Agricultural leader Bill Even, who returned to the Des Moines area this year to run the National Pork Board, can tell you everything you want to know about raising hogs. In an interview for a future Business Record story, though, he admitted that a possible music career ended early and badly for him. He tried his chops on a trumpet his Dad acquired, but the Hummel Concerto in E-flat Major http://bit.ly/2e88GWf apparently was out of the question. “I don’t play an instrument. When we were little kids in the ’70s, we went to some farm auction and came back, and in this box of junk you buy at farm auctions for a dollar were two French horns and a trumpet. This would have been in about November. It was starting to get cold out and it was snowing. So what do you do with four farm kids, right? We started our own band in the house. After about a month of playing out-of-tune trumpet, and the French horns, and we picked up a snare drum someplace, one day all of this stuff was magically gone. Lo and behold, Dad took the two French horns and the trumpet down to the farm shop, took a hacksaw, cut the ends of them off and used them as funnels to put oil in the tractor. I’m sure he sold the brass to the scrap metal guy.”