November 14, 2025 • 65 mins
Truly Significant Texans honors Bill Martin of Carrizo Springs. Enjoy this story from an 8th generation Texan and an authentic MAN's man.
Bill is Rancher, lover of nature, man of faith, loyal, hard working, all with a grateful heart for how he has been blessed.
He is a superlative storyteller that will take you back to yesterday with a Texas twist and bit of nostalgia.
Thanks to Betsy Tocquigny Campbell for connecting us to the one and only Bill Martin.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/success-made-to-last-legends--4302039/support.
Bill is Rancher, lover of nature, man of faith, loyal, hard working, all with a grateful heart for how he has been blessed.
He is a superlative storyteller that will take you back to yesterday with a Texas twist and bit of nostalgia.
Thanks to Betsy Tocquigny Campbell for connecting us to the one and only Bill Martin.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/success-made-to-last-legends--4302039/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Welcome to Truly Significant dot com presents. This is our
Truly Significant textan version. My cousin Betsy Tolkeeny told me
that I have to meet Bill Martin and it is
an honor to have you on today. Bill, you come
(00:31):
with high praise from my cousins who say you're one
of the greatest people in the world to take care
of Uncle Bobby's ranch and all the life talk.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Welcome, Thank you very much, Thank you a lot of
your family all my life.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Well, you probably know more stories, and that's why we
want you to be on today so we can capture
some stories and then I can pass it on to people.
So start with tell us about yourself and your family.
Go back as many generations as you want to, because
I want to unpack all of this.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Okay, Well, I'm an eighth generation Texan, or maybe ninth.
My ancestors came to from the Canary Islands and seventeen
thirty took him about a year to get up San Antonio,
and I think he's my eight times great grandfather was
the first all calledy of Bear County. His name was
Juan Leo Gorras and Juan Gorass Leol. So we can
(01:31):
trace our ancestry back along ways and asked for Timit
County increase those springs. We've been here since eighteen sixty
five when the people first moved in. And I always
liked to laugh at the idea of my great great
great grandfather pulling the wagon up and stopping and turning
into my great great great grandmother and saying, we're here,
(01:51):
and she turned back to him to here, What the
hell do you mean here? There's nothing here? And that's
kind of the way it was. First people came been
to this area of eighteen sixty five and there was
nothing here at the time of a bund water and
a lot of grass.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Oh my goodness, eighth generation. Okay, so how do you
know that about the Cayman Islands.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
My sister, third youngest sister, spent countless days in the
basement of the Bear County Courthouse going back into all
of the records, and when she found enough to join
the Canary Islanders Association, all I had to do was
point at her and say she's my sister, and they
let me in and there are records that go back
(02:42):
that far.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Wow. Okay, how did you meet the tolkienis Well?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I don't know there was a time I never, I
didn't know him. Becky was about eighteen months younger than
I am. And I've got a pick sure that shows
Leanne holding Becky. Sheoose about eighteen months and I guess
I'm close to three, and I'm running around a pair
of boxer sharks, a pair of boots and cowboy ant
(03:12):
and of course Becky just a little bit thing, barely walk.
But my parents, or my mother and Becky's mother, lee Anne,
were sorority sisters at ut in nineteen forty one and
long friends. It's from the time first grade or before probably, So,
like I said, there's not a time that I didn't
(03:34):
know Tolkeni's or the Halls as lee Anne was a
lot of years, yes, sir, a lot of stories.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
What's the what's the story of who was the sheriff
of them at county? How are you connected to them?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Well, I'm really not. I think I probably didn't explain
that clearly. But Hall was the sheriff, not my grandfather,
and Bob Hall was the sheriff, not my grandfather. So
my grandfather always wanted to get in law enforcement, and
he had an opportunity one time to join the Texas Rangers,
(04:17):
but decided that he was doing so well farming and ranching.
It was he didn't want to make that bigger change,
let everything go. One thing though that did that was
in my family that had a lot of influence on me.
Is at World War Two, and when my father came
home from Europe, he was a navigator on b seventeen,
(04:42):
and they brought him home and put him through pilot training.
I was getting ready to go to the Pacific in
p fifty one and when the war ended, but he
came home and just like a lot of other small
towns in South Texas, we had a National Guard unit
and he was a company commander of the Guard unit.
So I spent a lot of my time when I
(05:02):
was young out there sitting in tanks, pretending I was
driving that kind of stuff. But in nineteen sixty one,
the Guardian a here was mobilized and sent because of
the Berlin Crisis and sent to Atlanta General Depot, where
I spent most of my sophomore year in high school.
Came home. So they're just you know, it's really difficult.
(05:26):
There's so many stories that I could keep you in
the rest of the day. I guess. But let me
go back to Bob Hall, and he was the sheriff,
but he and my grandfather were best friends, and they
both ran Bramer cattle, and they used the same brand,
only turned in an opposite direction. There's a question mark
(05:48):
and it was on each side, and my grandfather turned
it to where the dipper was down. Bob Hall turned
it the other way where the dipper was up, and
he always said, they both said the Bramer cattle were
just almost unable to truly understand how their brains worked.
