Memory fades but the show whites were washed and pressed by Mom and folded sharply and stuffed in a duffle bag in the dormitory until show day. There were all different classes for showing cows and calves based on the age of the animal, and what was supposed to be proven, and there were other showmen there too, other than 4-H’ers, like Future Farmers of America (FFA) people – the real professional farm kids who seemed to pledge their lives to carry on farming at all costs.

I think the FFA kids had separate barns at the fair and separate competitions. But they chased after the same girls and they had these natty jackets, dark blue with gold embroidery proclaiming they were the future of America, and hey, I was just lowly 4-H, and my Dad knew, sadly, at some point in his stint of fatherhood, that neither of his boys was going to continue farming – not with milk cows at least. But at this stage of life, nothing was determined and we each had our own animal and trained her and took care of her as if we too might have a future in the milk industry, but our county, once a top producer in the state of New York, was under constant pressure from developers and cheaper sources of milk, and for an almanac reader like myself, a mental graph could be made which showed the inevitable decline and fall of the family farm and the near complete urbanization of the county so far from the big city but not far enough.

My father never pressured either of us to follow in his footsteps. He saw the writing on the wall long before the end was clear to others. He spent an inordinate number of evenings at planning board meetings and town council meetings, and it wasn’t easy on him holding up his hands against a tidal wave of cheap money and developers in fancy shoes like he was a Dutch boy in front of a dyke of heavy equipment. He tired of the cows too, and knew he could never condemn either son to the life he had chosen. As much as he loved the land and the animals, the morning milking and the evening milking each day, every day, without cessation, and without the resources to hire fulltime help, was enough that an episode of ill-health was all it took to see the herd go down the road a second and final time. So, what he gave us was our childhood and our freedom, each as sweet, now, in memory, as the last.

The show tent occupied the high ground above the pole barns and the 4-H building. My calf that year was a Holstein on the black side of the Holstein color spectrum, and she had a very straight backbone, and perfect legs and the skin of her tail was pink and the tip of the tail, the fly swatter part, was brilliantly yellow white. For a cow, she had an above average IQ. One side of the show tent had bleacher seats and that’s where the parents sat, and the siblings (if not old enough to be out running the Midway), and other spectators.

I had washed and curried my calf the day before and had hoped there was not a great mess over the nighttime hours, and we were fine. I put on my fancy whites – white pants and white shirt and black belt, feeling like a man in a white dinner jacket – and we all felt special, and yet nervous and apprehensive like at a spelling bee, or a tryout for the Gong Show.

When the county was still full of hundreds of dairy farms, the competition within the show ring was fierce. We walked backwards leading our heifers by the polished show halter, and I paid acute attention to how my animal walked, as she was being judged on a long list of factors and it was my job, the job of the showman, to highlight her good Holstein qualities while hiding her weaknesses from the judge. Like a lanky model at a fashion show, or dogs at the Westminster dog show, a lot of it was how you held the head.

We all walked backwards in a big circle around the perimeter of the ring with the judge in the middle. That girl, Genie, was in this class too, and I tried to put her out of my mind even thought she was dressed all in white too and was tallish, but not too tall, and thin, a blonde, and she evidenced the blushing red cheeks of her Dutch heritage, as many of the farm families had come to this county from Holland, and even our cows, the Holsteins, the bloodlines came from the Nederland. She was considerably attractive and even glanced at me once in a while. I tried to get on duty doing my volunteer hours selling milk and hamburgers in the small grill on the ground floor of the 4-H building the same times she was on duty, and once or twice that worked out. She wasn’t very talkative, at least not with me, and that was somewhat awkward, as there were days I was known to say nothing at all.

There was a major disturbance in the ring. I didn’t know what the problem was and, basically, out of laziness, I simply ignored it. I kept my eyes on my heifer, Jessie, and she didn’t skip a beat either. My mother was in the bleacher seats with my younger sisters in tow, and Old Man John Roebuck was in his whites and in the ring too doing ring-poo-maintenance with a square faced shovel on cow-pie duty and he hurried across the fresh wood shavings of the ring to attend to the episode. I never knew what happened. But the judge pulled me out of line on the next go ‘round and he moved me up into second place and into the blue-ribbon portion of the conga line of cows. Genie was there too, with her very white calf and her very blonde hair, and that meant both of us were going to the State Fair in Syracuse. And that was better than knowing what ever had happened in the ring to disturb the whole competition.

The judge, during his comments, mentioned he moved me up in the competition because my “showmanship” was superior and because I hadn’t been distracted in my task by the commotion and that I had kept to the task.

So up I went.