25 Years Ago
Late Autumn/Early Winter 1979
by Maurice Telleen
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Winter 2003 - 2004

(From the Winter 1979 issue of The Draft Horse Journal, the various breed publications of the time and general news sources.)

I find current national and world news so discouraging that I’m going to reverse the order and do the “horse-gig” for 25 years ago first. On this bright September morning I need a lift, not a letdown. Unrelieved pessimism is dangerous to your health. So is drought. We have experienced a fair amount of both lately.

We will start with the 1979 Clydesdale News. The association finished fiscal 1978 with a record (modern day) volume of business. Betty Groves, the secretary, reported the registration of 69 stallions, 109 mares and 189 transfers. The annual meeting was held in Waterloo, Iowa, in conjunction with Arnold Hexom’s semi-annual auction.

Nearly 200 people attended the annual meeting and banquet–that, too, was probably a modern day record. A total of 72 Clydes went through the auction ring. Nineteen stallions, 33 mares, 12 geldings and 8 grade mares were sold at an average of $2,260. There was one little problem. It takes quite a while to sell 72 horses, one at a time. The problem was that there were 800 head of Belgians, Percherons and etceteras waiting (somewhat impatiently) to get sold. The turnout was huge and unexpected. It was a case of expecting a two inch rain and getting a typhoon–of horses.

Seven of the Clydes topped the $4,000 mark with the toppers being a stallion and a gelding. The stallion was Baron’s Buddy, going to Ben Langston, Sherwood, Oregon, from Anheuser-Busch, Inc., in St. Louis at $6,100 and the gelding, also from Anheuser-Busch, Inc., selling to Carlie Roometua, Auburn, Georgia.

The combination of annual meeting and the national breed sale has proven to be one of the great strengths of the Clydesdale breed in this country. Serving both Americans and Canadians with a business meeting, a pep rally, a family reunion of sorts, and a sale. The turnaround had been accomplished, and this combination of business and pleasure was a key ingredient in the recipe. It still works–albeit in Springfield, Illinois, rather than Waterloo, Iowa.

Next, to the Belgian Review of that time. Everything was coming up roses in the Belgian camp. That breed was also setting modern day records. Fiscal 1978 showed an increase of 283 registrations, 717 transfers and ten new memberships. Their numbers were 2,416 registrations, 3,201 transfers and 252 new memberships, and they showed a net gain of $8,846 for the year. The new secretary, Mr. Rollin Christner from Syracuse, Indiana, came in on high tide. But it was going to go higher.

And, finally, to the Percheron Notes, to round out the trio of breed annuals. The roses were blooming in that garden, too. During fiscal 1978 they recorded 580 head, an increase of 79 over the prior year. Transfers totaled 805, which was an increase of 167 over the prior year. Seventy-six new members joined the group –coming from 27 different states. The association showed a healthy balance sheet too, with receipts exceeding expenditures by better than $8,000.

That 1979 Percheron Notes also served as a Memorial Edition for their recently deceased secretary, Dale Gosset. His wife, Lucille, assumed the reins. So much for the trinity of breed papers–to borrow Sam Guard’s often used phrase–it was sunup time in the draft breeds.

We published an issue, too, about the same time these three came in our mailbox. It, too, had grown beyond our expectations and we found ourselves putting out 150 pagers. We even had to raise our subscription rates–all the way to $8.50 a year in the U.S. and $10 in Canada. But I claimed it wasn’t even an increase because we were sending out 600 pages a year instead of 480. It just looked like an increase. On a per page basis, it might have even been a decrease. I’m not much into endless figuring.

The Japanese were buying a lot of registered drafters from us at that time. That is an interesting story in itself.

I’m just going to rerun most of that story, much of it borrowed from Bruce Roy who was editor of the Canadian Percheron Broadcaster at that time. We have a lot of new readers, I’m sure, who have never heard of draft horse racing in Japan. I don’t suppose they have changed it much in the last 25 years. You’ve heard the expression, “a controlled runaway,” which seems like a contradiction in terms. In Japan it was a big business. With rules.

On November 28 of that year, Floyd Jones from Bangor, Wisconsin, passed away. Floyd and Melba were wonderful friends to us and to many others. During my stretch as Clyde secretary, he was president. A solid-as-a-rock kind of guy whose entire life included a big dose of Clydesdale. His father, also a well known breeder, had bought his first Clydes three years before Floyd was born. Floyd’s life and record with the Clydes was the main article in that issue, not pari-mutuel wagering in Japan. Great man, any way you slice it.

