theatre attendance. Hollywood was in a bit of a panic, as were theatre owners. What had been a great little mom and pop business in thousands of situations was suddenly looking sickly. As for TV, it was black and white only—until May 2 when RCA broadcast the first commercial television in color. The great bulk of it remained black and white for a long time.

It seems like a long time ago—almost a completely different world. Writing this column left me feeling very old this time