I’m currently researching and writing a history of the National Western Stock Show’s Catch-a-Calf program to mark its 90th year. The program began in 1935 with a group of boys who entered the fat steer show that year. Among them were Joe Beauprez of Boulder, Harry Bostrom of Sterling, Harold DeBacker of Boulder, and Dwight and Robert Sheard of Joes.

Joe Beauprez came from a dairy farming family back when Boulder County was one of the state’s agricultural strongholds. Boulder County was flush with dairies at the time with Watts Hardy Dairy in town. Before the company was purchased by Sinton in the 1980s, they processed and pasteurized dairy products for distribution to stores and delivered dairy products to front-porch milk boxes. The Beauprez family, like other dairy families in the area, raised their own feed including alfalfa, corn, high moisture corn silage, barley, oats and haylage.

Joe met his wife, Marie, when he went to a neighboring farm to study how that farmer had developed a water resource to make better and more efficient use of water on the farm. The farmer happened to have three unmarried daughters and when Joe saw Marie walking up the hill from the spring with a bucket of water in each hand, a lifelong love story began.

The two wed and together they weathered tumultuous economic times in the 1950s and again in the 1970s. When Joe paid off his debt just before the domestic farm crisis of the 1980s, it allowed them to survive those years, and he never borrowed another penny.

The lessons of faith and financial independence Joe and Marie taught their children served them well when they began farming and, for their son, Bob, notably when he represented Colorado in Congress.

Harold DeBacker also grew up in Boulder and in the years after he caught a calf in Denver, he courted his future wife, driving her home over Trail Ridge Road. As the story goes, he drove close to the edge of the road so she would scoot closer to him. She later said “her father liked him because he was a Republican and her mother liked him because he was a Presbyterian, and she liked the sparkle in his eyes.” The DeBackers also dairied and their farm is part of Boulder County Open Spaces.

Dwight and Robert Sheard also caught calves that inaugural year. Robert found his way to Kansas where he was a landscape engineer at the University of Kansas and raised cattle. Dwight, like many young men of that era, sold his calf and found himself in World War II as a corporal in the U.S. Army.

Harry Bostrom farmed with his grandfather near Brush in the years following his Catch-a-Calf participation. He was hailed out in 1956, again in 1957, and then in 1958, he was hailed out on June 15, July 15 and Aug. 15. The softball-sized hail was so severe it killed a calf. He made the decision to move his young family to town to work outside of agriculture. He died young, but his son said he took his family to the National Western every year.

Chuck Sylvester spent many years managing the National Western and is a gem of a story himself. His favorite story about the Catch-a-Calf program, though, is about Richard Reinick.

Reinick was one of 10 boys to catch a calf in 1951. He happened to have only one arm, having lost the other in a farm accident as a young child. According to a Rocky Mountain News article, two stockmen volunteered to give Reinick a calf, but he declined and “showed them he could get one just as well as his two-armed competitors.”

According to the news coverage, the crowds nearly screamed themselves hoarse cheering for Reinick, who struggled with his calf for 12 minutes, dropped the halter and was drug 30 feet from it before backing the calf back to the halter, picking it up with his feet, and slipping it on the calf upside down. He righted the halter with one hand and his teeth before leading it.

Reinick joined 4-H and raised turkeys, selling them and raising enough money to purchase sheep. He sold the sheep to purchase a steer, and he sold that steer after successfully showing him at the National Western in 1948. He was first eligible to catch a calf in 1949 but wasn’t successful. After he caught his steer in 1951, Reinick was contacted by Harry Huffman, a businessman and former Denver theater manager, who read about his crowd-pleasing catch.

“I thought to myself, that’s the kind of boy we’re trying to build in America!” Huffman said. “That’s the spirit that can’t be licked!”

Huffman offered to buy Reinick — who was the president of his 4-H club, a trumpet player in the band, and a multi-sport athlete (baseball, track, and basketball as well as being named to the all-state football team) — a prosthetic limb. Reinick declined, telling Huffman there was something he wanted more than a prosthetic arm: a hog. Huffman provided a hog to Reinick.

Reinick returned to the National Western in 1952 and placed 10th with his steer, sponsored by Bill Votaw, a member of the National Western Stock Show committee.

Reinick farmed in the Kersey area most of his remaining days, raising hogs, sheep and dairy cows. When he died in 2016 at the age of 82, his obituary made mention of the Catch-a-Calf program and how he “caught a catch-it-calf down at the Denver stock show.”

These stories barely scratch the surface but, on this Labor Day, they most certainly illustrate the dignity of hard work.

Rachel Gabel writes about agriculture and rural issues. She is assistant editor of The Fence Post Magazine, the region’s preeminent agriculture publication. Gabel is a daughter of the state’s oil and gas industry and a member of one of the state’s 12,000 cattle-raising families, and she has authored children’s books used in hundreds of classrooms to teach students about agriculture.