Twenty-five Years Ago this week in The Colorado Statesman … Forty Front Range bigwigs piled aboard a chartered Continental Airlines airplane loaded down with stuffed animals and other memorabilia for the brief return flight from Pueblo after yet another successful venture by the Denver Rustlers. More than $75,000 in contributions went to the junior livestock auction on the charitable group’s record-setting annual outing. The budding institution had been sparked six years earlier when Jerry Robbe, the state fair’s executive director, and Tom Farley, a member of the fair’s advisory board, corralled business leaders to help boost the proceeds from the auction, which was barely raising enough to cover the expenses of the youth who had spent a year raising championship lambs, hogs and steers. Homebuilder Larry Mizel, dairyman Dick Robinson and Arden Hartman, general manager of the Mile High Kennel Club, came to the rescue, then Colorado Springs television station KRDO agreed to televise the auction, and a tradition was born. “When they arrive at the fairgrounds, it’s time for grown men to become little boys, with games on the midway, cotton candy and carnival rides,” The Statesman noted. City folks also took part in the third annual Robinson Dairy Milk-Off, won by the Colorado Springs team, though all enjoyed the “udderly fun event.” …

… New York Democratic Senate candidate Geraldine Ferraro filled a Denver backyard for a fundraiser in her bid to unseat incumbent U.S. Sen. Al D’Amato in the 1992 election. Ferraro thanked youngster Matt Stratton and his grandmother Shirley Siek, who was keeping track of the tyke on the swingset, for giving up his playground. “Where is Matt?” Ferraro later asked. “Probably out in the street playing with the cars,” quipped his dad, Mike Stratton, although the boy was plenty safe. Ferraro, who made history as the first woman candidate for vice president on a major party ticket seven years earlier, introduced two Democratic senators she said she was looking forward to working with – Tim Wirth of Colorado and Harry Reid of Nevada. Reid had only stopped by the fundraiser briefly on his way to the airport with Colorado pal Norm Brownstein. Ferraro said she was hopeful New York Gov. Mario Cuomo could help her campaign, particularly if he ran for president in 1992. She noted that her fundraising could use a boost, with an anticipated $8 million budget. “I have name recognition, people know I ran for vice president, but they don’t know my views or my personal experiences,” she said. “I’ve got to go on television; this isn’t grassroots.” …

… The bipartisan Denver Rustlers’ annual trek to the Colorado State Fair for the junior livestock sale produced its usual strange bus-fellows, including Senate President Ted Strickland and State Agriculture Commissioner Steve Horn. Horn had kicked off the recent controversial raid on the animal farm maintained by the Westminster Republican’s wife, LuAnne Strickland, who faced charges for boarding 637 too many animals in Strasburg. Strickland wasn’t shy about how “disgusted” he was with Horn, even joking that he’d remember everything Horn had done when it came time to budgeting his department next year. Horn, for his part, was happy to point to a recent court ruling that put a $64,000 price tag on the fine that could be levied for tending to the hundreds of animals the state had confiscated, even though it would cost the state in excess of $100,000 to care for them. Horn turned more serious, though, lamenting the hate mail and death threats he’d received since taking action against the menagerie. …

… In dueling takes on the “State of the Unions” to celebrate Labor Day 1991, Colorado Democratic Party Chairman Howard Gelt and Colorado Republican Party Vice Chairwoman Mary Dambman assessed the legacy and future of labor. Blossoming freedom in Russia – as in Poland, South Africa and other countries recently freed from the yoke of tyranny – depended on communication, Gelt observed after a visit to state Democratic Party headquarters by Nickolai Travkin, who chaired Russia’s new Democratic Party. “[As] the people of the world throw off dictatorships, we should say thank you to the American labor movement, a group which understood this truth and used it a decade ago to push for international freedom,” Gelt observed. Along with the National Chamber of Commerce and both major political parties, the AFL-CIO’s Free Trade Union Institute had created the National Endowment for Democracy in the 1980s to encourage democratic movement in oppressed countries. The Endowment had been a key supporter of Poland’s Solidarnosc Union, trade activists in Hungary and agitators in the Soviet Union, Gelt noted. Colorado Democrats gave Travkin copies of party rules, manuals and pamphlets to promote citizen participation, as well as helping the Russian understand how fax machines could spread the word. “For the time being,” Gelt added, “we will count on the AFL-CIO, the Free Trade Union Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy to help freedom grow.” Citing Megatrends author John Naisbitt – and the recently published Megatrends 2000 – Dambman proclaimed the new century would see the “triumph of the individual” as globalization made individuals more powerful. The American worker, she wrote, was no longer concentrated in a few huge industrialized corporations but in “the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that start up, grow and succeed or fail based on individual entrepreneurial skills.” The tools of the 1990s workforce were no longer heavy equipment, Dambman wrote, but computers, fax machines and cellular phones. The proposed free-trade agreement with Mexico wouldn’t threaten U.S. jobs, she concluded, but maintaining trade barriers and denying open market access between the United States and Mexico would cut American imports with the country’s third-ranking trading partner, killing jobs, adding, “Expanding markets for U.S. goods in our own hemisphere cannot help but strengthen American labor.”

– ernest@coloradostatesman.com