And they both thought it would be a great idea
(06:10):
to go out and shoot an old Bramer cow someplace
and cut the top of her head off and examine
her brain, because they knew there had to be some
significant difference between Bramer cattle and any other cow. And
they talked about it for decades, but neither one of
them ever did it.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
They were convinced that's so funny. Bobby. Uncle Bobby was
our first exposure to somebody that actually owned and operated
a ranch in livestock. And to this day, Bill I
will never ever forget riding in the back of the
(06:48):
truck and he would call out to the cattle and
they would talk to him, and I think I always thought,
is my uncle Bobby, doctor Doolittle. Do those cows know
him and do they have a personal relationship with him? Well,
would you tell me your perspective on that.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yes, they do. They get to where they know you
so well that when I did the same thing, I'll
go every day now because it's a dry I'll go
out and put out cottonseed cake, which is high in
protein and supplement the cattle. They can fill up on
the dry grass, but it really isn't nourishing unless you
add some protein to it. But I'll get out and
open the tailgate and they'll be one or two old
(07:31):
cows and nibbling on my shirt and they I feel something,
look back and they're trying to bite my shirt to
get my attention. But they if they if you see
them every day, they fall into the routine. They know
who you are, they trust you. But if I bring
somebody else with me and they get out of the truck,
they'll back off and look very suspicious at them. So
(07:53):
it's just just acclamation, I guess on their point, and
they know they recognize the truck too, And in fact,
the truck is white and not only do they chase
me through the pastor wanting to get fed. They chased
all the off field workers through too, So color blind
(08:16):
they are, but they recognize light and dark. So a
white truck they visualize that different than you know. I
guess everything is either white or black, and a white
truck that they will chase. But that old story about
waving a red flag at bulls, that's just something lighter
door does because it looks good. The truely didn't make
(08:37):
any more difference. They noticed motion quicker than they do colors.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Did you ever work at the Delmani plant or know
anybody other than my dad and Bobby that worked there.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Oh? Yeah, there was a man there named Jack Garra.
He and Bobby were really good friends. He was raised
here Increasing Springs, and Jack's son, who was was older
than I am, but we played a lot of tennis
together and been family friends basically for a long time.
But Jack was charging of maintenance over there, and one
(09:14):
time they had a plant up in Illinois or somewhere
that some big fancy piece of machinery couldn't work correctly.
Something was out of line. It was shaking itself to pieces.
So Bobby said Jack go up there and fix that thing.
So they took him up there, and he looked around
at it and got a hammer and red she started
beating on stuff and shimming other stuff up, and they
(09:36):
got that thing, turned it on and it ran smooth
as anything could be. There is a guy that probably
had about a fifth grade education Emmitt County, Texas that
was showing all the fancy engineers took to make that
thing run.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
And what I'm talking about the people that came out
of Corrizo Springs are historic and sometimes we think in
our hearts more important than others, especially our dad. And
to that point, I want you to speak to my
siblings about what was life like growing up, especially for
(10:14):
my dad and Bobby back in Karas of Springs in
the depression.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Well, one thing I always say is quick, if you
ever drink the water and denn the county, you'll always
come back. And amazingly, there's some people that went to
school with us, with me only here maybe two or
three years junior high, maybe a year or two in
high school, and they can still be ask them what's home,
say Carrizo Springs. But when I grew up as a
(10:42):
child of depression, their parents We learned to be frugal,
and my mother made sure of that. And it was
just ingrained in people that had to live through not
only the Great Depression but the drafts of time. Also
that you didn't throw anything away. You always tried to
(11:03):
utilize things. But we never lacked anything. If we needed meat,
we'd go out to the ranch and take out a
big calf and take him into the walk a plant
you don't have a process would eat that, and my
mother would make sure we ate every bite. I'd get
(11:23):
out off school bus sometimes or come home and I'd
smell a liver cooking and I'd say, oh, crap, we
ate ever ingeo that calf. But other than that, my grandparents,
my grandfather and my father. When Daddy graduated from Texas,
he was a civil engineer, but my grandfather only had
(11:44):
my mother and the family, and he offered my father
a chance to come back and start farming, which you did.
It was highly successful doing it, and then my grandfather
continued to ranch after about sixty one or two, I guess,
so I really grew up more on the ranch anywhere else.
I was on a horse when I was seven eight
years old. Are you ready for interesting stories. Yes, sir,
(12:09):
We were working cattle one time, and I was about
seven or eight, and they always gave me a short
legged horse or if I fell off, I wouldn't fall
too far. But we were out pushing some cattle and
Grandpa looked down and I saw it too. It was
a big rattlesnake going into a hole in the ground
about halfway in. So he got off his horse and
(12:31):
he grabbed that snake by the tail and yanked it
out of the hole and went around his head about
three times. And any how, and that snake's head flew
off just like a bull whip cracking. And I bet
that head flew one hundred feet. And I thought that
was the greatest thing I'd ever seen life, you know.
So I went home and I told that story to
(12:52):
Mama about how I couldn't hardly wait to do it
myself when I had the tent. I found out that
day there's some things you don't go home tell mama, So.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
I imagine not I was told no one.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Certain terms that I was not going to be popping
the head off sakes like he did. But he just
he was almost legendary in town for some of the
things he had done. He caught an alligator one time
out a four foot alligator and put it on a
leash or rope and was parading it up and down
(13:25):
in front of the old Sunshine Cafe where everybody went
for coffee, you know, twice a day, once a morning,
once about four in the afternoon. And a guy that
had a feed stool right there next to us where
office was, thought he was stuffed and walked up, kidd
kicked it, beat him on the foot, and I got
a picture right now, grandfather and that damn alligator posing together. Oh,
(13:51):
just story, story, stories, and Bill.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Where are the springs in Carrizo Springs.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
When everybody arrived here in uh in the middle eighteen sixties,
they were basically everywhere the Corrizo watersand actually starts where
Bobby ranched or Bob Hall had the ranch, and then
goes further north into where my main ranch is, which
(14:18):
is the Hut Ranch. And as that sand goes east,
it goes underground, and it gets deeper and deeper and
deeper until you get up into East Texas and is
an all sind. But it's at the times there were
there wasn't any pressure release on it, No wells drill,
so Springs ran basically all over. I've got a copy
(14:40):
of an old movie that was made in nineteen thirteen.