President Carter was doing his level best to bring peace to the Middle East. Probably for the first time in history–or ever. He had both Prime Minister Begin from Israel and President Sadat from Egypt and their entourages, sort of locked up at Camp David in Maryland for weeks. He doggedly kept at it until a peace agreement was hammered out. In the process he earned the respect of both the other leaders.

Begin said that summit should have been called the “Jimmy Carter Conference” and Sadat said of Carter, “He worked harder than our forefathers did in Egypt building the pyramids.” If “blessed are the peacemakers” is true, Carter will certainly rank in the upper echelon of our presidents. I voted for Jimmy twice, once in victory and once in defeat.

About the same time Carter was insisting that the Egyptians and Israelis bury their hatchets somewhere other than in one another’s backs, another pair of old adversaries signed a friendship pact. It wasn’t very complicated, as such things go, only about 500 words. The Chinese head honcho suggested that “they let bygones by bygones” (old Chinese expression). The Japanese Emperor responded with a “sort of“ apology for the invasion of China. “Oh, sorry about that invasion thing, the rape of Nanking, and all those other unpleasantries.”

Doesn’t that sound stupid–”Oh, sorry about that” followed by a bunch of insipid verbiage. And yet, I suppose diplomacy has to start with things like that. And right now, we sure could use some.

Have you ever heard of a congressman from California named Leo Ryan? Well, this Irishman really opened a can of worms when he responded to complaints from constituents that relatives were being held against their will by a self-proclaimed Messiah named James Warren Jones–or Reverend Jim Jones in a place in Guyana, South America.

Congressman Ryan decided to go investigate. He took a small group of news types with him. When Jones heard about this, he went even more berserk and ordered cult members to ambush them at the airport. They did as he directed (you don’t mess around with orders “from God”) and most of the visitors were gunned down at the Port Ksituma airport, near Jonestown. One camera man kept filming right up until he took a bullet in the head. Congressman Ryan was killed.

This done, Jones ordered all of his followers to commit suicide. He had said he would destroy the compound if it were ever attacked, which he now expected. He had trained his followers in a suicide ritual and few balked. When Jones said, “The time has come to meet in another place,” he wasn’t talking about moving 25 miles west.

And so, with a concoction of Kool-Aid and Cyanide, they proceeded to kill themselves. It was ladled into the mouths of infants, children were ordered to drink the stuff, and adults swallowed it on their own. As for the fearless leader himself (described variously as paranoid, sex-crazed, power hungry and regarding himself as a manifestation of God himself), he didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. He shot himself in the head. Kool-Aid, apparently, is not for immortals.

The final death toll was over 900 Americans who followed this king-sized nut case into a place in the jungles where he could run his own little universe.

The congressman was responding to constituent complaints –probably from family members of cultists. So he took his little group (hoping probably for some great publicity in the bargain) down to have a look around. And precipitated this insane mass suicide.

So beware–if you run into anyone who thinks he or she is God–shun them. And cults. Don’t join them. Lodges are mostly okay, but cults are out. As for movements, they tend to be pretty tunnel vision, too. So you have to be careful even with those.

Three famous and wonderful people died within a few days of each other as 1978 wound down. They were all very different and left very different legacies. Norman Rockwell checked out at 84. He was the best known and most loved illustrator of the century. It was also a century of magazines and Rockwell did 317 covers for The Saturday Evening Post alone. And the Post was a giant in those days. He sold his first one to them when he was 21 years of age. Rockwell’s drawings were almost unfailingly optimistic, cheerful, forgiving and upbeat. Most of the artsy types looked down their noses at him. He just took another check from the Post to the bank and cashed it.

I suppose you could say that Rockwell painted things the way he figured it ought to be or the way he wanted them to be. A Rockwell reproduction hangs in our living room. I think it is called “The County Agent.” A friend of ours once dissected that painting with an account of what had happened to all those bright looking kids–and how their parents were so marginalized in the painting. It was not a pretty story and it was all true–this friend, as always, had done his homework. The painting still hangs in our house, but we now look at it a little differently.

The two famous women that followed Norman to the grave in just a couple of weeks were cut out of a very different bolt of cloth. They were as tough as Rockwell was gentle.

Golda Meier, Israel’s first prime minister, died at the age of 80. A member of the Labor party, she was described by the then party chairman as a “stalwart lioness.” As for Anwar-el-Sadat, the president of Egypt (the same one Jimmy Carter locked up with his Israeli counterpart at Camp David and then swallowed the key), he credited her as “an honest foe” and one who had started “efforts for peace.”

The last one I’m sounding taps for was another lioness. Margaret Mead, anthropologist and author, died at 76. She was another fiesty, gifted lioness. I believe either one of them could have eaten old Norman up, piece by piece.