The speech makers

Now days it's not unusual for purebred breeders to offer 500 bulls in a sale, but when I started working bull sales 46 years ago, a typical sale might offer 60 or 70 bulls, and it would take almost as long to sell them as it does 500 head today. The reason it took so long was because the sale managers and auctioneers would make long speeches about nearly every bull in the sale. They'd prattle, harangue, preach and babble on about some dwarf relative five generations removed from the inferior bull in the ring, and they put a lot of fire into these speeches. Instead, most of their speeches should have been put IN the fire.

Horse sales were even worse. I worked a lot of them, and we’d average selling about 10 head per hour, and if we sold 12 it was considered a blistering pace. Most of the horse sales I worked were for Dean Parker and Thane Lancaster, two of the best that ever lived. Thane had an encyclopedic knowledge of horses and Dean was one of the best horse auctioneers I’ve ever heard. His speeches were real stem winders, and if he’d had chosen to be a preacher instead of an auctioneer, I have no doubt he’d have been bigger than Billy Graham.

If an auctioneer or sale manager had a reputation as being fairly knowledgeable, there might be a flurry of bidding after a long speech, but just as often, all this speechifying didn’t result in an advance of the bid. It’s like the story Mark Twain told about being so inspired by a preacher’s sermon and he was ready to put $400 in the collection plate, but the preacher kept on droning and Mark changed his assessment of the remarks to $300, then $200, then $100 and by the time the preacher concluded his remarks Mark stole 10 cents out of the collection plate.

It wasn’t just auctioneers, sale managers and preachers who were more long-winded back then. It was quite common for a President’s state of the union address to take two hours of good TV time, which prompted Will Rogers to comment, “It’s oratory that’s killing this country.”

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