25 Years Ago
Late Spring/Early Summer 1977
by Maurice Telleen
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Summer 2002

On April 18, 1977, a newly elected president, Jimmy Carter, made a televised address to the nation–the likes of which we haven’t heard since. It was about oil, energy and our habits. The president said we faced a national catastrophe and needed to respond with the “moral equivalent of war” to our dwindling oil reserves. He called for conservation measures, higher energy prices and taxes to discourage a profligate use of oil, and penalties where appropriate. His avowed aim was to reduce gasoline consumption by 10% in the next eight years. (I assume the eight year frame was designed to fit two terms, which he hoped to serve.) He urged the nation’s citizens to change their wasteful ways, stating that “ours is the most wasteful nation on earth. It (the situation) will demand that we make sacrifices and changes in our lives.” Imagine that, calling my fellow citizens the “most wasteful nation on earth.”

Carter was not a particularly successful president, but a wise man. He told it like it was. That is not what people want to hear and little was actually done about it. Curbing waste was not our style. Still isn’t. We do, in fact, depend on it. How else can the gross domestic product keep growing forever?

Carter inherited the problem, just as every president since has. The ‘70s had been a decade of oil embargoes and oil-induced international tensions that started during Nixon’s administration when OPEC first flexed its muscles. It extended through the Gerald Ford years, into the Carter years, and right up into this new century. It was not limited to the U.S.

Take Great Britain for example. North Sea oil was, in 1977, more or less saving their bacon. Probably still is to some degree. The oil reserves under the North Sea had originally been considered too costly to tap into. Then came OPEC, and the price hikes of the ‘70s. That, plus new methods of extraction no doubt, changed both that mind-set and the arithmetic. What had been considered “not economic” began to look more like an economic life preserver, even a bonanza.

Queen Elizabeth had formally opened the first underwater pipeline to these reserves on November 3, 1975. And the oil flowed–but bonanzas come with costs. On April 22, 1977, one of the North Sea wells blew out of control. It was finally sealed eight days later. But not before it had dumped 7.5 million gallons of crude oil into the sea, creating a slick 30 x 45 miles. Officials said not to worry, its effect on marine life would be relatively small and, due to wind and wave action, the slick would not likely wind up on the shores of either Scotland or Norway. Which was nice.

On June 20, 1977, oil started flowing through the trans-Alaskan pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, where it could be loaded onto southbound tankers. Those northern slope oil fields were projected to provide nearly 10% of the United States daily consumption. Production was expected to reach 1.2 million barrels a day by autumn. There was a lot more offshore drilling to do and other opportunities. So why worry? That was the general reaction to the scolding from the White House. It was shrugged off. American ingenuity would solve the problem as it always had.

Nonetheless, we were also having a spirited debate on whether or not we wanted to go the nuclear route. On May 2, more than a thousand demonstrators moved in and camped on the site of a proposed $2.5 million nuclear plant at Seabrook, New Hampshire. Thanks to public concern, nuclear plant construction was more or less stalemated in this country. Other countries, such as France, went much further down this road. So we don’t have a great many such plants but we are obviously at a loss as to what to do with the radioactive waste that has accumulated. I don’t know what France does with theirs. They don’t have a Nevada.

So, here we are, a quarter century later and, so near as I can tell, we still don’t really have an energy policy that looks the beast squarely in the face. Not that alternatives don’t exist, just that we have refused to seriously address it. The alternatives; solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, draft animals, garbage, methane and even that terrible alternative, conservation exist. But they don’t come in barrels–so we drift along.

I can excuse Truman, Eisenhower and even Kennedy from not putting it on the front burner. They had pressing problems of other sorts with the cold war at its peak. But we’ve had six presidents since JFK and the only one who looked this thing full in the face was Carter. One out of six is not good for something this important. Interestingly enough, he had the best scientific credentials of the lot. But, who wants to be scolded?

Philip Wrigley died at the age of 82. He made and sold chewing gum and owned the most lovable losers in baseball, the Chicago Cubs. They play in the neatest ballpark in the country. There are much fancier ones but none with as much class. Wrigley became very wealthy–on gum, not baseball.

Here is a hot bulletin of possible interest to Brabant breeders and owners. On May 23, 1977, fire swept the Duc de Brabant hotel in Brussels, killing 102.

There is something about very tall buildings that attracts those who are possessed. On May 26, 1977, a guy looking for headlines scaled one of the 110 floor World Trade Center towers in the wee hours of the morning. He reached the top and did it using equipment he had designed and built himself. His explanation was, “I just wanted the prize of getting to the top.” The police were less than impressed with that explanation. Upon his successful descent he was arrested and given three summons for his pre-dawn adventure and later slapped with a $25, 000 lawsuit by the City of New York. The name of this human fly was George Willig and he meant to make it into a household name. I’ll bet nobody reading this had ever heard of him. So much for fame and household names.

On the big oval dirt tracks, a new hero emerged. Seattle Slew won the triple crown: the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont. I don’t pay much attention to the Thoroughbreds but I think he went on to be a notable sire. Even a household name in the households of racing fans.

On a more personal level, one of the most notable achievements of that time was Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Roots. It was about his own forebears in Africa and their involuntary passage to this continent. It was a powerful story and was made into a TV mini-series. It was a riveting thing to both read and watch.

Haley’s search and research was considerably more daunting and heartbreaking than that of some of my Swede relatives who went back there and spent days and days in courthouses and graveyards. I never really felt the pull to do that, choosing instead to go to France, Great Britain and Belgium to see where our great draft breeds came from.

