Part III-The Farm, Chapter 23-After The Dairy

CHAPTER 23
A. D. (After the Dairy)
1987-2003

In 1987 I made a decision to make a major change in the direction I was going on the farm. I decided I was going into the dairy business. Ronda, Gary and I were going to pool our resources and labor. I bought a mobile home and moved it on the place for them. Since cows were selling for about $800 each, the old dairy barn needed to be renovated, and I had no milking equipment, it was apparent that I needed to borrow some money if I was going to start milking cows. It didn’t take long to find out that the bankers didn’t think it was a good credit risk. I was turned down by all the local banks, the Federal Land Bank, and the dairy co-operative. I didn’t think so at the time but found out later they were doing me a big favor. I was determined to go ahead with the plans and came up with a way to do it. I sold my beef cows and bought 75 three day old dairy heifers. With the money left over, I bought used milking equipment and started remodeling the barn.
Gary and Ronda were a big help. I bought the baby calves 25 at a time. (See figure 28.) I bought the first bunch from Wisconsin; the second bunch was from Sulphur Springs and the last from Stephenville. It is no small job to mix formula and wash bottles for that many hungry mouths. Keeping that many calves healthy is also a constant battle. We put a collar and leash on the calves to keep them separated and help prevent spread of disease. We fed them on the bottle for six weeks; by that time they were eating grain and it was time to wean them. It is something to see 25 calves that have been tied up all their life suddenly realize they are no longer on the end of a tether. They go bounding and jumping all over the place. Some even have problems judging their stopping distance and will slam in into a fence or tree.
Gary and I remodeled the barn when we weren’t tending to calves. It was a double six stanchion barn with a feed room when we started and we converted it to a double four herringbone with a pit. After breaking the old floor out of the barn, we dug the pit using an old fresno that my Grandpa Sullivan had left on the place. We couldn’t back the tractor in the barn because the door was too low so we tied a chain on to pull it; then to get it back in the barn, we tied a cable on the fresno, drilled a hole in the back wall and ran the cable through the wall. Then we used the pickup to pull the fresno back inside. It worked great until I was pulling out one load and the lip of the fresno caught on the barn foundation as it went through the door. Gary had hold of the fresno handle and before I could stop, it almost threw him out of the barn like a slingshot.
Not being able to get financing had some disadvantages as well as advantages in starting the dairy. The biggest advantage was there was no loan to pay back but the biggest disadvantage was there was no income for two years. I had my Air Force retirement to live on but Ronda and Gary were really put in a tight spot. Gary started substitute teaching at Slidell and several other schools.
One day when Stephanie was three, Ronda missed her. She looked behind the dairy barn and found her swimming in the cow trough. Ronda ran back to the house and got her camera; today we have a picture of a little girl, naked as a nail, feet dangling in the water, clothes in a pile on the ground and a surprised look on her face. It was about this same time that Stephanie slipped away from her mother in Payless Cashways; Stephanie was pulling up her panties when she found Ronda and bragged to her, “I went potty all by myself.” She had filled one of the display toilets.

By 1988 it became apparent that Ronda and Gary were not going to be able to hang on until the cows started milking; Gary took a full time job teaching in Gilmer. I continued to work on the barn. I bought used stanchions from Darrell Wilson. I bought a milk tank, cooler, feed system, vacuum system, pipeline, and milking units from a doctor’s dairy on highway 730 north. He had sold his cows in the dairy buy-out program that the government sponsored a few years earlier. I had a lot of work to do to get the barn ready but had plenty of time to get it done. In addition to installing the equipment, I enlarged the holding pen and rebuilt some of the fences for the lane coming into the barn. I had to raise the roof in the milk room in order to get the big milk tank in. The tank was so big it was a “through the wall” installation, with half of it outside. I converted the old feed room into an office and bathroom. I made the feed troughs out of concrete. It turned out to be a very nice barn.
I went to A.I. (artificial insemination) school and started breeding the heifers artificially when they were about 15 months old; by doing this, I was able to use a much better bull than what I could have afforded for natural service. I had planted wheat every year since I had the good yield in 1984 but never had such a big yield again. By the end of the year, we were close to being ready to milk. Roger and Roy were getting excited about the dairy too. One day we were coming home from church in Greenwood and we passed the Stevens dairy; the car windows were down and Roy said, “Hmm, smell that dairy air!” We laughed and later Nell found a picture of the south end of a bunch of Holstein cows lined up at the feed trough with the caption, “Derrière”.
I didn’t realize it at the time but I made a mistake in not buying another batch of calves in 1988. As it was, I didn’t have any replacement heifers coming into the herd until 1991; if I had bought 50 more calves at this time, I would have been in much better shape in the future.

