The Time Capsule | Roy Marshall

I received an interesting letter the other day from the Tailgate Ranch, which is located near Tonganoxie, Kan. The writer has a name many readers will recognize. Paul McKie is a 1947 ROHS graduate who tells me his father, R. Clark McKie, was a long-time high school principal.
What I know about the cattle business starts with brisket and ends with rump roast, so it took a minute to get the punch line when McKie wrote they’d sold their corn and bean operation a few years ago to focus on cattle. “We now,” he continued, “work full time rather than just summers.”
Ranchers and feeders are going through a tough period, and McKie refers to the situation as “gloomy.”
Another reason for gloom, one shared by many, is the passing of Jerry Anderson. Paul did business with Anderson’s Red Oak-based Flying A and with their sprawling ranching operation in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. He thought highly of the man and has good memories of an old friend.
The letter brought to mind the day I met Jerry Anderson.
The year was 1980. I had recently been promoted into the State’s Arson and Explosives Bureau. One brisk, breezy Saturday afternoon, with an Iowa football game on TV, the Montgomery County sheriff’s dispatcher called. She relayed a message from the fire chief, who was chasing fires along the railroad tracks west of town.
He was hot. I could hear him telling dispatch as soon as his department knocked the fire down in one location the #@%%^&@ farmer started another one somewhere else.
This wasn’t an arson fire, promised to be a messy situation, but I was new and looking to impress the locals.
At the time I had no idea who Jerry Anderson was, had never heard of the Flying A, neither knew nor cared that he owned a few banks, was a heavy hitter in the beef industry and could blacken a good share of Garfield Township without infringing on a neighbor. Jim Zabel was calling the game when I turned the car radio off and walked half a mile across burned-over corn stalks.
The man was less than tall, had a face like a cherub, a gas can in one hand and a book of matches in the other. I badged him, said my understanding was that the fire chief had told him two years in a row not to do this crap on windy days.
Jerry grinned and said he reckoned that was right. The exchange that followed was testy, ending when I said if he struck one more match I’d arrest him and we’d go to town. Still grinning, he said it was probably time to quit anyway. As I turned away, he asked me to come back sometime and see his cattle.
Twenty-five years would pass before I saw him again. The reason was to do an article on what I then recognized to be a part of local history. I’m sure everyone with an interest knows the story—Jerry’s grandfather, as a teen-age immigrant, found employment with pioneer settlers. He worked for cattle; cattle he grazed on what was then open range in northern Montgomery County. The man had ambition and judgement, as did generations that followed, adapting to changing times to grow their Flying A land and cattle company.
With a note pad and recorder I entered the little office at the drive-over scales, wondering if he’d remember.
He was still grinning. “You havin’ as much fun now as when you were chasing down poor farmers for burning their own weeds?”
Probably because of that article Jerry put my name on the list of invitees to his annual customer appreciation dinner. He was busy at those events, without a lot of time to chat, but he’d wink and grin and remember that day in the smoldering corn stubble.
I once stood in the center of several sections Flying A land and threatened to arrest him. He invited me to a cattleman’s steak and hospitality. Jerry Anderson was a good guy and we’ll miss him.    

Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.