On June 24, 1951, Jacob Malik, the Soviet delegate to the United Nations, proposed a cease fire in Korea. The common assumption was that both China and North Korea were clients, or attack dogs for the Soviet regime. From that it was an easy jump to thinking that the communist bloc was signaling that they, too, were seeking a way out of this conflict. That Malik was simply the messenger.

U.N. Forces had recently succeeded in seizing a considerable hunk of real estate north of the 38th parallel including Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. The 38th parallel was the pre-war boundary between South and North Korea.

Malik’s proposition called for a cease fire, followed by an armistice and a withdrawal of both forces to their side of the parallel. Our Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, responded cautiously that such a withdrawal, coupled with satisfactory guarantees that there would be no renewed aggression by the communists, would be satisfactory. So hope soared for an early end to the conflict. That isn’t the way it worked out.

The talks finally began on July 10 but delay followed upon delay. The nature of the war changed but the killing went on. There were no more sweeping advances and/or withdrawals but the same hills along a fairly static front were the scene of bloody battles time and again. It must have seemed insane to the GIs.

In the boxing ring, history repeated itself, with this column in mind, I’m sure. For just 25 years before, a champion (Dempsey) was dethroned of his heavyweight title by an underdog (Tunney), so it was on July 10, 1951, that another champion, Sugar Ray Robinson lost the middleweight title to another underdog, Randy Turpin from England. This fight took place in England and, like the Dempsey-Tunney match, was a decision, rather than a knockout. Both boxers managed to stay on their feet for 15 long rounds.

And there the similarities end. Two months later, on September 12, in a return match, Sugar Ray knocked out Turpin in the 10th round. The title was returned to this country. National honor had been restored.

Robinson was very durable. He won and lost the middleweight crown no less than four or five times, finally retiring from boxing in 1965 at the age of 45. Which is pretty old for a boxer. If he had any thought about studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, he wisely kept it to himself.

In this age of commonplace home runs, there doesn’t seem to be as much emphasis on pitching no-hitters. No-hitters are wonderful to baseball nuts, but dull to the crowd. Fifty years ago this summer, Cleveland pitcher Bob Feller pitched his third no-hit ball game, joining some very select company. Only two other major league pitchers, Cy Young and Larry Corcoron had ever done so before Rapid Robert pulled it off. And neither of them had spent several prime time years serving in the Navy, as did Feller during WW II.

It would take fifteen more seasons before Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers surpassed all three of them by pitching his fourth no-hitter. He did one a year for four years! In that game in September, 1951, Koufax retired 27 Cubs in order, striking out 14 of them. His adversary on the mound that day was Bob Hendley, who gave up only ONE hit. It was a one hit ball game and the score was 1 to 0. Hendley must have felt robbed. Both pitchers were lefthanders, or southpaws, as baseball fans prefer to call them.

On July 31, Belgium got itself a king again, a 20 year old named Baudoun I. His father, Leopold III was so out of favor with his countrymen that he had, under duress, resigned in favor of his son. It was a condition of even allowing him to return home from Austria, where he had hunkered down during WWII. Quite different from the way his father had stood up to the invading Germans in WWI. But the kid was too young at the time of his abdication, too young to be king of Belgium anyhow. So, in July of 1951, when he turned 20 years of age he was crowned. Apparently the country limped along O.K. without one during the interval. Constitutional monarchies can be quite resilient.

William Randolph Hearst died at age 88. I’m sure he was not universally mourned. He owned 15-20 large daily papers and several magazines. He lived like a potentate, complete with a castle. It was called San Simeon and there he flaunted his wealth. It is in California, just in case you want to go there.

He traveled a long road politically, espousing some unpopular, unprofitable and even liberal causes while young and becoming stridently conservative or reactionary in his old age. He harbored political ambitions of his own, like a more recent publisher, but they went nowhere, also like the more recent one. And that is where ANY similarity between him and Steve Forbes ends. Hearst not only flaunted his wealth but his mistress as well. It is hard to imagine Forbes with either San Simeon or a mistress. Hearst was a larger than life figure but he wound up dying too–so maybe he wasn’t.

The U.S. Commerce Department reported that American’s average income for every man, woman and child in 1950 was $1,436–or less than $6,000 for a family of four. This represented a 9% or $116 gain over 1949 and was the highest in history up to that time. Taxes cut the net gain however. They averaged $360, that was for state, federal and local–leaving a total per capita of $1,076, or about $4,300 for a family of four.

That would sound pretty grim to today’s graduates, but it is all a case of compared to what. My first job away from the home farm in the early 1950s (writing off the six years spent either in the army or college) paid $3,000 per year plus free housing. I certainly didn’t feel abused.

So what was the job? Someone is sure to ask. I was the lab manager (job title) in a small bull stud. It was called the Nebraska Artificial Dairy Breeders’ Association. We kept about 25-30 bulls. As for what it involved, make that bull collector, evaluator, diluter and shipper of fresh semen; every other weekend barn cleaner; hooftrimmer and writer of newsletters and any other propaganda that needed doing. Jeannine had been a high school teacher in Iowa and signed on as a substitute. They must have had disgustingly healthy teachers so as other income, that was a joke. So she did a little secretarial work for a breed fieldman.

We got along fine. Didn’t even feel poor.

On a more lofty level–namely Washington, D.C., rather than Fremont, Nebraska, President Harry Truman had to do something that really pained him. On August 31, he invoked the national emergency section of the Taft-Hartley Labor Relations Act, in a copper strike. He hated this legislation, vetoed it–only to see Congress pass it over his veto, and called it “an attack on the working man.” But that unsuccessful veto came in mighty handy in his 1948 “Give ‘em hell, Harry” presidential campaign.

