All’s Fair : Rural and City Kids Take Part in Valley Livestock Auction

Eight-year-old Duke Keeble of Sun Valley had two things to be proud of after participating in Saturday’s Junior Livestock Auction at the San Fernando Valley Fair.

First of all, young Keeble raised the fair’s grand champion lamb, a 115-pound baby named Jason. And second, Duke helped persuade a neighbor, Terry Shelton, to bid a whopping $36 a pound for the lamb, money Duke will use to buy more animals to raise next year.

“I got a little carried away,” Shelton said, but you can’t blame him.

Throughout the day before the auction, Duke had been asking Shelton, “Are you going to buy my lamb?”

The four-day fair at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center ends today. Fair officials were optimistic the event would wind up a success. The crowds came out Saturday, but Thursday and Friday’s total attendance of 13,500 was down 500 from the first two days of last year’s fair.

“Five hundred is such a small number, it hardly makes a dent,” said Clover Hodgson, a spokeswoman for the event.

In the auction ring, where Duke and other youngsters trotted out their lambs, steers and other animals, farm kids and city kids alike competed for the highest prices they could get. On hand to help were auction spotters like Abraham Feltus.

“I think each and every sale is as important as the next,” said Feltus, enthusiastically scanning the crowd for bids, often climbing into the stands to encourage a higher offer.

“Sometimes they need a little nudging,” said Feltus, who has worked as a spotter for 30 years.

Feltus said he has learned not to pressure people to pay more than they want to for the kids’ animals. But he just might mention that this is a child’s first year in the auction and some extra money might inspire the child to stay involved in agricultural groups, such 4-H, Grange and the Future Farmers of America.

Feltus has gotten to know many of the kids’ families at these auctions, watched the children grow up and bring their own children to the auction years later.

“It’s like being in a ballgame and there’s no way to lose because you’re giving these kids as much as you possibly can,” Feltus said about the action in the auction ring.

“I don’t have a voice left,” said Steve Pietrolungo, an agriculture teacher at Canoga Park High School who was also a spotter.

Dominick Diaz, a 15-year-old from Torrance, raised the grand champion steer, which weighed in at 1,180 pounds. He sold the steer, named Wrigley, for $5 a pound, or $5,900. That gave the teen-ager, who paid $1,200 for the steer as a calf, a princely 300% return on his investment, not counting the cost of feeding and caring for Wrigley.

“It’s a seven-day-a-week job, with no holidays,” said Dominick,, a “city” kid who had to take his bike or get a ride everyday to the farm where Wrigley lived.

This year, Dominick also raised a lamb, chicken and turkey, and a pig named Sega, which he sold Saturday for $1.40 a pound. Sega is very smart, he said. “I taught him tricks.”

Nancee Siebert, whose 19-year-old daughter, Jessica, found her grand champion pig, Cha-Cha, as rambunctious as his name, enjoys the fact that the auction brings together kids from both urban and rural backgrounds.

“You can’t forget where your roots are,” said Siebert, whose children have been auctioning animals at the San Fernando Valley Fair for about seven years. It is also good for children to learn where the meat on their table comes from, she said.

An animal rights group, Last Chance for Animals, promised to picket the fair last night, claiming the Bull-O-Rama event is cruel to animals. Jan McClellan, a spokeswoman for the group, said about 100 protesters planned to hand out flyers at one of the fair entrances.