Chapter 1: Grandfather Stories

Forbears on both sides of my family were participants in this pioneering cattle shift. My great-grandfather on my father’s side, Oliver Perry Reeve, was the first of the family to come to Kansas, homesteading near Garden City in 1882, when he was middle-aged.

He brought his three young-adult sons of which my grandfather, George Herman, was the oldest. George Herman died when I was nine years old, so my history of him is based on family stories, but these portray him as a sad, unhappy man whom fate had dealt a poor hand. His brothers, Oscar and Byron, do not figure largely in this history.

My mother’s father, Frank Reed, Sr., arrived in Garden City in 1906, already an entrepreneur as well as a cattleman. His career spanned the East, Midwest and West, during which time he became rich and successful. Of course, he showed lots of courage in the face of both failures and successes.

Frank Reed, Sr., ran away from home and an abusive father in New York State at the age of twelve. He found a job driving cattle to the market at Lancaster, Penn. His “cattle trader” boss trained him well, and soon he was trading the cattle himself. His boss figured the customers would think they could out-trade the boy instead of the boy out-trading them. He made his boss a lot of money and, by the time he was sixteen, he was on his own.

After Pennsylvania, Granddad settled in Virginia where he established himself as a big trader of livestock, especially horses and mules. That is an art itself. He was constantly trading anything and everything. He refused to pay list price for anything, a trait which has been passed down through the generations. In 1906, a persistent cough convinced him, probably wrongly, that he had contracted tuberculosis, so he moved to a drier climate, ending up in Garden City, Kan.

After he moved to Kansas, his travels were primarily in the West. The horse and mul e business was very big until after World War I. A big mule auction, the Coulter Mule Barn, was located in Garden City (my animal hospital was on that site from 1952 until the 1970s). In the 1950s, Granddad traveled with me on some of my veterinary calls. Every farmer client was greeted with, “Have you got anything you want to get rid of?” or “This is sure a nice farm. Would you sell it?” or “Could you use some thin stock cows for that wheat pasture?”

He explained to me that to be successful you must have what he called “an inquiring mind.” His reputation was that he would spend all day trading with you, after which he would take you and your family out for drinks and steaks in the evening. He would only drink wine and beer because, to him, hard liquor affected the mind and its ability (to trade).

Of his nine children, Frank, Jr., and Mary (Mary’s married named was Patriarca) were the only ones with his trading ability. Frank, Jr., sold cars, a business that, early on, was an extension of horse-trading. Mary became a very successful real estate trader and ended up owning a cattle ranch where Washington’s Dulles Airport was later built.

About 1923, my grandfather lost his wife to cancer in California, where they had gone for treatment. Several years later, he met and married (too quickly) a very attractive California widow of wealth and what proved to be a mean disposition. Emma had lots of money, but he never saw any of it, even when he was nearly broke in the early 1930s. Emma was s omething else. Her description of the family was, “Those big-eared, knock-kneed, bow-legged Reeds”… an anatomical impossibility.

In the 1930s, Emma and Frank had an apartment in Long Beach, Calif., when it was a spa! One day he told her that he was going after a newspaper. Two weeks later, she learned he was in Garden City. He stayed away from her but always kept her in pretty good style.

In the depths of the depression, I remember meeting Emma’s daughter and her husband, who were destitute in California and had come to Kansas to seek help from Emma. As my mother said, “That girl sure had the wrong mother if she needed help.” Granddad fed them for a while before they drifted back to the coast.

Granddad had three 2,000-3,000-acre ranches east of Garden City. The first, southeast of Pierceville, he sold to his old friend Charlie Wortman, from Manter, Kan., about 1930. I remember Charlie loading sacks of cottonseed cake on three tandem-hitched wagons and driving away with several teams in front – six to ten horses. Very few men could handle teams like Charlie, my grandfather said.