On June 25th, 1989, our first grandson, Taylor, was born in Longview, Texas. Gary was coaching in Longview full time and Nell went over to help with the baby for a few days. Taylor was a tiny little thing and we found out later, he needed to take daily growth hormone shots. With the boost the shots have given him, he is close to normal size at this time.
I continued to work on the dairy barn and get things ready for the cows to freshen in the fall. In the summer, Roger was selected to go to San Marcus for a “Young Scholars Summer Science Experience.” Everything went fine for his trip until Nell went to the airport to bring him home. She got about half way there when the transmission went out on the car. She had just turned off I35 and was able to coast into a parking lot before it stopped completely. She called me at home and we tried to see if we could get it moving again but had no luck. I finally took the pickup down to get her. After we went on to the airport and picked up Roger, we came back to the car and towed it home. We were both exhausted after we got home about two AM. The transmission had to be overhauled.
The Navy had stationed Randy in Bermuda and he was going to be reassigned soon. Nell had always wanted to go to Bermuda and he wanted us to come for a visit. Earlier he had sent us tickets, but we were unable to get away at that time. We found a “space available” military flight going over there from Memphis. We knew that if we didn’t go now we wouldn’t have another chance after we started milking. So we drove to Tennessee and got on a National Guard C-130 headed for Bermuda. This brought back memories of flying with CSE out of MacDill AFB. There was one big difference: On this flight, Nell and I were the only ones on the plane except for the crew. When we flew out of MacDill, the plane was always stuffed full of men and equipment. We had the whole cargo compartment to ourselves except for five or six suitcases and some of the crew members had golf clubs.
When we got to Bermuda we had a good time. Randy took us all over the island part of the time; at other times he had to work so we wandered around on our own, or lay on the beach, or did what ever struck our fancy. It was against the rules to rent a car on Bermuda without a local driver’s license so we tried renting a motor scooter but that didn’t work out. With two of us riding on one scooter, I found it hard to control; the streets were narrow and the traffic moved fast (on the wrong side of the road) so we decided to turn the scooter back in. I don’t know why we didn’t just rent two. We found out there were no wells in Bermuda and most of the water used in the house was rain water caught from the roof. Since most people didn’t like to drink water from where the birds roosted, they used bottled water, some of it carbonated. That which was carbonated, we called “fuzzy water”. We spent six days there and headed home. On the return trip we had about 30 other passengers in the plane with us. Mom kept Roger and Roy while we were gone. When we got back, we found out we had been gone about an hour before the boys took the grain truck, out to the field and the transmission went out; it sat there for our whole trip.
We got back on the 8th of October and we had our first dairy calf on the 10th. It just happened that the first cow to have her calf had ear tag #1. Ronda had named her Miss Piggy because of the gusto in which she consumed her bottle when she was a calf. I milked her a few days; Joe and Wilma England wanted some milk so I was going to give her milk to them. They insisted on paying for it and I still have the dollar bill they gave me; the first dollar I ever made on the dairy. I didn’t start selling milk until I had enough for the truck to come pick it up. So for the next few weeks, each time a cow would freshen, I took her to Kenneth Caldwell to milk until I was ready; he had a dairy on Highway 51 just across Denton Creek from me. On the 30th of November I brought my cows home and started milking.