It was called gun Runners of the Southwest or something,
But this is a true story. About nineteen eleven or twelve,
there were some Mexican gun runners that run guns amminition
into Mexico for whatever revolution was going on at the time,
and the sheriff and the deputy sheriff went out and
(15:04):
found them, and they took them both hostage, and the
sheriff got away but to kill the deputy. But he
decided a couple of years later to be a good
subject to make a silent movie about, and he starred
in it as himself. His name was Tom Buck, I
think something Buck. So he made the silent movie where
(15:24):
it shows him going out and even though it's obviously
you're in we're in a drought because it doesn't look
like there's a blade of grass anywhere, there's a scene
showing them wading across the one of the creeks in
this area and it's chest deep. So the Springs continued
to run untileen fifteen or so. Because this was such
(15:49):
good formuling, a lot of people kept coming in a
lot more drilling water wheels that took finally took the
pressure off, and so now the water levels have dropped
now to anywhere from three to four hundred feet wherever
you are. But at the time the water was right
up picted to the ground.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Yeah, that's that is an incredible I'm going to dip
back into my memory of speaking of rattlesnakes. So we're
driving down the road with Bobby and we're coming back
from shooting quail if you want to call it shooting,
because he would go point that direction, boys into a covey,
(16:30):
you know, when you're shooting three or four at a time. Yeah,
take them back and aunt lie Ane would fry him
up and it was extraordinary food. And we go. We
get to eat a whole quail, you know, because we
didn't have a lot of food back then. But on
the way back he would invariably stop build to kill
three or four rattlesnakes on the road, and we were
(16:52):
just wide eyed little kids from Sherman, Texas, going, what
is he? Why is he doing it doing? Is that
still common occurrence down there?
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Not so much anymore, But what if you were shooting quill,
it was probably fall cooling off at night, and those
snakes would come to the pavement to because it was
warmer from the tun and that's why there'd be out there.
And it was a common deal on Friday and Saturday
night and crazy if we couldn't find the girl to
(17:24):
go out with us, and we just all jump in
the vehicle and go out and hunt snakes. And it
was very easy. You'd find about them the highways or
the back roads and a lot of places. I think
they've learned, truly, because they don't do it so much
anymore recently. I say that kind of thinking now that
(17:45):
the snakes had learned to not rattle, because the snakes
that rattle are the ones that get caught during the
rail snake round up, and you're leaving the ones that
don't rattle, and so pretty soon you've got a whole
generation the snakes that don't realize they don't radley don't
get caught. And I've had two occurrences recently that were
(18:05):
snake never rattled, even though I was close to him
and picked up some sacks. One time we were harvesting
onion plants in the farm and threw a bunch of
sacks in the back of my truck and we were
unloading them and one of the guys that was helping me,
I heard him holler and looked around. All about a
three foot rattlesnake had come out of that sack, hit
(18:26):
him in the chest but didn't bite him and just
was trying to get away and fell to the ground.
And that I loaded him up and never rattled, took
him out to the field, And even when he was
coming out of the sack and scaring the dickets out
of everybody, he didn't rattle in it. And that's kind
of scary, very scary.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Let's take a minute to honor your good friend and
my cousin, Chuck o Elkers, who just passed away. I
missed the opportunity here if you had a chance to
eulogize him at his celebration, lot tell our listeners about
what Chucky meant to you.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Well, we went to school from first grade only, and
so there was when he died just a few months ago,
there was over seventy years worth friendship there. And it's
getting to the point that I'll be eighty in this
next June. And we were class sixty four and starting
(19:26):
to lose class members that are pre rapid right now.
But it's still difficult to realize that he's not gonna
call me once a week like he always did. And
we visited for a long time, and Chucky was kind
of an organizer. He literally loved for all of us
(19:47):
as many classmates as we could find at the time,
or we could come to get together like San Antonio
for lunch, and not more or less than a year ago.
They were probably twenty five of us that got together
at the restaurant in San Antonio. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.
We spent quite a bit of time with Chucky and
(20:11):
Dottie down in Houston shared many a meal with him.
He was it's goed to be missed, really going.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
To be missed, yes, sir, And I second that about
him organizing. And he always organized a birthday party for
my aunt Rosalie every year. And we went and visited
her when she was one hundred or one hundred and
one down in the in her final days, and she's
(20:41):
so mentally bright, could still speak two or three languages
that I didn't understand.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
In Spanish and Bill.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
She keeps her story of being abducted by Pancho Villa
still rings in my head, and Chucky would always deny it.
Did you ever hear that story? Whether that was is
that just your Rosalie legend?
Speaker 2 (21:07):
The timing would have been awful a little bit because
she was probably born about nineteen twenty. I would think
her baby, yeah, yeah, and I think he was raising
no Passo in nineteen seventeen or sixteen. But there have
been so many want to be dictators down there. There
(21:27):
could have been somebody else. You know. She had a
real funny senshumor. She told me one time when she
was getting right way up there and over, she said, Bill,
you know what I've done? And now I said, what's that? Rosalie?
She said, you know, it used to be I'd lie
about my age, and now I've gone to bragging about it.
She said. We had dinner with her one time, several
(21:51):
of us, and everybody was ordering, and she this little
waitress said what would you like, ma'am? She said, I'd
like a in milk cocktail. And I could see the
little group of what glass of water?
Speaker 1 (22:10):
It's classical.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Oh, branching was really the main part of it, and
that the cows, Becky and Betsy referred to them as
Bobby's girls. They weren't, and they had individual names, but
as a collective group, there were Bobby's girls. And when
I leased the ranch from my boat, all those cows
(22:32):
and they became my girls, so and they and it was,
what's the funny, Bobby. When you're in a drought, you've
got to feel feed, protein content. And one common feed
is the ground up either corn. Grind up either corn
or maze and mix it with some glasses and put
(22:55):
salt in it to regulate how much they eat. Because
if you don't do that, if you just pour the
feet out, there a big strong cow just standing there
all day and be a weak cow. But if you
put as much at fifteen percent salt, after a while,
they can't eat anymore and they walk away in another cow.
And Bobby mixed the feed, he left the salt out.
(23:18):
In other words, he just fed them all they wanted
to eat everyone. I told Bobby one time, I said,
you're the only person I know that when a drought ends,
the cows are upset because they got to go back
to eating on their own. You're not standing there feeding
them every day. It's not really a funny story. But
(23:41):
Buddy was the Farm Bureau president and I was on
the board for When I moved back here, they said,
do you want to be on the Farm bureo board?
Might as well well. Buddy died that art attack, died
one night after a meeting coming out of the out
of the building, and then elected me president. And I
(24:01):
realized a few years later the only way I'm gonna
get out of being president is back Buddy did. It's
not funny, but it's also true.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Goodness, what does the Farm Bureau president do?
