![\"Photo](\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/miscphotos\/chickentrophy.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThis 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.<\/i><\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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> (I never realized until now that this occurred on his 32nd birthday.)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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… Continue reading Dad: A Major Award<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9772,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions\/9772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}