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construction to fit these iceboxes. Manufactured refrigerators that stood upright and had doors that opened from the side with a separate compartment for ice were owned by people that were thought of as being well-to-do, and these iceboxes were almost prestige symbols. Of course with either kind the ice melted faster when we kids opened and slammed the doors.
    We lived at the edge of the small town of Cumby,which boasted two meat markets. These meat markets had what were called walk-in iceboxes, and the ice was hoisted overhead with a block and tackle and put in the top compartment; these refrigerators were no more nor no less effective for the purpose used than the home iceboxes, which meant that the local meat market operator butchered beef several times a week in order not to take any chances on it spoiling from this damp, imperfect sort of refrigeration.
    Steak was the common diet for breakfast in the summertime. I slept on the porch all summer as a kid and kept my pony in a grass patch next to the yard. I would have preferred to have kept my pony in the yard where she could nuzzle her soft nose around on me in my sleep but my family had some kind of peculiar ideas about sanitation and keeping horses in the yard. However, I overcame this handicap when I went to cowboy’n’ and batch’n’. My first chore in the morning was to get up before the rest of the family and hop on my pony bareback and lope to town and get the steak for breakfast. Some people of course walked to the meat market, but there would be half a dozen other kids horseback that had loped to town to get steak for breakfast and the old meat market man would look out the door and see us waiting on our ponies and knew who we were, how many were in our families, how thick or thin our mothers wanted the meat cut, and pretty soon he would come out the screen door with his apron rolled up and hand us our separate packages of meat, and we would lope off home for breakfast. Needless to say, a kid sleeping on the porch in the open air, riding a pony a mile beforebreakfast thought steak for breakfast was just the thing.
    The meat in local markets would be from the carcass of barren cows or steers that weighed around 1,000 pounds and were thought of as lightweight, local-butchering-type cattle. Big steers that were shipped fat off the grass to supply the cities trade and especially Eastern markets were seldom ever weighed in at the packers under 1,400 pounds and 1,600-pound steers were ideal and thought to be more or less common to the finer trade. When T-bone, sirloin, or any of the better cuts were served in hotels or restaurants, all the tallow was cooked with the red meat and served on the platter. There was no air conditioning, very little if any so-called central heat, and closed automobiles referred to as sedans were barely making their appearance and we ate big heavy fat beef to supply energy to walk where we were going and the heat to maintain our bodies in bad weather. In all our ignorance the human race had not discovered vitamins and knew very little about minerals, food supplements, and so forth, and had we all stayed on a solid diet of aged beef, fresh vegetables and tree-ripened fruits, natural sun-ripened and carefully harvested cereal grains, it is just possible we might have never discovered the blessing of vitamins and other food supplements.
    During this period of the development of the cattle industry, it is true that some aged steers were fattened in the Corn Belt states and corn-fed cattle were considered by some people to be superior beef to grass-finished cattle of the same age.
    So-called milk-fed calf, baby beef and veal, was scorned as being a poor substitute for meat. Baby beefmight be served at a ladies’ luncheon but men scorned the stuff as a poor substitute for something to eat.
    The transportation and living conditions of Americans began to change right after World War I to the extent that there developed a small demand for what was