Speaker 2 (24:16):
We just conduct the meeting is about it, and anything
that comes out of Waco comes through the Farm Bureau president.
That's basically what it is. Because the Farm Bureau is
they don't want to be known as an insurance agency
because then they have to pay taxes. They want to
(24:36):
be known as a farmer's co op. And the government
watches real closely to make sure that we don't kind
of veer over in that insurance agency slot, and they
will let us call ourselves, say a co op you're
all about. Let me tell you another funny story. My
(25:00):
grandfather put in a dry land crop the watermelons at
the ranch. One year. Bass had to be back in
the thirties or forties, and he made a pretty good
crop and dry land fall watermelons come off about the
time the quail almost time quail season starts, but it
hadn't started yet, but the quail were just flucking in
(25:21):
there because the insects. Grandfather would shoot several of them
and bring them home, eat them that night and dinner,
and of course it wasn't quail season, and a game
warden suspected him of doing it, and one day when
grandfather had somebody with him, he said they shot the quail,
and he said he'd been hiding them in the watermelons
(25:42):
he'd be bringing in town. And he said, I think
he figured this out, so we're going to put these
in the hubcaps. So they popped the hub caps off
a truck and put the quail in the hubcaps, put
the hubcaps back on. Sure enough, game warden stopped him.
I mean, he's digging around through those watermelons, and he
had a young bird dog with him, and my grandfather
(26:02):
looked down and that damn bird dog was on a
dead point in one of those hoopcaps. Grandfoot runs over
there and he kicks that damn dog and he said,
don't you piss on that tire, son of a bitch,
and the dog hollered and jumped back at the dateboard.
Truck gameboard never saw any point.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Quail, Oh, I love that. That is so great. I'm
going to shift into some other deeper philosophical questions. You
spent much of your life work in the land and
caring for livestock. When you wake up before sunrise on
the ranch, what gives you that deep sense of purpose
(26:45):
each day?
Speaker 2 (26:47):
You know, I think it's to almost time out before
the sun comes up, and there's no nothing more spectacular
washing the suns. It just it. It gets you in
a frame of mind that And I'm a pretty strong Methodist,
and in fact time are a la laid leader. And
(27:09):
I've preached sermon one time about how this earth is
too engineered to be haphazardly where it is now. And
one of the things that I pointed out was that
things I see out there are impressed by sunrise or
at night even you see stars like you never see
(27:30):
anyplace else but it. You know, I guess you can
work hard on it all your life. And there's saying
down here that Kariza Springs, Demo County can promise you
more and bell and ever less, or promise less and
deliver more in any place in the world because we
are so so dependent on mother nature and rain. You know,
(27:55):
if you if you go into a small community like ours,
and you might say you're from San Antonio, you'll be
really amazed at how the topic of conversation for everybody
starts with how much rain did you get? Or you
think it's going to rain? Because we as growing up
part of it, you realize, or so I tell people
(28:15):
that I truly don't sell cattle. I sell rain because
rain falls, the grass grows, the cattle eat the grass,
and so I'm selling what was the by product of rain.
But it also it just gives you anything more beautiful
and watching. If I haunt my horn, cows will come
running in, and these little baby calves that are about
(28:36):
three year maybe three weeks old will come running in
beside them. They'll all have their tails curled over their back,
and they don't know why they're running, but they just
see the enjoyment in them for running with those other cows.
They just, like I said, they don't know why they're
just doing it. It just feels good, you know it teaches
(28:58):
the true meaning of hard work. It teaches you that
you reap what you sold. You know, it's difficult. You
got probably a real renaissance man in some ways. You
got to be everything from a plumber to a veterinarian
in some areas. So my grandfather always told me, if
(29:19):
you spend the money on a cow with a vet,
you lose the money. You go yourself.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Oh my goodness, tell us about when you first came
to the Tolkini ranch. What do you remember about those
early days and what's drawn you to stay in Corezo
Springs and live out your life story.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Well, Bobby in particular had a field out in front,
about three hundred acre field right in front of the
headquarters that he kept just immaculate. He kept every bit
of brush off of it, and it was a just
to big trap. But he had it planted in buffalo
grass and that when it did rain, it would be
the most beautiful field of grass and buffle grass and
(30:10):
imported grass from South Africa. But it's it's one of
the absolute best things it's ever been introduced into this
country because it's very high protein and cattle of it.
But he always took care of that field and he
uh uh, he had built cross fences around it to
make cattle. He always worked cattle by himself with one helper,
(30:34):
and he was he would make it easier for them
to work by you know, his engine ingenuity and where
to put fences and how to do this and that.
But I said, I'm going to tell you something about Bobby.
You probably didn't know. Bobby was hell of a crap shooter.
He shot dice like very few people you've ever seen
(30:55):
in your life.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Never heard that.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
There was also a story out of World War two
that Bobby want enough money on a troop ship coming
back from the Pacific that he had to hide at
someplace because he just wiped everybody out. And our Lions
Club every year would have a Texas A and M party,
and it would they'd have a meeting and then afterwards
it would they'd set up the crap tables and Bobby,
(31:21):
my father and one other would never be They just,
I mean amazing. I don't know if you say lucky
or they just were able to compute the odds immediately
in their heads on what was you know what the
first roll of the dice would come up with, and
very few people knew about that. In fact, Becky and
(31:42):
Betsy didn't. When I told him that story, they said,
are your kidd said, oh no, I saw him stood
there and watched him do it.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
I've never heard that ever, ever. Ever, I wonder if
there's anything tied to the mathematical brain of Toki, which
is Alex, my dad, Bobby, Joe, and how how smart
they were, and how that might apply to what you're
(32:15):
talking about.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
They very well have because my father was a civil engineer.
It was a tarbata pie, which is a piveta kappa portion.
I mean for the engineers, one smartest man I ever knew.