It was a nice way to start the year 1990; we had a milk check coming in twice a month. After two years hard work, it started to pay off. Everything in the barn worked as it should except I didn’t have an adequate manure disposal facility. I had a small lagoon and it was filling up fast. To remedy this, I bought a used liquid manure spreader that I had found in the classified ads in a dairy magazine. The only problem was it was in Illinois. At the time, Chuck lived in Iowa and had an SUV. When I found out he was coming down here, I imposed on him and he pulled it down here for me. It was a 1500 gallon spreader so it was bigger than his SUV, but he got it here okay. I’m sure he was proud to pull into the motels at night with a big manure spreader. After I got the spreader here, I bought an old abandoned 5000 gallon gasoline tank, buried it and ran the waste water into it. By doing this I was able to get rid of the open lagoon. At first I had to use the spreader to pump the tank out about once a week. As I got more cows and as the bottom of the tank started to fill with solids that I couldn’t pump out completely, it became a more frequent chore. I really didn’t get the problem solved until just a year before I sold the dairy cows.
Roger, Roy, and I were doing all the milking, twice a day, seven days a week. Nell would sometimes help clean up the barn. When the boys were in school, most of it fell on me and I was putting in some long hours. We decided to let someone move in the trailer house and milk on weekends for their rent. Donnie Zaicek, his wife, and three kids moved in with that agreement. Donnie’s regular job was cook at K-Bobs Steakhouse in Decatur. It was a real relief to have some time off although there was always something to do when I wasn’t milking.
That summer Randy was stationed on the aircraft carrier, USS Independence and they were deployed to the Indian Ocean. While there, Iraq invaded Kuwait and they were diverted to the Persian Gulf. In November, they were relieved by other ships and headed back to their home port of San Diego. The Navy had what they called a “Tiger Cruise.” Crew members on the ship could have up to three male guess meet the ship in Hawaii and sail back to San Diego aboard ship. I couldn’t get off but we thought it would be a nice reward for all the work Roger and Roy had done on the dairy to send them. The boys enjoyed the trip but I think Roger embarrassed Randy when he pulled on the Captain’s sleeve and ask a question about the ship. While they were in Hawaii, Randy rented a car and showed the boys around, including our old house in Whitmore City.

In 1991 the dairy was bringing in a lot of money, but we were also spending a lot on feed and supplies. The equipment was old when I bought it and would break down from time to time but for the most part, it held up as well as could be expected. We were reinvesting our profits so our bank account didn’t grow but our assets did.
The problem in the Decatur Church of Christ that had existed for years finally came to a head and about half the members left and formed the Central Church of Christ. A few months later, we thought it would be better if Roger and Roy were going there because there were no kids their age at Greenwood. So Nell started taking them to Central and I remained at Greenwood because the congregation was so small and I felt I had an obligation to them.
That fall Roger started his junior year of high school at the University of North Texas in Denton. He had been selected for the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science (TAMS); this was a program where the kids could finish their last two years of high school at the university, taking college courses. When they graduated they were given a high school diploma but they already had two years of courses towards a college degree. This was a good program for him because he really wasn’t challenged at Slidell.

Randy had just got out of the Navy in early 1992 and stayed with us for a while. In the summer he went to flight school in Florida; he came back and stayed here a couple more months, then went to work full time for Flight Safety in Lakeland, Florida.
In January I poured the floor for a silo. I dug it with the front end loader and poured the floor with the help of Allan, Randy, Roger, Roy, and Donnie. I then poured the south wall in sections on the floor and stood them up. I poured the north wall, in place and free standing, with the intentions of adding a second silo on that side at some future date. The back was also poured in place. It is hard to beat silage as roughage for dairy cows; it really makes the milk. I don’t feed silage to my beef cows but if I put a roof over the silo it would make an excellent place to store hay.
Donnie quit his job in town and started working for me full time. I milked three times a week and he did the rest. This gave me more time to put up hay, make silage, maintain equipment, feed cows and all the other chores that were always coming up.

In February 1993 Roger was named a National Merit Scholar and was awarded a full four year scholarship to the University of Texas at Dallas. He went on to graduate from TAMS in May. In June, Randy came back to Texas long enough to marry Judy Gann. He had met her while here the year before. They set up housekeeping in Lakeland where he was still working for Flight Safety. Judy came with a cute little two year old son named Douglas.
The trailer Donnie was living in was getting small for his family since his kids were getting bigger. I told him I would build a house for him to move in if he would donate his labor and help build it. So we built a three bedroom brick house. We just hooked the sewer system on to the one used by the trailer. They moved in just in time for Thanksgiving that year. The house ended up costing a total of just over $26,000. I refinanced the loan I had on my house, putting both houses on the same mortgage with the Federal Land Bank.

Nell and I didn’t like going to different churches so in March of 1994 I started going to Central with her. That spring the church had a big fish fry on Mick Savage’s lake. Everyone was having a good time and the kids were swimming. When it started getting dark, Roy pulled his truck up on a high bank overlooking the water and turned the lights on so they could see to swim. After the lights had been on a while, the youth minister thought it would be a good idea to start the engine and recharge the battery. He was not familiar with a stick shift and started the truck in gear. The truck started, sideswiped a tree and fell over the bank into eight or ten feet of water. A neighbor had a tractor and we were able to pull it out. The youth minister bought a used door to replace the one that hit the tree but he refused to reimburse any other expenses. Roy spent many hours getting water out of the gas tank, motor transmission and upholstery. He got the truck to running but it was always having some electrical problems. I was proud of his tolerance towards the man that ran it in the water. Everyone around church talked about the truck that was baptized for a long time.

