PROCEEDINGS CORN BELT MEAT PRODUCERS' ASSN. 461 



thought much about what we need back home in order to keep it going 

 efficiently. 



I read a little story in a magazine the other day. It went on to tell 

 about football — the game of football. Of course we all understand that 

 it is a pretty rough-and-tumble game, and back at Harvard it was espe- 

 cially tough. One of their prominent football men down at Harvard, 

 during the summer vacation, went out west to work on a ranch. He 

 got some of the ranchers interested in football, and they thought it 

 would be nice to have some football out there amongst the cowboys. So 

 they got the boys organized into a couple of football teams. He got 

 busy and picked up enough men for two teams, of the finest looking 

 cowpunchers, and then he explained to them, he says: "Now, if you 

 can not kick the football, kick an opponent." And so they started in, 

 and finally the coach wanted to know, "Where is the football?" And 

 one cow-puncher says: "To h — 1 with the football; let's go on with the 

 game." 



Now that just reminds me of a lot of those co-operative shippers. 

 Let's go on and get this car out, and so on. We haven't paid much at- 

 tention to the form of our organization — haven't made it permanent or 

 stable. We haven't paid much attention to this matter of a manager. 

 Why, 'most any kind of a fellow would be a good man to manage a ship- 

 ping association. About the only thing required is the time to fiddle 

 with it; that is all. Because all you fellows are supposed to do is to 

 call him when you want to ship, and when enough fellows do that, he will 

 order a car and let it go out. Naturally, that handicaps us. Of course, 

 we haven't got enough business to begin with, to make it worth while 

 for a good man to be manager, and naturally it has been a sideline, and 

 a lot of these ex-managers would take what they can get. He would not 

 be very aggressive for the rest of it, if he were to handle it as a sideline. 

 Then we have boards of directors, too, and I can criticize a good many 

 boards of directors who haven't taken the interest in the thing that they 

 should. We haven't checked up the manager; we don't know what he 

 is doing. It is his association, and sometimes you know the board of 

 directors have complained to me, when I am out trying to help them solve 

 some of their problems: "Why, we can not get our manager to do this. 

 He doesn't want to do it that way." Well, maybe the manager is right. 

 Undoubtedly he is, lots of times; but if he is wrong, certainly it is the 

 duty of the board to have him do it the way they want it done. Man- 

 agers are not to blame always. The blame rests on both sides. We 

 haven't studied our business. We haven't had good managers, and there 

 is no business on earth that will live without a good manager. Then, too, 

 we have had the other problem that we haven't paid much attention to. 

 That is the membership problem. We must have members. Then there 

 is the matter of loyalty. You could take either one of these points and 

 you could talk for three hours on it and bring out a lot of good points. 

 We have seen members who are loyal to an organization that in many 

 cases is not really worth being loyal to. You know it, and I don't need to 

 go into details. I am just hitting the high spots, and leave it with you. 

 As I travel over this state and see how lots of this business is conducted 

 and the way the association is organized, I have had a faint suspicion 