But and Bobby is say I had the same kind
of uh brain that just would like I said, figure
odds just instantly, and not that it has to have
(32:41):
something to do with being a very good crap shooter.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Isn't that amazing? You made me think about this. This
is a bit of a tangent. But he was the
Bobby was the singular funniest uncle that we had, and
I always wonder why everyone else was so serious. Bobby
would come up to Sherman and he would have this
(33:06):
glass eye and we would all go what happened to
your eye and then you would pop it out and
he'd show it to us. It's like, who is this
magical uncle of ours? I remember his laugh to this day.
And so where did that in the midst of the
(33:27):
toughness and sometimes the grind of Corrizo Springs? Where did
that sense of humor.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Kind of story that will really tells tell you about that.
I had a good friend down here that always said
he had to be tough to live on the border.
And one time I saw a family, this guy worked
for us, going into a coyote bar and somebody sat
down beside him, had a feud with and he just
pulled a pistol out and shot him. Well, he gave
(33:54):
him twenty years in prison. And I saw this family
at the post office, his wife and a couple of
kids in the car, and I kind of smiled and
waved at him, you know, tell him I'm sorry about it.
And there's about a three year old boy in the
back seat, and I look over and that little old
boy sitting there. You know, I could get angry, but
(34:17):
I had to laugh. And I told my friend, I said,
you don't have to be tough, you got to have
sense humor. And Bobby did. I'd go out and sit
down visit Bobby and Leanne quite frequently and just thoroughly
enjoy the visit. In fact, we were I was visiting
with Bobby one time and had a picture of one
(34:38):
of his granddaughters on the wall and a cheerleader suit
or something. I said, Bobby, he said, that's where whichever
one amy I think? He said, she's cheerleader somewhere I
think for maybe the Texans. And she was. And Bobby
didn't he know what, you know, what an accomplishment that was.
(34:59):
But I thoroughly enjoyed this, and with both of them,
just they were at the stage of life that Bobby
would start out telling something and Leanne would finish your sentences.
I I sit there hours talking to them, and I did, well.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
What happened to that antique business and what spurred them
to go to the almost like a light switch flipped
and they would be driving up to Sherman with a
trailer and hauling back furnitures, Like what happened to you two?
Did you just become instant antique dealers?
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Leanne had always had an interest in it. She would
buy all these old dogs and little nicknacked things. Like
one of them that she gave me one time. It
was supposed to walk to my great grandmother was a
little I don't know what women did with it, but
a little dish that the lid was like a little
hen and you'd open it up and you'd keep I
don't know, rings, something like that. Then she brought it
(36:03):
out that she had bought him some relative minds. He said, here,
take this you sure, yeah, just gonna give it to you.
And I think, I I don't know who I gave
it to, but maybe my wife. It's around here somewhere.
They got very big into it, and Bobby had a
guy working for him that did all the physical labor,
stripped him down and then he would refinish them. And
(36:26):
we had found an old dresser out of the house
at the ranch where the guy worked for us lived,
and apparently some of the furniture that he was using
when he left moved in town. I looked at it
and I picked it up and bloated it up, took
it in to Bobby and says it's worth fixing. He said, hell,
(36:47):
yeah it is. That's solid oak. And he worked it
over and tightened up the joints and it's in our
bedroom right now, and that was forty fifty years ago.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Yeah, we are talking to the one and only Bill Martin,
who knows more about the Tolkeenis than the Tolkeenis know
about themselves. Okay, Ranching isn't a job, it's a calling.
Who or what shape your worth work ethic and how
have those values carried through those long days and hard
(37:23):
drought seasons.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Well, I grew up with it. It was either going
farm when Daddy was young or more so, and I
just I guess I just fell into it and really
didn't didn't know that it was not that way everybody worked.
(37:45):
I took and he was My grandfather was kind of
a natural naturalist, I guess you could say, and that
he knew the names of a lot of brush out
there and things like that, and I grew up with
him being able to identify them. And my daughter had
two classmates who were in FFA and they had to Well,
I didn't find ten different species of brush to identify,
(38:08):
and of course the mamas ended up doing and asked
me to take them the ranch and we did, and
we found everything they needed and they were just amazed
that I knew all that, and I was just truly
amazed that they didn't. So it was a you know,
it's just what you grow up with. And sure, so
I never really you know, bought it through, just following
(38:33):
the lead.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
That's what it was, of course. Okay, so how do
you define a good day's work?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Well, good days work is when I don't find anything wrong.
I go. I go to the ranch every morning. I'm
out there by daylight. I check every water source. I
uh checked gates, we did. We until just recently, we
had a lot of where the league was coming across
cutting fences, leaving. So in fact, I'm a pilot and
(39:07):
I had a little one fifty until about two years ago,
and i'd use it to check the ranch. I'd fly
and if I didn't see any water leaks or see
any cattle where they weren't supposed to be, then that
was good. But then if I found it, I would
have to go fix it. But it's always there's always
something to do. There's always a broken wire someplace, there's
(39:27):
always you know, a water float of a water trough
that needs a jesting. And right now it's more busy
because i'm putting out that supplemental cotton seed cake cubes
to my cattle. But we've had good rains back at
the end of June in the first of July, and
(39:50):
the grass was just knee deep green. And one day
about ten o'clock, my wife called me and she said,
what are you doing? I said, well, every tanks will
water Trough's good cattle or not paying attention to him
because they got all the grass they need. So I'm
out of my truck hunting airheads. I was wading around
in upon particular area picking up areas and Becky used
(40:12):
to hunt those over the far northeast corner of the range.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
We used to hunt them, did you. Daddy used to
take us to hunt arrowheads in Kariza springs.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Well back during those days when the Indians were here,
the springs were flowing, so it was a very good
place to live if you were an Indian. Well, about
a week ago I found an airhead that was actually
chipped out ten thousand years ago. What yep. It's called
a golden drina, which means swallow in Spanish, and it
(40:50):
has where the little ears are. It looks kind of
like a swallow. The wings on a Swallow, And I've
got a good friend that probably is a PhD in
archaeology and graduated high school with me, and as the
knows more about South Texas archaeology in anybody in the world.