The time seemed to go by so fast from 1995 to 1999. Roy graduated from high school and started college at Texas A&M. Pawpaw died. Maryjane was born. Roger graduated from the University of Texas at Dallas. I bought a new four wheel drive tractor. Roy and Julie got married. Julie graduated from Texas A&M. I had problems with my back. Mom had her knee operated on, moved to Linda’s and then into a rest home. We had a family reunion at New Braunfels. There were cows, cows, cows to milk, milk, milk. (See figure 29.) I sold over a million pounds of milk a year for several years.

In early 2000 I decided I was going to sell the cows within the next year or so and retire from milking. I made a mistake and told Donnie this. He started to worry about his job and started looking for another one. He took the first good offer he had and left me with the milking. I didn’t want to train a new man if I wasn’t going to milk much longer so decided to sell the cows as soon as I could find a good buyer. Robert Grantham, the man I bought most of my A.I. supplies from did me a big favor. He knew most of the dairymen in north Texas and spread the word that my herd was for sale. On the 13th of March a man from south of Ft. Worth came by and looked at the cows. He bought them on the spot and picked them up two days later. (See figure 30.) It was a real emotional roller coaster; I was glad to be out from under the responsibility, but as you might imagine, when you feed a calf on a bottle while she is little and then milk her for ten years, you become attached to her. I couldn’t hold back the tears when three big eighteen wheelers pulled out with all my cows; one of them was a calf born just that morning.
When I got the check for the cows, I paid off my loan to the Federal Land Bank and some money I had borrowed from Mom. We had the kitchen chairs we had bought in Alaska recovered and I bought an almost new diesel pickup. We also bought a small travel trailer. I put most of the rest in the stock market and managed to cut its value in half over the next two years.
With spare time on my hands, I completed several jobs around the house that had been put off for years. I fixed a step to keep rain water from running down the basement stairs. I finished the built-in china cabinet for the dining room. I built shelves for the TV and put a door on the dumb waiter in the living room. Out in my shop I built a rack to hold metal stock and made a trailer to haul irrigation pipe.
The year before I sold my cows, I had bred some of them to an Angus bull so I could have beef cows after I sold the milkers. I had 22 black heifers when the trucks hauled off the Holsteins. That fall I rented two of my fields to my neighbor, Lowell Hughes, because I didn’t have enough cows to keep up with the pasture. In addition to a cash payment, he agreed to sprig the two fields to coastal.
We decided to go see Randy in Florida at Christmas. We hooked our travel trailer to the pickup, took Roger with us, and left on the 20th of December. We stopped by the Civil War battle field at Vicksburg, Mississippi on the way and found it very interesting. We had a good holiday with Randy, Judy, and kids and enjoyed the nice weather. On the way home we hit a snow storm just before we got to Wise County. We made it to about 200 yards from the house before I had to get out and walk the rest of the way, get the tractor and pull the truck and travel trailer up to the house.

In 2001 I continued to catch up on jobs I had been putting off while milking. I built a desk with drawers and book shelves for the family room and a gun closet in the living room. We bought a nice dining room set and some leather couches; this was the first furniture we had bought in years. I was given an old air compressor that had bad bearings. I repaired it and bought a 500 gallon used propane tank to use for compressed air. I then plumbed the shop so I can have air pressure all over the building.
I had a couple of gas pipelines ran across the place. They had to push out some trees so I bought a chain saw and cut them into logs (since it was the middle of February, I told Nell the saw was her Valentine’s present). I took the logs to a sawmill and someday hope to make the kids some furniture. The lumber is presently drying under the old dairy holding pen shed. The work caused my back trouble to flare up again but it got better with rest.
That spring Roy graduated with his master’s degree in accounting and passed his CPA test on the first try. He and Julie moved to Corinth; he went to work for an accounting firm in Dallas and Julie went to work in Denton for UNT. Roy had a few weeks off between school and starting work so he had some knee surgery while waiting.
That fall I also had surgery. A spur on my left heel had bothered me for years; in addition I had a bunion and a hammer toe on the same foot. The doctor recommended correcting all three problems at the same time. I was off my feet for about six weeks and an infection slowed the healing, but the end results were well worth the wait. After it healed, I was able to walk without feeling a thumb tack under my heel.
The kids really surprised Nell and me for Christmas. I guess they thought it was time we were brought into the 21st century. They gave us a nice computer. Without the computer, I wouldn’t be writing this paper now. I really didn’t think I needed one but now that I have used it for a while, I don’t know how I got along without it. I should have bought it for the dairy; it would have simplified book keeping and production records.

