Dad: A Major Award

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of posts about events during the life of my Dad, who passed away in early November.

The year was 1955. I was three years old and my brother was about six months old, and our parents were in Chicago, a long way from our home in the Texas Panhandle.

They had traveled to the Windy City so my dad could compete in – wait for it – a chicken judging contest. To this day, I still don’t know what’s involved with chicken judging, but it was apparently a big deal back then (it may still be; feel free to enlighten me), and my dad was also apparently quite good at it. So good, in fact, that he won the competition, and this Major Award:

The inscription on the trophy reads thusly: 1st Award – Senior Poultry Division – Pfizer 3rd Annual Livestock Judging Competition – November 28, 1955 – Sheraton Hotel, Chicago, Illinois. (I never realized until now that this occurred on his 32nd birthday.)

I can’t find any additional information about this event. Pfizer still has an animal health division, and it’s involved in some collegiate livestock events; livestock judging continues to be a big deal at the high school and college levels, but I don’t find a lot of mention of adult judging competitions. It’s probably safe to say that this represents something of a bye-gone era.

But the trophy isn’t the end of the story. While it’s the sole remaining tangible evidence of his accomplishment, I suspect the more exciting reward as far as my parents were concerned was the $2,000 cash prize that accompanied it. In today’s dollars, that equates to more than $17,000 and that surely represented a large percentage of Dad’s annual salary as an agricultural extension agent. Mother tells me that they bought a bedroom suite and several wool rugs for the house, and she bought Dad a .22 pistol.