(41:11):
And I sent him a picture of me. He said,
that's a golden Dreamer and was made somewhere around nine thousand,
five hundred BP. I don't know if you're familiar, Rick,
but everybody has a different means of determining dates. Now,
it used to be ad hereby Lord BC for grass,
(41:34):
and then they went to Common Era CP. But anthropologists
have their own dating system and it's BP before present
and the present they said, is nineteen fifty. So this
erahead was nine thousand, five hundred BP. So that means
it was made nine thousand, five hundred and seventy five
(41:57):
years because you add on or twenty yep seventy five
you had that on too. And they chose nineteen fifty
because there were radiation or nuclear bomb testing that took
place after nineteen fifty in the atmosphere became more loaded
with radioactive material, which made it more difficult to carbon
(42:20):
date organic material that are found in their heads. But
this one was anywhere between ten five and nine five
and ten five thousand years VP.
Speaker 1 (42:34):
What tribe would that have been, that's not.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
It's difficult to say because they had a name for
the Indians down here. It was ko Wheel Tickens. That's
where the state of Kohela came from in Mexico. But
they weren't really a one unit tribe. They were a
conglomerate of several small tribes. And I'm pretty sure the
(43:00):
She's and the Apaches were in this area. And tell
you another funny story that you know. When I was
nine years old, it was just well, my great grandfather
was born in eighteen sixty nine and he was I
was ten years old when he died. So in eighteen
seventy two, the last known Indian raid in Dimmit County
(43:23):
took place. And they had a fort built and rights
on the edge of town. And everybody was congregating around
that folk for it, all the women and children anyway,
men were out, you know, getting ready I kiss. But
sure enough here they came Indians. And he was outside playing,
he was three years old, and his mama runs out
(43:44):
to get him and the first thing she could grab
is his hair, so she yanks him into that fort
by his hair and they slammed the gates. And when
I remember thinking, when I was nine years old and
he told me this, that that was the greatest story
in the world, because there's nothing more blood thirsty for
tales like that. But then later on I realized that
(44:07):
what that was was a passing of knowledge, skipping two
generations from him to me, telling stories of what it
was like when he was a child. And you know,
his generation, maybe more than any other, saw the greatest
changes ever. Saw automobiles and airplanes that went from harson
(44:29):
buggies to cars, electricity. He got nineteen six, seen amazing changes.
But that story of what took place in eighteen seventy
two stuck with me.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
That's what I'm talking about. Thank you, Betsy, because that's
a that is a pricess story. You said you're a pilot.
You also said you're a methodist. Let me see if
I can tie those two together somehow. So you believe
in God, you think Earth is sometimes too well engineered.
(45:08):
When you're flying, what do you see that other people
don't see?
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Well, I tell you, And when you do, you remember,
do you that poem that guy wrote about uh uh,
I leave the bounds of earth and he's flying. Do
you ever hear that poem?
Speaker 1 (45:31):
Yes, sir, I wish I could recite it.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
But leave the surly bounds of earth and dance the light.
Just dance the silver wings. And anyway, when you get
up some days and there are a lot of cumulus clouds,
you're not supposed to fly into them. But if you
just fly by them and the wisps of the clouds are,
you're have a wing tip in the wisp of the clouds.
(45:56):
And it's just the most beautiful sight and sensation in
the world. Because the end of that poem is that
he reaches out and touches the face of God, and
up in an airplane like that, I can very well
see where that poem is. Just it's manifesting what you
feel and what you see. And you know, it's another
(46:22):
thing that it just opens your eyes what it does,
it was this world is beautiful, and probably what I
do for a living makes me more. I feel sorry
for someone sitting off, Get out and go home, go
in the house. Don't spend more than thirty minutes outside,
maybe on the weekend, but I do this every day.
(46:42):
I'm outside every day. Just I couldn't work inside at all.
No way.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Now I want you to give some advice to the
young ranchers and farmers and ore f if a kids
listen about having hope in this occupation.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
Well it, like I said, it's the greatest thing in
the world. But the one thing that makes me know
or realize it will always be need for a farmer
because we basically feed not on the United States, but
a lot of parts of the world what we produce,
(47:30):
and with populations rising, it's going to make agriculture more important.
And you know the part of that is our water
down here. It's become more valuable too. And so if
you the problem is though you just don't decide you
(47:51):
want to be a farmer, because land has gotten so
expensive that you'd have a hard time finding anything you
could raise that would pay for that pay for the
interest on it. So the sad thing is that you've
got to be born into it. Really. Now you might
have a relative that you know, you could get into
(48:12):
it through them that owns the land, but most people
it's passed on but the family farm. I think I
saw a figure the other day that said, in the
last three years or four years have been one hundred
and forty thousand family farms that are gone out of business.
And it's not because they couldn't make a living. It's
just because land got they're selling out the Riar Grandy Valley.
(48:35):
They're very little farming goes on down there anymore. The
citrus is all gone, and it's just so many people
live in there that somebody's got a couple of acres
can make so much money off of the selling interest
that they could farm in it. So, like I said,
(48:57):
it's a beautiful thing, but it you have no control
over the price you're going to get for your product.
You have no control over the weather that can either
save a crop or wipe a crop out in fifteen minutes.
But like I said, it's the freest thing in the world.
You're your own boss, and that that is extremely important.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
No one can fire you.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
No, and you you you know, however much you want
to put in it, you're going to get back.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Oh amen.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
There's a saying about people that some people are farming.
You just call them row farmers. Or they'll go out
and they'll look at a row of crops if they
won't get out and actually walk. Yeah, it's just a
step further.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
Yes, sir, I've got a few more questions for you,
and I would be remiss if I didn't ask you
to share a story about a moment on the ranch
where your patience and your intuition and your care for
animals made all the difference. And for whatever reason, God's
(50:11):
putting on my heart for you to tell us about
when you helped a calf, helped deliver a calf or
some other baby out there, because most of our listening
audience doesn't even know what it's like to pull a calf.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
Oh yeah, you know, calf's supposed to be born head first,
but sometimes they aren't. And more On one occasion, I
found one where the be hind legs are sticking out
and you just slow we pulled that calf out. My
grandfather wan't to had cow that he thought of what
(50:49):
he knew that was breeched birth. But the calf was
so big it was afraid he's gonna kill it if
he pulled it. All it was so you remember those old
window weights used to be yes, there would counteract. Oh yeah,
he had one of those things, and he tied a
rope around the calf's feet and put that wind to
weight on the other came back in a few hours
(51:11):
and that way that slowly pulled that calf out and
she was with calfs brilliant to the.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
Brilliant. See that's the kind of stuff that I think
the next general no offense youngsters. But where is that
common sense or practicality going to? Where you get that experience? Today?
