Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to writing about a topic. This particular one took me about fifteen years.

Back in my thirties, while doing some research, I came upon an article from 1962. The headline was “Cow of Month Selected From Loudon Kyle’s Herd.” I thought it might make a good column sometime, so I printed it off, stuck it in a file, and immediately forgot all about it.

So recently, while I was reorganizing my files, I rediscovered this one, and I decided to dust it off and write the column. Hey, I’d decided to write about this. I’d never specified when.

Loudon Kyle was a local farmer. The headline would have been weird if he wasn’t. He was born in Mackeyville on February 11, 1912, the son of Loudon Senior and Mary Kyle. His father had purchased the Mackeyville farm in 1904. James H. Porter, another local farmer, had died, and his heirs sold the farm, including a steam-powered threshing machine, and Kyle Senior bought the works. He built a large barn there, and raised herds of cows.

Loudon Kyle Junior inherited the whole thing. In 1937, he married Kathryn Uebel, and then continued to work on his farm, as farmers do.

In April of 1962, the Clinton County Dairy Herd Improvement Association, which apparently was a thing, selected one of Kyle’s cows as their “Cow of the Month.” The cow was named 5203, because evidently Kyle was not a very sentimental man. 5203’s father was the more creatively-named Pabst Rambler Walker (I swear it’s true) of Lewisburg, owned by First Pennsylvania Artificial Breeding Cooperative. (A lot of this is kind of going over my head; I’m just reporting it.) 5203 was five years and seven months old at the time of the award.

So what did the notable 5203 have to do in order to earn this honor? She produced 17,618 pounds of milk. The testers for this were local men Thomas Fox and James Young, and they reported that the milk tested at 3.4 for a butterfat yield of 598 pounds. I assume that’s important.

County Agent C.P. McMinn was quoted in the article as saying that 5203’s father, Pabst Rambler Walker, had several children who all ranked first in milk production throughout Pennsylvania’s various breeding organizations. (I remember in journalism class in high school, I had to write an article about a horse named “RAF Durose B-Luck,” and now I’ve come full circle, writing about farm animals with funny names.)

Speaking of which, the newspaper also listed some of the runners-up. (All of them said it was an honor just to be no-moo-nated.) There was Blacky from Beech Creek, Dixie from Mill Hall, Pabst from Salona, and several others.

One of these was 5012, who belonged to, you guessed it, Loudon Kyle’s herd. Kyle apparently had dreamed of being an accountant, or saw no reason to mess around with cow names when he could be bottling all that milk instead.

The article also mentioned the high-producing herds in the county. Clair Courter of Mill Hall had the highest, with thirty-two cows that averaged 1,451 pounds of milk per cow. I never realized there was so much math involved in farming.

Loudon Kyle passed away on August 30, 1981. He was placed in Cedar Hill—the man was Mackeyville through and through. But he did accomplish “Cow of the Month” in April of 1962, it was reported on by the local newspapers, and I found it. And, just fifteen years later, I managed to write a column out of it.