In May 2002 Nell and I decided we would be happier going to a more traditional Church of Christ. We started going to the Cates Street Church in Bridgeport. It was a longer drive but the singing is much better and no one seems to have an “agenda.” I had been asked to serve as elder at Central but after remembering the experience at Decatur, turned it down. I was asked to serve as deacon at Cates Street and accepted.
Roy got tired of the drive to Dallas; when Julie lost her job at UNT they decided to move to Dallas and Julie would go back to school to get her master’s degree. They bought an older house near White Rock Lake and Julie enrolled in school at UTD.
Ronda had brought her horse, Kilah, out to the farm after I sold the dairy cows. I had plenty of pasture and she didn’t have a good place to keep her near her house so it worked out good for everyone. We had heard about West Nile Virus and that it affected horses but there had been no cases in Wise County. One day I noticed Kilah was favoring a hind quarter and thought she was lame. I told Ronda and she was going to come out the next weekend and treat her. In two days she could barely stand; I called the vet and he suspected West Nile Virus. He said there had been about a dozen cases in the last week; he treated her as best he could and took a blood sample for testing. In two more days she was dead. The blood test came back positive. We buried her under the trees where she liked to stand and I made a headstone for her.
Ninny had not been feeling well for some time; her heart was beating so slow they gave her a pace maker. Then in November she had a mild heart attack. She came to Decatur and stayed with us a while. After she got to feeling better she wanted to return to Adamsville.
By waiting until the day after Thanksgiving, Nell and I were able to get some discounted airline tickets to Florida so we went out there to see Randy, Judy and the kids. We had a nice visit but when we came home we had failed to take coats with us. It was 34 degrees when we landed and to make it worse, when we got in the car, the heater wouldn’t work. All the sun we soaked up in Florida had leaked out before we got to the house.
I was walking by the silo after a rain one day and saw a piece of flint. When I went to pick it up most of it was buried; it had been chipped into a tear drop shape about seven inches long, five inches wide and one inch thick. The ground around this vicinity had been stirred up when the pipeline was buried near by several months earlier. I had found arrow heads and flint chips in the area before. In fact when I dug the silo, I dug up a corn grinder and several pestles.
I spent the last few months of 2002 building a wooden clock. I had seen one when I was a young man and had always wanted to make one. Shortly after getting the computer, I searched the internet but could find no plans. Then one day I was looking for something else when the clock plans came up. I wanted to make the gears out of bois d’arc wood so I took Nell’s Valentine’s present, cut down a tree, cut out some one inch planks, and planed them smooth. It was a green tree and I didn’t want to wait long for it to dry out so I set the oven on 150 degrees and put the boards inside. After they had been in the oven about three days, Nell smelled wood burning one night. When I checked on the wood, some of it was smoking and about ready to break out in flame because the oven thermostat had stuck on. I figured the wood was dry enough. In addition to the bois d’arc, I used some walnut, oak, maple and pecan. When I was making the case out of the pecan, I found a lead bullet that had been shot into the tree. I left it in place and that is the only metal in the clock. While I was trying to make final adjustments and getting it to run, I had temporarily hung the clock on the wall. The winding ratchet slipped, the weight fell and the clock bounced off the wall. When it fell, it broke the face and two of the gears. After I repaired the damage, I secured it to the wall better until I got the case completed. It turned out better than I expected. I think I put in about 400 hours total in the project.
We ended the year when Roger and Stormy got married. They bought a house in Garland and were married on New Year’s Eve. Stormy came with two lively little boys, Bobby and Chris. It was a nice way to end the year. And with four wonderful kids, each of them completing college and each with a wonderful mate, I think it is also a nice way to end this paper. (See figure 31 and 32.) However, before I end, I want to write one more chapter to record some of the tales and legends I’ve heard repeated by other family members.