In 1933, my grandfather lost most of a big herd of steers due to “sweet clover poisoning,” one of the first diagnoses of this condition. These cattle were cheap, but not that cheap. On top of his other losses, this reduced his wealth to very littl e. The drought of the “Dirty ‘30s” had started, and he formed a partnership with Ralph Halflich and moved to Arizona, leaving Ralph in Kansas. Ralph would buy purebred bulls in Kansas and ship them by rail to Arizona in carload lots, where Frank would trade them for steers. Prior to this time, the cattle of Arizona were of very poor quality; little dinky things of all colors. Soon Frank Reed became a very big figure in Arizona cattle circles and branched out into California. More important, the quality of Arizona cattle got better.

One time during the depressed years, Granddad rented the Goodyear rubber plantation at Litchfield Park, Ariz. Here Goodyear raised long-fiber cotton for tire cord and rotated crops to build up the soil. Granddad had heard there was a new banker in Phoenix who was actually looking for loans. He met the banker and borrowed a few thousand dollars to buy 1,000 steers. Granddad went to Deming, N.M., and found there had not been a cattle buyer in the area for a year. He started buying and soon found he had bought two thousand steers and not spent all the money he had borrowed to buy one thousand. He drove all night back to Phoenix to see the banker and told him what he had done. The banker said, “Get back there and keep buying cattle until I tell you to stop.” That was a guy after the Old Man’s heart.

Many years later when I was attending a bank meeting in Garden City, someone mentioned that the Valley National Bank of Phoenix had some delinquent real estate loans. I told the group my grandfather had Valley’s first real-estate loan in 1935 or ’36 when he bought a two-township ranch (72 square miles) near Prescott. He rounded up enough wild cattle on it to pay for the ranch. For the next 35 years, that bank never had a bad real estate loan.

Another time in the late 1930s, my father accompanied Ralph Halflich to McKinley-Winters Auction in Dodge City where Reed and Halflich had a trainload (about 50 carloads) of poor-quality Mexican steers. My dad said he had seen cheap cattle in his life, but nothing as bad as these. After they were sold, Ralph picked up the check, and they started back to Garden City. My dad said sympathetically, “Ralph, you and the Old Man do a lot of business and you’ll make it back.” Ralph said, “One thing about them, they brought twice what they cost,” or, as Granddad would say, “They made 2 percent.”

One evening in 1949, old Frank called me. “What time are you getting up?”

I answered, “six o’clock.”

“Get up a few minutes early and come by, and I’ll have breakfast cooked,” Frank said.

After we finished a delicious breakfast, he asked if I would take him to the bus depot. When we got there, he asked, “Have you got any money?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Lend me $200.”

I did, and he got out of the car.

A few days later, my Uncle Bill (my mother’s brother), who had endured a stroke and thereafter lived with Granddad, told me, “The Old Man sure knocked a home run with those Steenis cows.”

My heart sank. “What Steenis cows?”

“When you left him at the bus station, he caught a bus to the La Junta, Colo., auction, bought two hundred thin cows for about $100 each and sold them to this farmer he met on one of your vet calls for $200 each.”

That was a $20,000 profit. I called Dal Steenis and suggested, if he hadn’t paid for the cows yet, he should “renegotiate” the price because my grandfather sometimes asked too much for his stock.

Dal replied, “I’ve already made a satisfactory deal. Besides, that’s a hell of a way to talk about your grandfather.”

The next spring, as might be expected, the market wasn’t good and Dal faced a loss. Then Granddad found a packer in California who would give enough to get Dal even. That’s a trader and maybe a friend. Dal always thought of him as a friend and advisor. He did help Dal.

The Old Man was a very good cook and a believer in a large stock of provisions. The introduction of the deep freeze was a boon to him. He always insisted on visitors staying to eat, and made food a big thing in his life. He also was on the lookout for real estate, cattle, hay, grain and many other items at all times. He would spend all day trading on a stack of hay.

There was a cool relationship between my father and Granddad Reed. It traced back a long way. When my mother and father got married, their respective fathers were in a lawsuit, and each group of sons had to keep the old men apart at the wedding reception. My grandfather furnished one of the shocks of my life when I returned from college the Christmas season after my mother died of encephalitis in 1940. I found my father and his father-in-law living together in my dad’s small apartment. The rest of Frank’s life they were close and dear friends.