So why did he HAVE TO use this law which he detested? He had already been through a slowdown in the steel industry. Typical of him, he seized the mills and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that he had acted unconstitutionally. That really smarted. But it wasn’t unconstitutional for him to summon the head of U.S. Steel and the head of the Union to his office three weeks later and demand that they settle their differences, reminding them that the country was at war. They did.

After that experience, he wasn’t about to seize a copper mill, war or no war. The court had already let him know how that would end.

This next note is almost as painful to me as invoking the Taft-Hartley Act was to Truman. On September 22, a Swedish court fined an 18 year old sailor for kissing his girlfriend in public. Disgusting! The judge, I mean. How dumb can you get when you put on a black robe? Especially in Sweden, where all the women are beautiful and the children are above average. That magistrate must have been an immigrant. It all, however, ended on a happier note. The Swedes just raised hell about it. On the other hand, why didn’t that sailor kiss her on the lips instead of the street.

Draft Horse News:

You talk about a drought. That is the way 50 years ago was for the draft horse news. As for the commercial market, there wasn’t much. In our area the fox farms and dog food outfits almost had the field to themselves. But it wasn’t dead, dead. It just appeared so. The Amish had made a decision in the 1920s that they would not go the tractor route and truly dedicated non-Amish horse breeders simply refused to quit. They just settled for not making any money at it. And more than a few plain-vanilla farmers and ranchers were not about to discard their teams. A pox on those smart-aleck editors at farm papers. So beat down it was, invisible, it wasn’t.

Sir Jule, junior champion at Ohio and junior and reserve grand Percheron stallion at the Pennsylvania Farm Show in 1940 for E.A. Nicodemus, Waynesboro, PA. Fifty years ago, Sir Jule was living out his senior years at the Western Penitentiary for the state of Pennsylvania. I suppose they stood him for public service as well. He said prison life wasn’t so bad.

Jan Farceur, senior and grand champion at the American Belgian Show (Ohio State Fair), Illinois and Michigan State Fairs. He was a champion over 50 times at major shows and a great sire as well. Jan was the son of the immortal Jay Farceur, three time grand champion at those pre-war Internationals.

Band Master, bred, owned and exhibited by Meadow Brook Farms, Rochester, Michigan, was the young horse to beat. But nobody did–until the Royal at Toronto. He was junior and grand champion at the National (Waterloo), junior and reserve grand at Illinois and Indiana, and junior champion at Ohio. In his season finale at Canada’s Royal, he stood down to two Canadian colts. Sired by Conqueror and out of Broken Stripe, he was sampled as a sire at Meadow Brook.

Gracie Farceur was the poster girl for the common man, the farmer breeder. She was reserve senior and reserve grand at the National show for her breeder and exhibitor, Norton Davis, Hedrick, Iowa. At Waterloo, she was beaten by Linda, Meadow Brook’s great mare who went undefeated for grand champion that year. At Des Moines, Gracie stood second to June Farceur, shown by C.G. Good & Son. This photo doesn’t quite do her justice. She is too stretched and standing wide in this photo.

The only publication covering draft horses that year was the Belgian Review. It carried an interesting article by W.L. Henning from the Animal Husbandry Department at Penn State. He stated that within a five mile radius of the campus, there were over 30 draft teams working regularly–and that was not on Amish farms. And also that the good Percheron stallion, Sir Jule–owned by Ed Nicodemus, was standing at the farms of the Western Penitentiary in his state. He also stated that, “I feel that every Vocational Agriculture Agent should know how to harness a horse, drive a team of horses and know something about riding a horse. It really hurts me these days to see how little some of these workers in agriculture know about farm livestock.”

He ended that fairly long paragraph with “I feel that land-grant colleges are making a mistake by not giving some of their students the opportunity to work more with horses of all kinds.”

He went on to state that “as long as (our judging teams) are asked to judge draft horses at the Eastern States Exposition, the Eastern National Livestock Show, and the International Livestock Exposition in Chicago, there is certainly a need for good draft horses in the stables at the land grant colleges.”

He also stated that they were experiencing an increased interest in their class in Horse Production at Penn State. Where, incidentally, they were still maintaining a quality stable of drafters and showing both Belgians and Percherons at the International. The last of the schools to do so.

The tone of that article told me that Professor Henning wasn’t at all convinced that American agriculture was on the “right track”. (Anymore than a lot of horse breeders were). He sounds like “one of us.” There were a lot of doubters out there. I believe subsequent events have proven that many of those doubts were valid.

The Belgian shows were well supported. They were the clear leader in the draft horse ranks and did yeoman work maintaining a draft horse presence at our big livestock shows. The Percherons and Clydesdales did the best they could, which wasn’t much, because there were fewer of them. At our own state fair in Des Moines, draft animals even managed to show an increase in numbers–260 head versus 212 in 1950. Every one of the five sections: Belgian, Clydesdale, grade draft geldings and mares, mules and pulling teams was up. But over in the 4-H section, where the future was happening (so we were told), it was bad news. Four colts, all Belgians, were shown by three girls, all daughters of hard-core purebred breeders. That didn’t auger well. In the pre-war past, like 10 years prior, that ring had been full of Belgian, Percheron, Clyde and Shire colts.

I’ll run a few pictures of some of those 1951 winners at the Belgian shows and the Percheron stallion, Sir Jule, who was serving time at the Western Pennsylvania Penitentiary.