Choice gleanings from 45-plus years of Unregistered Bull.

John sat looking through the lobby window. It was misting rain, barely enough to wet the pavement but enough to freshen up his philosophy a little.

"You see there," said John, "everything is getting back to normal. It’s already been cloudy for three hours. First thing you know, we’ll wake up here some spring and see green grass all over the place.

"Right now, all I can hear is how tough everything is. People keep talking about drouth, bad markets, bad-tempered bankers and busted bank accounts. They say they can’t savvy how everything got turned upside down so quick.

"I claim the whole outlook is one to make a man sit back and breath a sigh of relief. I’m not afraid of going broke. I’m already broke. For the past several years I’ve been jittery as a lizard on a hot stove, what with everybody making a lot of money, eating fancy food, and building indoor bathrooms all over the country. Anybody that stopped to think would have known something was wrong when ranch people could do things like that for two or three years in a row.

"All us oldtimers got worried year before last when the market kept going up while the country kept burning up. Then last year, the drouth was still on and the market went up some more. I tell you, I was scared to death. It was the first time I ever saw a drouth without the bottom dropping out of the market and breaking everybody in sight.

"This year we had some more drouth and the market went down at the same time. It’s just a case of things getting back in the groove. It’s normal for a rancher to go broke every now and then, and I believe things are about as normal right now as we can reasonably expect them to be. We’ve got an election on, everybody’s confident the country’s going to the dogs regardless of who wins, and you already see nearly as many Fords as Cadillacs on ranch roads.

"Some of the young bucks can’t get over the fact that only yesterday they had money in the bank and still had 40-cent calves to deliver. However, I don’t see any reason for them to be jumping off any windmills just because they’re in a jam now. After all, when they were making money they had to fork over the biggest part of it to the most wasteful government in history.

"If they can still climb on a horse and ride across a pasture they can call their own, they’re better off than most people. If they don’t think so, they don’t belong on a ranch anyway.

"If they have the guts to stay in there and pitch, they’ll see green grass and fat stock on their ranches again some of these days. They’ll discover their credit is good at the bank, and maybe they can buy another Cadillac someday. Meanwhile, they’d better learn to love the livestock business for its own sake, because about the time they get on their feet real good it’ll be time for another drouth an they’ll go broke again.

"There are only two kinds of ranch people that I know of who have managed to escape the hard bumps. One is the man who had the good sense to inherit land with oil all over it. The other is the man farsighted enough to inherit a ranch but lazy enough to lease it out instead of operating it himself.

"Neither type can be considered a significant factor in the country’s agricultural production." — (S.F. 09/25/52)