Description
Very Good dust jacket, a mylar dust jacket has been added. Illustration of man on horse with cows, with yellow lettering, wraps around to spine, blue lettering on rear of dust jacket. Bottom edge of front is creased and two tears 1/2″ each. The Very Good+ binding is yellow cloth over boards, black lettering on the spine. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 8.5″ tall x 6″ wide.
About the book (from the dust Jacket)
Just after World War I and following a Summer with a rag-tag harvesting crew and a season as a grain hauler in western Kansas, Ralph Moody decided to devote his time, small savings, and considerable enthusiasm to the livestock business – a fascinating, often grueling, but more often rewarding occupation.
With the backing of Bones Kennedy, the stern but sympathetic bank manager of Cedar Bluffs, Ralph started out trading and shipping mortgaged cattle and hogs He expanded into livestock feeding, teaming up with Bob Wilson, whose flair for judging cattle was surpassed only by his talent for losing money. A March blizzard followed by a June flood, nearly wiped them out and a threat of bankruptcy hung in the air.
But the twenty-one-year-old Moody took heart from the sage advice and friendship of George Miner, a poker-faced veteran of the cattle business. Ellie Simons, the ebullient telephone operator and local newscaster, buoyed his spirits with her insistent helpfulness. A year later, Moody was back on his George Miner described it, ‘with feet, as heaps of kettles boiling at one time.” What George did not notice was that one kettle on the back range was, in time, to boil over. Horse of a Different Color is the story not only of Mr. Moody S experiences as a Kansas livestock dealer but of the people who had the courage and fortitude to wrest a livelihood from that land of killing droughts, searing heat, and violent storms.
About the Author (from the dust jacket)
Ralph Owen Moody was born December 16, 1898, in Rochester, New Hampshire. His father was a farmer whose illness forced the family to move to Colorado when Ralph was eight. The family’s life in the new surroundings is told by the boy himself in Little The farm failed and the family moved to Britches. Littleton, Colorado, when Ralph was eleven. Soon after, his father died of pneumonia, leaving Ralph the man of the family. After a year or so – described in Man of the Family and The Home Ranch – Mrs. Moody took her three sons and three daughters back to Medford, Massachusetts, where Ralph completed his formal education through the eighth grade. This is the period of Mary Emma G Company. Later Ralph joined his grandfather on his farm in Maine. This is the background of The Fields of Home. A new series of books about Ralph’s later experiences starts with Shaking the Nickel Bush and The Dry Divide and continues through Horse of a Different Color. In spite of his farming experience Ralph Moody was not destined to be a farmer. “When I was twenty-one,” he writes, “I got a diary as a birthday present and I wrote in it that I was going to work as hard as I could, save fifty thousand dollars by the time I was fifty, and then start writing.” True to his word, he did start writing on the night of his fiftieth birthday. Mr. Moody now lives in California.
