So You Wanna Be a Cowboy?

by Kirby, Jack

• ISBN13: 9781449736552
• ISBN10: 1449736556
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-04-04
• Publisher: Westbow Press

Summary

This book is for all ages, from the age of following your dreams to the age of considering what to do with your life after retirement. It has lots of action, heartbreak, and humor and shows the love of family, as they all took part together in many travels and activities with their animals and family together, including off-road desert biking and car racing. Marilyn and Jack are certain you will enjoy their experiences, written in short story events. Jack started his first business when he was a teenager. He then built their restaurants in El Centro, California, and later in Montrose, Colorado. He then followed his boyhood dream to become a cowboy. You will read about some of their Cattle Drives, wrecks, and stampedes, as well as their later travels with their Clydesdale hitch across several states, from San Diego, California, to North Platte, Nebraska. It also covers many events in their lives after horses, as well as building their golf course. This book is about my mom and dad, as it parallels Dad's life as a young boy, businessman, husband, father, and grandfather. It also describes his ultimate dream of becoming a real cowboy. Join me as my dad takes you through twenty-four years of cattle drives alongside my mom, his lifelong friend and second-generation cattle rancher, John "Pinch" Taylor and his wife, Vera. At eighty-two years of age, this is his first literary endeavor. It has allowed him to re-live his real-life stories through the eyes of a cowboy, and was written in his own words. -Paul Guy Kirby, son

Excerpts

Slowly Becoming a Cowboy        My love for horses and cowboys probably started in the late 1930’s.  My dad bought me a pony in 1937.  We lived on ten acres of ground where the Ryerson Concrete Company is located today.  It was east of town on the old Highway 80.  My horse’s name was Tony.  He was brown and white and about forty two inches tall.  He had a very gentle disposition.  I crawled all over him and he never kicked or bucked.      We had two cows that Stan, my brother, and I had to milk early in the morning.  We had twenty head of hogs that we had to feed.  We also had to feed the chickens and gather the eggs for Mom and then back to milking in the evening.  Dad planted Milo Maze corn one year that we had to irrigate.  When it was ready to harvest, we tied gunny sacks around our waist and then start at one end of the field cutting off heads of grain and putting them in the sack until they were full or too heavy to drag.  We dumped the sacks in piles.  Dad would pick up the piles of sacks and put them in his truck and we would start again, going down the rows, picking and cutting off the heads of corn.  In between work, I would find time to play with “Tony Boy, Pony Boy” as I would call him.      During lettuce season, Dad would have three or four loads of lettuce delivered and dumped in the field for our calves and cows to eat.  I would get on Tony bareback and run along- side the piles of lettuce.  I would then act like I got shot and fall off my horse into the lettuce piles. Tony would run a little ways and stop, so I would go and get him and jump on his back, just to do it all over again.  No chance of getting hurt in those piles of lettuce, but I sure would get dirty and smelly, especially after it spoiled in the sun for four or five days.      Dad sold products to restaurants and grocery stores.  During the day, Mom made potato and macaroni salad that Dad would sell to the grocery stores.  Another chore for Stan and me was to peel the boiled potatoes daily for Mom’s salads.  Stan and I also had another chore to do, and that was to load the truck for Dad for the next day on his route.  He would hand us a list of products to put on his truck.  He had a warehouse with products on the farm.      Now, back to my horse life.  In the “30’s” the theaters on Saturday afternoons had continuing serial stories along with full-length movie, newsreel, and cartoons.  The continued serial movie was usually The Lone Ranger and Tonto or Hop-Along Cassidy.  There were different movies with different cowboys such as Gene Autry, Tim Holt and Roy Rogers.  These serials always ended with the star about to be killed in some way.  So, we would have to come back the following Saturday afternoon and see how he would get out of his situation.  All this for ten cents, and the popcorn was the same price.  So, after the movies, I would go home and play “Cowboys and Indians” with my pearl-handled pistols in their holsters, one on each hip, and back to falling off into the lettuce piles.  Soon I developed some interest in making a horse harness for Tony and would hook him up to something to just drag around.  I went to the Shoe Cobbler’s in town to get scraps of leather and other pieces and I made Tony a harness that would work.  In the summers, my folks would put me on a Greyhound bus and sent me to my uncle’s in Colorado from the age of eleven through age thirteen, which you wouldn’t do today in this world we live in now.      I would stay with my uncles and cousins for about two or three months, and they had horses.  I could ride them from one uncle’s farm to the other uncle’s farm.  My Uncle Orin farmed with draft horses.  He taught me how to harness a horse, the names of the straps, and how to drive them.  I got to mow with Old Nick and Joe (his team) and then haul the hay into the barn area from the field.  I would grab a hay hook for hay and then Old Nick would pull it up to my uncle through a pulley to the hay loft, so he would have hay to feed his cattle through the winter.      Uncle Orin and Aunt Eveline had two kids, my cousins Orin “Bud” and Jeanine.  Uncle Wyatt and Aunt Frances also had two kids, Roger and Ruthie, all wonderful cousins whom I love dearly.  The uncles were my mother’s younger brothers, and their last name was Smith, as was my mother’s maiden name.  Another of my uncles I had in Montrose was Uncle Harlan and Aunt Arlyene.  They had one daughter, Charlene.  Uncle Harlan worked on heavy equipment and had no horses, but more on him later in the book.      In 1942, my folks sold our ten acre farm on Highway 80 to Ryerson Concrete Company, and when we moved to town, Dad bought a house at 734 Broadway.  There was a vacant lot to the East.  On the corner of the vacant lot lived two classmates of mine, Joanne and Donella Quinn.  Of course I took Tony Boy with us to town.  I built a small corral for him on the vacant lot next to us.  My grade school was Wilson, located where the police station is today, at the corner 11 th and Broadway.  Across the street to the East, and North of the Courthouse, was a two-acre lot full of date palm trees and grass.  I would hook Tony up and drive him to school, tether him to a palm tree and walk across the street to school.  Then after school, I would throw the harness on him, hook him up to my cart and trot three blocks home.  None of this could happen today, because of laws in our city or someone could steal him.  This is what they mean by “the good ole days,” the days when we could do things like this.      Wilson school burned during the summer of 1944 so, the eighth grade class had to go to school at Central Union High School for our eighth grade year.  That lead to a lot of teasing over how it took our class five years to go through a four year high school.      The time came when I had to sell Tony Boy.  When the man came to pick him up in his four-door car, I led Tony over to the car, opened the back door, and shut the doors after he was in.  You are probably wondering how you could load a pony in the back seat of a car.  Well, remember we’re not talking about a four-door 2012 Mustang.  The cars in the “30’s” had large back doors with running boards that Tony stepped on and then on into the back seat floor board area and then I shut the doors.  I collected my money and away he went.  I never saw him again.  I have often thought of what his back seat must have actually looked like once he got home with his cargo.  Needless to say, my heart was broken to have given him up.  I still think of him, and I thank God daily for giving me such a great boyhood and wonderful parents, but I knew my life would get much better.  I had no idea what God had in store for me.  Now, as I look back, I am able to see that He had a wonderful plan for my life.