16 NATIONAL STANDARD SQUAB BOOK 
than the average beginner would spend: He is a superin- 
tendent of a large manufacturing plant, a man of push and 
energy, and he has four young boys in his family who have 
helped with the wife and grandfather to make the venture 
successful. It was a paying venture almost from the very 
start. Everything that we wrote about squabs as money 
makers came true in his case. One of the sons, a lad of nine- 
teen, came on to see us the first summer and told us the story 
of their success. He was after more breeding stock. He 
said he had many calls from peonle who wished to buy stock 
of him, and he was unable tc supply all of them, but he did 
not intend to have money offered him very long without 
being able to pass out the birds. In other words, they were 
going into squabs for all they were worth. They had not done 
any advertising, and had not.sold live breeders to any extent, 
but figured their profits solely on the sale of squabs to com- 
mission houses, and they were getting for them just what 
we said the commission men would pay. 
We have a great many visitors, some coming from remote 
points of the United States. One of our visitors in the 
summer of 1902 was Mr. A. L. Furlong, from a little town in 
Iowa. Mr. Furlong said to us: ‘‘lowa is quite a squab 
breeding State. There are plants in Ruthven, Osage, Wallake 
and Estherville. The owner of a plant in Ruthven I know 
very well. He showed me his account books; he was shipping 
from seven hundred to eight hundred dollars worth of squabs 
last month. He is making a profit of three thousand to five 
thousand dollars a year. He ships to the Chicago market, 
as do nearly all the Iowa breeders. He never gets less. than 
two dollars and fifty cents a dozen for his squabs. I am 
going to start raising squabs myself.”’ 
Mr. Furlong left an order for one of our Manuals, having 
given his first one to his friend. He said that his friend was 
breeding common pigeons and would like to know our methods. 
We discarded common pigeons some time ago. If our lowa 
friends will use Homer pigeons instead of common ones, they 
will produce a much better squab and make more money. 
We had a curious confirmation of the above in August, 1902, 
when Mr. E. H. Grice, who lives in the northern part of 
Vermont, visited us. Mr. Grice had just returned from a visit 
to the West, and stopped for a while at Ruthven, Iowa, where 