After I came back to Garden city in 1947, my grandfather returned from California with big money. I had contracted undulant fever or brucellosis while in Missouri and since I was feeling poorly and scared of permanent invalidism or death, I didn’t see much of him at first. He had taken over my Uncle Dick’s new house because Dick and his screwball wife, Pauline, had bought it when they couldn’t afford it and were about to lose it. My wife Dorothy and I were appalled when Granddad took us there and showed us the hardwood floors. Pauline, after returning from her nightly sojourn to the taverns while Dick was working two jobs, had washed the floors with Clorox, apparently to kill the germs.

Several years before, Granddad, who always tried to keep Dick out of financial trouble, had given him the ranch he still owned west of Pierceville. Granddad had gone to his friend, old Judge Vance, and insisted on an irrevocable trust deed to Dick, which meant he could not sell, mortgage or give it to Pauline, which he was perfectly capable of doing. After several abortive attempts to stock the ranch with cattle in partnership with Dick, Granddad finally bought Dick a little house in town and had Dick deed the ranch back to him. This escapade made Granddad’s heirs over a million dollars. (It doesn’t hurt to be lucky.)

A remarkable feature of the Old Man’s business life was his regard for his partners. He always insisted that each partner benefit to the extent of his participation in any joint activity. If he made a deal to put 100 steer calves with Herb Clutter, he would spell out that he would furnish the money for the cattle and the freight, but Herb would pay for medicine, feed, labor and other necessities. Some deals were complicated, with different selling times and divisions of the money through ownership. It helped me a lot in my business life, because I learned who to partner with and who to leave alone.

Early on I had several partnerships with beet farmers grazing cattle on beet tops. They always worked nicely and we parted friends. These graduated on up to absentee partners who generally performed very well. There is very little room for success in agriculture. So many times a venture makes no money, very little money or even loses money.

There was one great story the Old Man didn’t tell me, but his partner did. Mr. A. S. Ardery was a Syrian, short and burly. He had the Arab’s trading ability and adapted to America very rapidly. He told me that in the late 1920s, just before the markets crashed, Granddad Reed and he had bought 800 heifers to run on Ardery’s wheat pasture during the fall and spring, after which they would be grazed on the two river ranches of Reed’s for the summer. In the spring, they were offered about $20 to $30 per head profit, since they had gained a lot of weight on wheat. Ardery wanted to sell at least his half of them, but the Old Man refused, insisting on the original deal, but adding bulls to breed the heifers. That fall, Granddad found a New Mexico ranch that he leased to run their cowherd. Ardery tried to get out, even offering to take the spring offer for the cattle to pay for his summer care. The Old Man was so positive, but the New Mexico deal was like they generally are, plagued by drought, weed poisoning, cattle rustling and other damages. Then the market started dropping rapidly. Granddad and Ardery had to sell their droughty pairs at a loss. Ardery refused to pay his share. During the 25 years after the cattle were sold, the two men did not speak to each other.

Mr. Ardery was a good veterinary client and we always enjoyed each other’s company. One cold night he called. He had found an Arizona cow that had been trying to have a calf for maybe two days. They finally got her in the old barn just at dark and called me. The old barn had numerous drafts and the cow was on the prod and had long sharp horns. After maybe an hour, Ardery’s sons, Russell and Raymond, and I got a rope on her, tied it to a stout fence, and I went to work. I had to remove the calf by embryotomy, which is just what it says, in a cold building with very little water and an odor you couldn’t believe. After we finished, Mr. Ardery wanted to know what he owed me. I told him, “I’ll make a deal with you. If the cow dies, you don’t owe me anything. If she lives, I want double, or $130.” He agreed.

Two weeks later, I saw Raymond at the Garden City sale and asked about the cow. She had lived; maybe as he said, “she was too mean to die.” In fact, she apparently hadn’t missed a meal. I saw A. S. in the restaurant, sat down beside him, and then said to him, “Now you can write me a check for $130.” He looked surprised. I told him I had seen Raymond who had told me the cow was fine.

