AGRICULTURE: On the Block

Into a huge tent near Gunnison, Colo, last week strode brisk, blue-eyed “Colonel” Arthur Weimer Thompson, dean of U.S. cattle auctioneers. In his clarion voice he addressed his audience of 1,500: “You men are the backbone of America. Burn all the cities down—you farmers and ranchers will live. Tear up the farms and ranches—that’s the end for everybody.”

Having got wisdom off his chest, Thompson got down to business. He was there to sell 306 purebred Hereford cattle from the nearby Switzer & Field ranch. Quickly he sold nine animals for a total of $39,925, topped the whole lot with a whopping $46,000 for one prize bull, Baca OJR Royal I. In two arm-flailing days filled with Thompson’s rolling oratory, he and four assistants sold the entire Switzer & Field herd for $654,320.

Thompson has probably done more than anyone else to make Herefords the highest-priced cattle breed. In the last 42 years Auctioneer Thompson has knocked down $250 million worth of cattle at more than 7,000 sales all over the U.S. His record $506,000 for a single day’s selling, set at the auction of Colorado Rancher Dan Thornton’s Hereford herd in 1947, still stands (TIME, Oct. 6, 1947), as does the $65,000 bid at which he sold the prize bull Baca Duke II last year. Only eight Hereford bulls have ever been sold for more than $50,000. Colonel Thompson has auctioned them all off.

Hot Days. Art Thompson first made up his mind to be an auctioneer more than 50 years ago, as he trudged behind a horse-drawn cultivator on his father’s Nebraska farm. “As I walked those hot miles under the sun,” said he, “I thought that some day I would get a job where I could get a drink of water any time I wanted it.”

He practiced the auctioneer’s spiel as he did his farm chores, at 19 apprenticed himself to an auctioneer for three years, at nothing a year, and became an expert judge of fine cattle. “Doctors may make mistakes, patients die, and laymen don’t know why,” explains the colonel. “But on the auction stand you’re talking to men who know as much as you do.”

Sleepless Nights. As an expert, Thompson convinced cattlemen that high-priced bulls were cheapest in the end, because of the vast improvement the animals made in their herds. He has collected as much as $90,000 in fees in a single year. (For the Thornton sale, he got $16,000.)

He makes a wire recording of everything he says on the block, refunds the buyer’s cash if he has misrepresented an animal in any way. At 64 the colonel is still going strong, this week drove 200 miles to preside over an auction near Denver. Says he: “If I could have looked ahead and seen the long trips, and sleepless nights, I might have thought better of that walking cultivator.”