With that I think it is time to move on to the draft horse scene and what better way than via the Summer 1977 Draft Horse Journal. It was 112 pages and the only color was on the cover. It was a picture of a Clydesdale mare, Portia, and her 1972 filly foal. Portia was a better than average Clyde mare. As a 3 year old she had won the $500 Busch award and trophy for the Best American Bred and Owned at their National Show. She was also in “better than average” hands. She was the property of Floyd and Dan Jones, second and third generation Clydesdale breeders at Bangor, Wisconsin. Floyd was also a long time president of the Association through those lean years.

The photo was taken by Danny Weaver, Agri-Graphic Services, Cary, Illinois. I suspect Danny was on a cow mission at the time, and just took a shot of the mare and foal for fun. The Jones family bred (still does) fine Holsteins as well as Clydesdales. Floyd was on the sire selection committee at the big Tri-State bull stud for years, so it was not unlikely that Danny was at the Jones farm on Holstein business–rather than Clydesdale business.

The black 4 up of mares. In two years of competition (1938-39) these mares with two more in the six won $1,875 in premiums and all were in foal for 1940. The blacks were in nickel harness and the greys in brass.

These two Ardennes horses had been used as a commemorative stamp in Belgium in 1976. We had mistakenly identified them as Belgians - or Brabants, as the current vocabulary would have it.

The new livestock coliseum at the Iowa State Fair made its debut in 1902. So come to Des Moines in August and see how it has held up for a hundred years.

Two big events focused a lot of attention on California in the late ‘30s. In 1938 the National Percheron Show was held at Pomona, California. That was followed in 1939 by the Golden Gate Exposition, with a great livestock show, in San Francisco. California Percherons were for the first time in the national spotlight.

Then along came World War II. By 1945, the Percherons at White-O were all gone. While they had put together a tremendous foundation, they never really found that great stallion, but had things held together–who knows. In the late ‘30s a great many stables like this had been assembled and when the market for drafters all but disappeared, they also simply disappeared. The draft horse market didn’t “go out of favor,” it vanished–as in extinct. Such was the fate of many draft horse stables. Entire bloodlines disappeared about a half century ago. The gene pool of all our draft breeds was seriously diminished by that great liquidation which went on clear up to about 1960. A gene pool is not measured by numbers alone. Bruce concluded his article on White-O with “Hitler and Tojo spoiled it all.”

Speaking of gene pools and breeds, that issue also carried short articles about two breeds that one doesn’t normally meet in this magazine. We had a nicely illustrated one on the Ardennes–sometimes called the Small Belgian and the Canadien, a general purpose breed somewhat like the Morgan, developed in Quebec.

The English Suffolk Association was celebrating its Centenary Year in 1977. The official birth of their stud book dates back to a meeting of the Suffolk Agricultural Association held in Ipswich, England, on April 21, 1877, where it was proposed to form a Suffolk Stud Book Society. Both North America and Great Britain were full of such local societies. They provided the platform from which both breeds and shows were launched. Breeds, at that time, tended to be local in nature. In that part of England known as East Anglia, they had their trinity–the Suffolk Horse, the Suffolk Sheep and Suffolk Cattle–which we insisted on calling Red Polls. I guess their pigs were “just pigs.”

The 75 Years Ago column in that issue carried a picture of the “then new livestock coliseum at the Iowa State Fair. This building made its debut at the 1902 Iowa State Fair. We will rerun it here as this fall will mark its 100th year of service. Looks familiar, doesn’t it?

Bob Eschrich from Milwaukee, one of the handful that kept the Percheron alive out our way through those down years, sold out on November 19, 1977. Bob never kept many but he kept good ones. He was the breeder of Maverick, one of the signature sires in rebuilding the breed from the ashes of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

The only big sale report in that issue was from the Waverly Spring Sale, which included the National Clydesdale Sale at that time. That breed sale was another vehicle of no small importance in putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again. We kind of went overboard on the report–calling it “A Landmark Sale With Five Mares Representing Three Breeds Reaching The $7,000 Figure.“ It was a landmark sale. That was not rhetorical overkill.

That issue carried an amazing number of ads for forthcoming sales. The early spring sales had been strong. Then Waverly sort of went over the top and suddenly, holding a draft horse auction seemed like a very good idea to a lot of people. Most of them were new consignment sales but a couple were private. Cliff Meyer, out in Nebraska decided that October 18 would be a good day to sell his almost fifty head of Belgians. Might have been a rite of passage sort of sale–maybe that is when Lynn took over the ranch.

But my favorite sale ad was a two page ad, in the form of a sale catalog, of the “Near Dispersal of Belgians and Mules” owned by John Lutter, Zell, South Dakota. It, too, was held on the ranch. There were 58 lots, 38 registered Belgians, ten mules and ten Belgians from Bernard Hargreaves, Stickney, South Dakota. I liked that phrase “Near Dispersal.” It should be used more often. Sounds better than an “Almost Dispersal” or a “Sort of Dispersal”–and then there is also the “Semi-Annual Dispersal” in the purebred livestock business. Both Cliff and John chose a mighty auspicious time to lighten up.

But the most surprising sale ad was the one announcing that there would be no Fall Sale here in Waverly. One of the handful of sales that had been responsible for restoring draft horse values was taking a holiday. Fall, here in Waverly, would be like Spring without robins or cherry blossoms. Who knows, the moon might not even shine on a clear night.

There had to be an explanation for this unnatural event–and there was.