Me, 4-H, and Bovine

I was deep in the 4-H Club as a kid.  It was a group of people who had determined there were enough things that started with an “H” that you could pledge yourself to, so an organization was formed.  We’d have a meeting that would get called to order.  Then we’d pledge.  We’d “pledge our head to clearer thinking, our heart to greater loyalty, our hands to larger service and our health to better living, for our club, our community, our country and our world”.  Then there were numerous boring reports, mostly by adults, and then we’d close with the pledge of allegiance.  Then you got to drink kool-aid and eat cookies and hang out with your friends.  It was kinda like going to one of those time-share presentations, you had to sit through the spiel to get to the pay-off.  We’d meet either at the First State Bank of Marionville or the Community Building in the winter, and down at the park in the summer.  The park had a contaminated creek you could wade in and the last thing I remember was a sand pile and the littlest Hopkins girl grabbed a handful of sand and threw it in my eyes and made me cry.  Kids were laughing that I was crying, but have you ever had a handful of sand in your eye?  I’d cry today and stand solid behind my right to cry at that point in my life.

To be in 4-H you had to have a “project” which meant the boys had to screw around with some type of livestock and the girls cooked.  Understand, what was going on in the sixties in the big cities hadn’t filtered its way down to Marionville yet.  My project was Jennifer, an Angus heifer.  Dad was, from birth, a cattleman.  He and his dad made their living “cattle trading”.  That means you travel around the country trying to buy cattle for less than they’re worth from people that aren’t that smart, then put them together with other cattle that resemble them, then truck them to a big stockyards somewhere and sell them for fantastic profit.  Back then all it required was a one-ton truck with stock racks, a credit line at a bank, and a gob of time. 

Dad and granddad bought our little farm in 1937 as a place to keep the cattle until they could be assembled for sale.  The place had been an orchard and there were still ten acres of untended apple trees that they had planned to bulldoze.  Dad decided to see if he could raise apples and that was the beginning of the end of his cattle trading days.  He had found his passion.  He raised the best apples and made the best cider and did it as long as almost anyone, starting with his first “real” crop in 1940 and ending with his death in 2007.  He was REAL good at that.  At raising livestock, I guess he could have been good at that if that had been his goal.

Anyway, we always had cattle around growing up and dad loved to go to the barn and “piddle” around with them for hours.  Actually I think he was killing time so mom could get supper ready without his assistance.  Later in life I learned that some of the stuff we had going on wasn’t normal for a top cattle herd.  Normal beef cattle aren’t blue, normal Angus cattle don’t have horns, normal cattle herds aren’t bred for their kicking ability and so on.  I suspect dad kept the cows he had because he didn’t have much money in them, they were castoffs from mainstream herds.  If they raised a healthy calf every year it was money in the bank for very little investment. 

We had a roan cow, which was some kind of milking Shorthorn/Jersey cross and was colored about like an Appaloosa horse.  She was bred to an Angus bull and produced an all-red heifer that we kept for a cow.  Later she was bred to an Angus bull and her offspring was BLUE and we kept her for a cow.  I’ve never seen another one like her and I remember when we sold her the eruption of laughter in the sale ring at the stockyards must have been embarrassing for her and really hurt her feelings just before she became hamburger.  I would normally have been sad about this, but I really thought she would kill one of us before we got rid of her.  I saw what she did to a snake one day, and thought about what would happen if she’d turn on one of us, all that hybrid vigor gave her a massive attitude.  The other cows all bowed to her dominance.

Our horned Angus had a story.  Angus cattle don’t normally have horns, through selective breeding over the millennia, that trait has been bred out of them.  But, if you accidentally get lazy on bull replacement, and you have an Angus whose dad is his brother, guess what?  Horns!  I wish I had a picture of this animal whose face resembled most pictures of satan!  This was another animal that brought frivolous hilarity to the stockyards buyers and didn’t sell very well.

I’m not sure where the kicking thing came from.  Most of the cattle in dad’s herd could nail you if you got anywhere near their hind quarters.  And I don’t mean a little tag; they’d kick the living CRAP out of you.  To this day, I never walk close to the back end of any farm animal.  Why dad’s herd was so bad at that I don’t know, except, maybe everyone who had kicking animals got rid of them and he bought them cheap.  They kicked and all the generations after them kicked.

SO, my memories of cattle raising were inbred, crazy, punting cattle that all tended to birth at the kickoff of the Super Bowl in sub zero weather in a blowing snowstorm with chill indexes we haven’t seen since the sixties.  Dad liked to give me the job of getting the afterbirth out of the stall.

All this to say that when we picked my 4-H project, we selected one of only two purebred Angus heifers in our herd, Jennifer.  I broke her to lead over a five month period of being kicked, drug, stepped on and “snotted” on (if you’ve been around cattle you know what I mean), and we went to two livestock shows.  At Mt. Vernon I believe we rode with neighbor Kenneth Gillig, whose son was my best friend.  He was nice enough to take my animal and his also.  At Monett, dad took me.  He had a part-time job at the Marionville Post Office (in case the apples froze out in any given year we’d have income), so we got up real early and drove to Monett and he dropped me off and went back to work.  He came to pick me up after he got off at 5.  Trouble is, the show ended at 3:30.  All the parents gathered up their gear, loaded up their livestock and went home, leaving a ten-year-old boy alone with a 1000 pound animal.  By the time dad got there I was pretty sure I had been orphaned and was making plans to find a cardboard box to live in.  He was REALLY embarrassed and felt bad to his death about that day.  As to how we did showing cattle...well, someone has to be last.

Most farm kids that get city jobs eventually miss the fun of screwing with cattle and when they retire, go out and purchase ten head and they’re off and running.  Working in the farm equipment business at S & H we sell them a lot of equipment and they tell me joyful stories about their experiences and I’m real happy for them.  The good news about all of my experiences is that when I’m done working I won’t be screwing with bovine, I’ve paid my dues and have no desire to go back.  While everyone else says “farm livin’ is the life for me” I’ll be on the lake.  You can laugh at me when I’m trying to eat the boat hull when times get hard.