papers on the table. Finally, finding what he was after, he waved a black-and-white portrait of a handsome Bronze turkey. “Charlie!” he exclaimed.
“Out of a thousand turkeys,” Reese said, “there is always one who wants to be with you all the time. Charlie was my first. When I was a kid, the neighbor’s dog got his tail. The vet took one look and said, ‘You better just butcher him.’ I went nuts and said, ‘You fix him!’ So he sewed his tail back on, and Charlie and I hung out for the next ten years.”
For decades, Reese assumed that he’d gotten so friendly with turkeys when he was a kid merely to make the best of a frustrating situation. “I was the youngest and too little to drive the tractor or handle the cattle or pigs,” he said, “so I got sent to the poultry house.” Eventu- ally, though, he came to the awareness that there had to be more to it than that. “My father once said that he took me to the state fair when I was three and that all I wanted to do was drag him through the turkey ex- hibits,” Reese told me. “So maybe I was just born this way.”
Until he’d grown enough to manage turkeys on his own, Reese showed chickens. He took his first blue ribbon at the Saline County Fair when he was eight years old and won every year for the next decade. Start- ing at the age of ten, he showed turkeys too. “I got beat a lot,” he said. “Back then, there was no kids’ division and I was up there showing with all the old, legendary turkey breeders: Norman Kardosh and his Narragansetts, Sadie Lloyd and her Bourbon Reds, Cecil Moore and his Bronzes.” The older turkey
breeders may have taken home the blue ribbons, but they also took note of Reese’s talent. These farmers and enthu- siasts had spent lifetimes preserving American barnyard breeds, some of whose bloodlines could be traced to the 1890s. Until Frank Reese appeared, none of those breeders had anointed an heir to continue their legacy. Each knew the clock was ticking.
Growing up, Reese was never more in his element than he was at poultry shows. These bustling events, which took place across rural America throughout the 20th century (and still do, in some areas), culminated in big annual national competitions, where farmers and hobbyists displayed prized birds that they’d bred for hardiness, meat quality, reproductive prowess, and physical beauty. Held in vast exhibition halls, the juried contests were similar to dog shows, a Best in Show milieu in which hair dryers were aimed at feathers rather than fur. “If you won the national show, you were set because everybody wanted to buy your birds,” said Reese. The shows were also where older breeders mentored potential successors. “They taught me the breed his- tory,” Reese remembered. “They had me sitting on the ground with my standards book, studying each bird.” Reese was talking about Standards of Perfection, a guide published by the American Poultry Association that recognizes eight distinct varieties of turkey that are considered to be the purest farm breeds and describes the ideal physical characteristics of each one. The book, first published in 1874, harks back to an era when the difference between common breeds of chickens and turkeys were as dramatic as the differences between, say, a Great Dane and a Dachshund. These varieties were raised for different uses: big roasters for Sunday dinners, tough and flavorful stew- ers for soups, plump-legged fryers, and so on.
Norman Kardosh, a breeder from Alton, Kansas, was Reese’s most influential teacher. “Norman taught me about the importance of fine breeding, how it ensures the survival of the best bloodlines and how that, in turn, ensures biodiversity among the species. Without those two things, any creature is doomed to extinction.” At some point in the late 1970s, after earning a nursing degree and finishing a stint in the army in Texas, Reese realized that standard bred birds—as the types of poultry recognized in Standard of Perfection are called— were in trouble. He was raising turkeys at his home south of San Antonio and competing on the side. “I’d always competed against 50 to 100 birds at every show. Suddenly it was just me,” he recalled.
22 Winter/Spring 2012
greenwomanmagazine.com
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