My dad enjoyed auction sales. Maybe he had become addicted to the auctioneer’s chant calling buyers to bid on various artifacts. Whenever Dad offered the highest bid, he would load the prizes into his battered old Ford pickup and head home. The booty usually included old furniture, rusty tools, books, or boxes of miscellaneous items thrown together and sold as one lot.
Today I’m looking at an item found in one of those boxes, something which has escaped the trash bucket, a tattered Stallion Service Account Book kept by a man named Richard Krueger of Sheldon. We cannot tell how many stallions Mr. Krueger had standing at stud, but he filled the book with entries for the year’s business in 1927.
An example entry shows C. R. Simon from Elliott who brought his six-year-old black mare named Dolly for breeding. The fee Krueger charged him for the services of his stallion was $12.50, a price he charged each recorded customer. Throughout the pages we find mares like a grey ten-year-old mare named Baldy, the brown eight-year-old Bess, the white ten-year-old Trixie, and more. Horses bred for farm work were still important because rubber tired tractors weren’t prevalent. A few years later in 1935 still only 14 percent of farm tractors rolled on pneumatic tires.
Nineteen twenty-seven was a momentous year for change. A Model T Ford cost $360 and ended production after manufacturing about 15 million of them starting in 1908. Only 400,000 units were built in 1927 because the Model A which sold for $385 took its place in October. I found another occurrence to be of interest in the auto industry - the first Volvo car rolled off the production line in Gothenburg, Sweden.
We can name more important events of the year Work began on Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota and ended 14 years later, 1941. Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, decided whom the carvings would represent based on which presidents he thought represented the most important events in history. The first transatlantic telephone call was made from New York City to London, and Charles Lindbergh flew his airplane named The Spirit of St. Louis from New York City to Paris in the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean.
The New York Yankees fielded a great team in 1927, so great that they pulled off the first sweep of a National League team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, in the World Series. The Yankee players earned the nickname “Murderer’s Row” which included Babe Ruth who hit his 60 homers in this year.
Movie-goers could attend the first movie with sound. The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson featured six songs and 350 spoken words.
Returning to our horse theme, World War One ended a decade earlier where huge numbers of horses had been decimated. During the horse-buying years of the war, a 1915 headline in a Virginia newspaper certainly must have horrified horse-lovers. It blared “Horses for Cannon Food and Bullet Meat.” A North Dakota rancher with the well-known name Usher L. Burdick raised championship horses. Maybe he had a premonition of the coming war because he urged ranchers to raise horses for profit and told them to start with the very best sires they could find locally; it did not matter much which breed they chose. At a Grand Forks stock show in 1909 his horse named “Gazolite” placed as the champion in the three-year-old class.
Whether or not Richard Krueger raised championship studs is not known, but they were in demand. He filled the pages of his journal with 50 customers whom he charged $12.50 for each of the mares brought to his stallion. To quote Dee Brown, “Sometimes there isn’t enough material. There’s a story there and you can’t fill it in with facts, so you let your imagination run wild.” That’s what we will have to do regarding this business enterprise because no other information is available. With Krueger’s book filled and the last entry being July 13, he may have started a new book, but we don’t possess it.
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