This year’s offering at High Point Genetics in Osceola, Iowa.

Bull sale season is wrapping up now, and it hardly arrives or passes without my mind still going back to the late Fred Johnson.  As I got to know him in my early 20’s, he was getting into his 80’s.  Once a year we would visit for an hour or so, and in the process he would always relate the little stories that carried with them a lifetime of observation.

“You know I was once at a big Angus sale in Upstate New York.  I had wound up sitting beside a guy who owned a fine New York City steakhouse.  He had decided he was going to get into the Angus business, and he did so by giving $20,000 for a $500 heifer calf.

We had talked a little prior, and right after his purchase he turned and asked me, ‘So, is there any money in this business?’

I replied, ‘You’re damn right there is.  I’ve sunk a fortune into it.  The trick isn’t putting it in, though, the trick is getting it back out.'”

You’ve probably never heard of Fred Johnson, nor his now gone ranch of Summitcrest, but if you’ve ever heard of Certified Angus Beef, then you are probably familiar with his accomplishments.  And if your childhood memory is like mine, and you remember the lime green and yellow tile floor at the local McDonald’s, then you remember the culmination of the Johnson family’s Summitville Tile business.

The purebred business is a funny thing, made up of all types of folks, just like life is.  For some it’s the image of rugged independence, steadfast loyalty, and high regard for a reputation.  Fred never seemed overly concerned about these at all.

What is rugged independence, after all, but dependence so great it drives one to isolate themselves?  What is loyalty, but the willingness to do what someone wants you to do for them rather than doing what you should do for them?  And who, at our age, would be unable to come up with a whole list of the disreputable things we’ve done in order to keep our reputations?

The first time I spoke to him, he asked me if I knew what the most important part of a registration paper was.  After some hesitation, I simply admitted I didn’t.

“It’s the breeder’s name at the top.  If you can’t believe that, then nothing else really matters.”

Perhaps in order to believe it, you need someone who recognizes the dependence the next owner will have on it.  Someone who’s willing to tell you what you don’t want to hear.  Who has the humility to tell you what they don’t want to say.  I believed Fred Johnson.

In one of his obituaries, I found that Fred had been injured in World War II, and left on the battlefield for dead.  A couple of days later, they found he wasn’t, and he began a several month process of making it back to the living.  I suppose he had plenty of time for reflection.

It seemed Fred put his whole self into his life, with a tenacity and determination still evident in his early 80’s.  Maybe that is the trick, then, that allows someone like me to still get a piece of it back out.  We are all worth the same, some just have a knack for adding value.

My father and Tom Judy, who managed Fred’s Iowa ranch, and cut from the same cloth.