30 Days of Ranch Memories: Sledding with Ease

When we lived on the Cox Ranch, north of Mullen, we had some horrific winters.  We also had some great hills for sledding right behind our corrals.  Even though we used horses a lot, we were also fortunate that Marvin was a snowmobile dealer.  We had a hay wagon that would attach to the snowmobile, and that was sometimes the only way to feed during the snowy winters.

What do big Nebraska Sandhills and snowmobiles have to do with sledding with ease?  Remember the three older boys, Donnie, Jamie and David?  Well, they loved to drive the snowmobiles, and I loved to sled down those long, big hills.  I had the best red disc sled.  Well, once I got to the bottom of the hills, they would zoom down, pick me up on the snowmobile and drop me at the top of the hill again!  Boy was I spoiled!  But I loved it, and I loved those big hills! 

Several years back, my dad and I went back for the Ranch's 101st anniversary.  I often wondered if those hills were really as big as I remembered.  And they were.  They looked just as big to me in my adult life as they did when I was just a little tike on the ranch.

Kicking off 30 Days of Ranch Life Memories

Welcome to 30 days of Ranch Life Memories.  Thanks to Holly Spangler for the challenge to blog for 30 days about a rural topic. Holly is compiling a list of five things daily about rural life.  Visit her blog:  My Generation I just hope I can remember 30 stories from my days on Nebraska ranches.

Thanks to my great parents I had a pretty good upbringing. We did move around fairly often, but some of my fondest memories are from the two Hereford ranches my dad worked on as a herdsman back in the 70s and 80s --Iodence Herefords at Hemingford and Cox Ranch north of Mullen.  It seems like for the longest time I thought every kid got to ride in a feed pickup with their dad or be with their dad while making fence or just run around on the gravel road.  Those were a little more carefree times. I didn't know what a latch key kid was; we never lead to lock our doors. I thought it was normal to ride a bus that was a four-wheel drive suburban or a little bit later in life to go to a one-room school.  Yes, life was simple.  And life was good.

Since my blog is a place I share my random thoughts and life experiences I thought it would be good to get some of my childhood  ranch memories on paper, so to speak.

And speaking of putting the pen to the paper, I think I always knew I would be involved in communications and travel.  My first words were bye-bye and at my first 4-H meeting I was  elected reporter of the Sandhills Hillbillies 4-H club.  I remember how excited I was to record the happenings of each monthly meeting and submit my report to the Hooker County Tribune.  Think about most 8-year-olds writing --penmanship was not pretty, but later in the year, I started using my mom's typewriter.  I don't think that was very pretty either.  But  there was nothing  more exciting than to see my byline in the news as reporter.  I'm sure the older kids knew there was monthly work and were glad to see  the little kid get excited about writing.

I'll probably talk about 4-H a lot I  the next month because it seems that youth projects and rural living eventually lead to 4-H projects and ultimately careers. 

Today has been just a preview, and I'm excited to share more ranch life memories with you in the next month. 

The 30-day Challenge

I’ve been a little absent from this blog lately – I did a great job capturing my trip to Israel this April – and am thankful to have the blog to go back and visit.  But then May hit.  I turned 40. Resigned from a 15-year stint at American Angus Association. Listed my house. And moved to Illinois to start the next chapter.  And with that new chapter came a lot of newness:  commute, job, renovated farm house, state fair and a crazy life, including Stan and Holly.  But I’ll catch you all up on that later.

The 30-day challenge is posed by my friend and one of the greatest writers I know, Holly Spangler.  Each November, she blogs daily with a theme in mind, and encourages others to do so too.  Holly is a great writer and captures rural Illinois and farm life for so many readers in the Prairie Farmer, and she has inspired me to take this as a way to get back to my “Thoughts on Life” blog.

So, for 30 days, starting Nov. 1, I’ll be recounting my Ranch Life Memories – a blog that discusses growing up on cow-calf operations in Nebraska – both in the Sandhills and in the Panhandle.  Yes, those were the “good ole days” and it will be nice to take a walk down memory lane during one of my favorite months of the year.

Please come back to visit, and  I’ll try to enlighten you a little how I got my start in the beef industry  running around barefoot in the corrals and wrangling cats and cows.  This is going to be fun!

You can go home

During the course of my vacation last week, I made a couple of Angus stops. Some people might find this odd since I was on vacation. But, I truly consider many of the Angus breeders and Association members family. As a matter of fact, I see many of them more often than my family so last Saturday on my way across Nebraska's Hwy 2, I made a stop at the Kraye Angus Production Sale in Mullen. Now, mind you my family and moved to Cox Hereford Ranch in 1978 and moved away in 1983, when I wasn't quite a decade old. But I learned alot about ranch life in those old Sandhills, which is some of the best cow country on Earth.

So I was perusing through the bulls at Kraye's when I ran into John, the second of the third generation on this family operation. He looked at me, and just started shaking my hand, and said, "Shelia Stannard, how are you? I can't believe you drove all the way from St. Joe to come to our sale!" Well, I explained to him that I was passing through town on my way to the Panhandle to see family and I couldn't forget their sale day. He mentioned that he was honored I was there from "the Association." And, I looked at John, and smiled, thinking to myself, I wasn't really on official business, and I could never forget where I came from.

Well, his dad, "whispering" Fred, didn't think one thing about me being from the American Angus Association. When I walked into that sale barn, Freddie put his arm around me and I was that 9-year-old third grader again. He led me around from rancher to rancher, exclaiming, "I bet you don't recognize this old gal," only like Freddie could! Very few people did recognize me, but hello, I wasn't wearing my bell-bottom Wranglers, my ball cap pulled down tightly over my ears and my leather belt with "SHELIA" engraved in the back with a little hereford belt buckle like I did so many years ago! I would hope I have straighter teeth, straighter hair, and am not quite so goofy looking! I got to talk to the Coxes, the ranch we lived on and worked for. And I got to see most of the Kraye family. It was just like being "home".

Oh, and why do they call him "whispering" Fred? Well, they say if you walk into the barns in Denver, and all the cattle are laying down with the fans blowing, Freddie can say "hello, friend," to the first person he sees, and it will be so loud all the cattle in the barn will stand up. He's been that way since I first met him in his feed store back in the late 1970s and he'll always be that way. It's nice to know that you can go home.