Ardery said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with that boy. He’s too dumb to ever amount to anything.” Then he laughed and wrote me a check.

Granddad was a dear friend of Herb Clutter of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Herb depended on Granddad for most of his cattle advice and bought the Pawnee ranch, 22 miles northeast off Highway 156, from the Old Man just a few years before Herb was killed.

Granddad also leased the Pierceville ranch to Bob Morrell about 1948-49. Bob was from Paonia, Colo., on the Western Slope close to Delta. His father had been running sheep on wheat pasture around Garden City while Bob was in World War II. He decided Garden City was a lot easier place to be in livestock than western Colorado, and it sure was. Bob also leased the 5,000-acre John Adams ranch 20 miles south/southwest of Garden City. He then bought 500 New Mexico cows off the desert and planned on ranching these two Garden City ranches. The drought of 1952-57 ruined his set-up. He gave up the leases and went back to Colorado pretty broke. He and his wife were good friends of ours.

Granddad had wonderful neighbors – Jim Fare, the manager of the gas company, on one side, and the widow Brakey on the other. He kept them in meat, had them to the Reed family gatherings, and treated them and the Fare children better than his own family, who, in some cases and depending on likes and dislikes, he treated rather shabbily. I know that he discriminated against his son, Harry, and his wife, Eileen, whom he called “The Wop.” He was never great with my mother, Tom, Bill, or Effie (whose married name was Scott), but wonderful to Frank and Mary, and supportive of Dick. He was really nice to me, but I was also very nice to him and enjoyed his stories and activities.

In 1948 Granddad bought a new Cadillac, the first of the fishtail design. I think he paid $2,500 for it. He went to the Nolan Motor Company to look at one after he had worked cattle and was a little dusty and no doubt had manure on his boots. John Nolan’s son-in-law forbade him to sit in the car. Granddad went home, called a friend in Kansas City and bought a gray Cadillac from him. John Nolan almost died when he heard the story, which was soon all over town. The son-in-law was demoted out of the front and into the used-car lot.

Grandfather developed diabetes, a family failing, sometime after he was 70 years old. He had to get a daily insulin shot. He acted like it was a penalty his doctor, Bill, Peggy (Uncle Bill’s wife) and I forced on him to restrict his diet and make his life more complicated. He was not a good patient but furnished plenty of conversation and laughter.

After 1955, he went downhill gradually until he died in 1957. He had tried to leave each child a home, including $5,000 dollars he loaned me in 1948 to build a 20-foot-square house and an office of a “garage” design. He almost refused to take the repayment the next year, but 80 years of greed took over and he finally took the money, plus interest. Dorothy had designed the interior and it worked for basic living, making our home life much better than when we lived in the store building with 18-foot ceilings we had rented in Missouri and after living with my dad for eight months in Garden City.

Granddad lived to age 87, so I got to enjoy him. He had many phrases such as, “It isn’t hard to make money; it’s hard to keep it,” and “I’m just a country boy, and you city slickers should be ashamed to take advantage of me.” The latter was said when he had just out-traded the other man. When my father took a handful of cigars from Granddad’s Roi Tan box, Granddad would say, “And he doesn’t even know what they cost.”

Some of the Old Man’s other pronouncements were: “The only person a banker wants to lend money to is one who doesn’t need it,” or “You’re treating me like an orphan child.” When his fly was open at age 85 he said, “What can’t get up can’t get out!” and “I’d rather make a dollar on one steer than lose a penny on a thousand.”

Granddad had many of the prejudices of his time. I’ll never forget his struggle toward friendship with an elderly black man named, Mr. King, who had been a moderately successful farmer and stockman north of Garden City. When they would meet at the Wednesday livestock sale, they had to help each other onto the elevated bench seats with their canes and big hats. It was pitiful yet fun at the same time. The Old South was prominent in my grandfather, and Mr. King had come to Kansas to escape prejudice. Neither knew how to handle their new relationship.