We figure things out to fix a fix things without
fix things with wire, you know, not induct table.
Speaker 2 (51:41):
Yeah, and we the same family has worked for us.
And he was hanging for three generations now four, and
every one of them was a master craftsman at building fences.
They were just barn with a piece of wiring one hand,
a pair of flyers in the other. And they taught
(52:01):
me tricks that when I do and people say, how
do you learn how to do there? But I've been
talked by experts. But I worked cattle this morning and
we penned about one hundred and fifty cows. I cut
off calves I wanted to sell held back to half
ers all the key And one thing you learned real
quick is you don't want to push a cow. You
(52:24):
want to make you want the cow. And think that's
what she wants to do. So if you can convince
the cow and make the cow think, okay, I want
to run over here, and that's what you wanted to do,
then you can work them so much easier. And it's
not who can holler the loudest, who can work that
cow around where she thinks what she's going to do
(52:46):
is her idea, But it's what you wanted to do
all along. So this quieter you can do it, slower
you can do it, the better it you don't want
to and you know you can say I learned that
cattle on the same thing he use on people.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
Exactly same lessons. Hey, if you were the commissioner for
the Texas Department of Agriculture, what would be the first
two or three things you would do well?
Speaker 2 (53:19):
One time? This is kind of interesting. It goes back aways.
When Rick Perry was Commissioner of Agriculture, I got to
know him pretty well. He come to Creasis several times,
and I was visiting with him. One time he said,
you know what I want to see done? He said,
everybody in Texas at least our age is no more
(53:39):
than one generation removed from the land. He said, But
now we've got kids at school that don't know it,
don't come from They don't know that Larns starts off.
They don't know what this generation was born with. He said,
I want everybody in the school system to all these
kids growing to realize and appreciate what takes place to
(54:05):
feed them. And uh I when he was governor, he
did start some programs where UH schools would have department
and taxa department agriculture people go put on you know,
afternoon deals for them and teaching things like that. So
(54:26):
that's that's a lot of it's appreciating what uh you
know where it comes from.
Speaker 1 (54:35):
Teach appreciation. Okay, what else would you do?
Speaker 2 (54:43):
At one time, we had a lot of restrictions put
on us by the federal government and UH the uh
the navigable well us waters they have to be navigable
to have government influence like the Army Corps of Engineers
(55:05):
or But when they put that word it just said navigable.
That meant something a boat could go down. But they
took that word navigable out, which meant that if I'm
a farmer running water down a ditch, I could possibly
fall under the government control. And I need him to
(55:26):
be very very vigilant. What is coming out of Washington
that will affect me. I do remember back when Carter
was president, and I like Jimmy Carter as a person.
I don't think he was very wonderful man. But we
had a packing house slaughterhouse here, and that's where our
(55:46):
calves would go. And I had a calf. I had
a whole load of cattle. I was taking the valley
and one calf got down in it and the other
stood on him till he couldn't get his breath down.
When I got up there, he was dead. So I thought,
we don't he I'll just take him back to the
slaughter plane. Well, they had a government in specter there
(56:08):
that wouldn't let me unload that cap because he didn't
know how it died. He wouldn't believe me. He had
to have proof that it didn't have some kind of
disease or something. And it was very obvious because he had,
you know, blood out his nostrils from its lungs being crushed.
And I thought to myself, that's a little bit too
(56:28):
much government overreach right here. So I took him to
the ranch and gave him to the family that worked
for Uce, and they kind of rope and strung him
up in a tree and skin him and he was
in the freezer with about four hours. But they would
not let me do that, and they're just, yeah, there's
a lot of other things that we've got careful with
(56:49):
just and sometimes it just be easier because we know better.
We know better. Well, the only thing the government ever
really did was convinced Panhandle on Oklahoma farmers to change
some of their methods of plowing back into the Great Depression,
because that was, you know, we had such terrible droughts
(57:10):
and dust bows. And they finally convinced him to plow
across rather than with the direction of the wind, and
it made a big difference. So that was a good program,
And there are a lot of good programs out there,
But then there are others that wanted to just take
away our right to decide to determine how we won't liberalize.
Speaker 1 (57:33):
Good points. Let's think about ten or twenty years from now,
when we're hopefully at our in our eternal home, what's
going to happen to the future of the Tolkini ranch
And what legacy do you believe that you and the
family are building together now?
Speaker 2 (57:51):
Well, we're the same way our family. We own a
two thousand acre farm and no, not a single one
of the four children that I have, between my three
sisters and myself, I want to come back to it.
So we're in the process of selling it. And we've
been in business since nineteen thirteen, so but I'm almost eighty.
(58:14):
My youngest sister and her husband really running the farm
because I retired from that and they're both seventy and
seventy one. But we're selling it to an entity Bonnie
Plant Farm that if you go to a hardware store
and you see onion plants or tomato plants or pepper plants,
they're providing them. And they're going to continue running it
(58:36):
at Sixondale Farms and keep my sister and brother in
law for as long as they'll stay. And that you
go back to the Tolkeeni ranch. Becky has no children,
Betsy has two girls and either one of any interest
at all. So they have a price on it to sell,
(58:58):
but the price is so high that they nobody will
pay that kind of money, and it's just kind of
putting off the selling of it, which I will break
their hearts, I'm sure, and that's why since I leased
it from them, I'm their boots on the ground, so
(59:18):
to speak. If there's something that's got to be taken
care of with the appraisal district, I do it. If
there's something that has to be done through an RCS
or anything else, I do it for him because I
know they can't do it. In fact, when Bobby died,
they closed his post office box and the appraisal district
was sending farms to be filled out to maintain the
(59:42):
ag exemption. Post office are sent back because Bobby's post
office box was closed, and the appraisal district did not
look for how to get those notices to Betsy and Becky,
So all of a sudden they could. They find out
that they don't have the egg exemption, and their taxes
go up ten times for a couple of years, and
(01:00:04):
they finally got it back, and they were very, very
involved in making sure that they do everything needs to
be done, and I take care of that for him. That, yeah,
well I don't mind doing it because I told both
those girls that I got a raised with you, almost
like I've got two more sisters. So yeah, I got
(01:00:25):
to treat you all like that because when my mother
died and my father died. A couple of years later,
we were cleaning out their house and Mama saved everything
depression their child, and we found a box and in
it was this real pretty little dress and a note
there that said I wore this dress to Leanne Hall's
(01:00:46):
twelfth birthday party. Did save that and it just thought,
my gosh, we all just thoroughly enjoyed going through.
Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
Yeah, that's beautiful. Okay, I'm going to show you this
and then we'll wrap up the show. And this is
the only thing that my uncle Toki had Alexander TOKENI
in his railroad room and that was handpainted between Corezo
(01:01:23):
and North Grand in Sherman, Texas Railroad and none of
his kids wanted it, and I said, I gotta have it,
and I to this day, Bill, I think that there
is this core values route that comes from Corezo right
to Sherman to the other Tolkeenis and it was all
(01:01:47):
about hard work, common sense and being kind to each other.
Please comment on how you see the Corrizo Springs branches
out there.
Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
Oh, it's just you know, like I said, if you
drink the water, you're always going to come home. And
I had to help preacher do a funeral for somebody
a year or so ago, and I was reading scriptures
or something, and I stopped and I said, I look
at everybody out there that's attending that funeral, and I
(01:02:23):
see threads that connect family, threads, threads of friendship, and
it's just, you know, you may leave, but you'll always
come back in some farm or fashion. And it's just
I don't know. I think it's just like I said,
it's our relationship to the soil, and it's just it's
(01:02:46):
a small community, it's a more oriented, but we we
know each other. We look out for each other. And
I had to do a thing for Water District project
a while back, and they interviewed me for something and
that's guys said, well, what one word what would you
use to describe Crazo Springs? And I said, residient. Our
(01:03:09):
people are resilient, they're tough.
Speaker 1 (01:03:14):
Amen to that. Thank you, sir for being on There
are successful people in this life, then there's truly significant people.
And you have leaped way beyond any measure of success.
And now I know why you mean so much to
(01:03:36):
Betsy and Becky and you mean so much to the
rest of the tolkinis as well, So I thank you well.
Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
Rick here, welcome and it's so labor love. It's just
I couldn't do anything else.
Speaker 1 (01:03:50):
It's you. You have responded to the calling.
Speaker 2 (01:03:54):
I guess so. And my grandfather was a second too.
They both the community in many capacities. I've done the
same thing with school board, Livory board, things like that.
Speaker 1 (01:04:09):
Jory, thank you so much. You're so kind for spending
time with us, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. And again
my thanks to Betsy for introducing us. And we'll stay
in touch with you, Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
I expect joyed visiting with you. And like I said,
I see chokey. I see chokey.
Speaker 1 (01:04:31):
That's cool. Folks. We hope that you enjoyed this program
with our friend Bill Martin from Carrizo Springs and consider
everything that he says as you consider what your purpose
in life is supposed to be about. Have a great week.
Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
Yeah,
Welcome to Truly Significant dot com presents. This is our
Truly Significant textan version. My cousin Betsy Tolkeeny told me
that I have to meet Bill Martin and it is
an honor to have you on today. Bill, you come
(00:31):
with high praise from my cousins who say you're one
of the greatest people in the world to take care
of Uncle Bobby's ranch and all the life talk.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Welcome, Thank you very much, Thank you a lot of
your family all my life.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Well, you probably know more stories, and that's why we
want you to be on today so we can capture
some stories and then I can pass it on to people.
So start with tell us about yourself and your family.
Go back as many generations as you want to, because
I want to unpack all of this.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Okay, Well, I'm an eighth generation Texan, or maybe ninth.
My ancestors came to from the Canary Islands and seventeen
thirty took him about a year to get up San Antonio,
and I think he's my eight times great grandfather was
the first all calledy of Bear County. His name was
Juan Leo Gorras and Juan Gorass Leol. So we can
(01:31):
trace our ancestry back along ways and asked for Timit
County increase those springs. We've been here since eighteen sixty
five when the people first moved in. And I always
liked to laugh at the idea of my great great
great grandfather pulling the wagon up and stopping and turning
into my great great great grandmother and saying, we're here,
(01:51):
and she turned back to him to here, What the
hell do you mean here? There's nothing here? And that's
kind of the way it was. First people came been
to this area of eighteen sixty five and there was
nothing here at the time of a bund water and
a lot of grass.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Oh my goodness, eighth generation. Okay, so how do you
know that about the Cayman Islands.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
My sister, third youngest sister, spent countless days in the
basement of the Bear County Courthouse going back into all
of the records, and when she found enough to join
the Canary Islanders Association, all I had to do was
point at her and say she's my sister, and they
let me in and there are records that go back
(02:42):
that far.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Wow. Okay, how did you meet the tolkienis Well?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I don't know there was a time I never, I
didn't know him. Becky was about eighteen months younger than
I am. And I've got a pick sure that shows
Leanne holding Becky. Sheoose about eighteen months and I guess
I'm close to three, and I'm running around a pair
of boxer sharks, a pair of boots and cowboy ant
(03:12):
and of course Becky just a little bit thing, barely walk.
But my parents, or my mother and Becky's mother, lee Anne,
were sorority sisters at ut in nineteen forty one and
long friends. It's from the time first grade or before probably, So,
like I said, there's not a time that I didn't
(03:34):
know Tolkeni's or the Halls as lee Anne was a
lot of years, yes, sir, a lot of stories.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
What's the what's the story of who was the sheriff
of them at county? How are you connected to them?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Well, I'm really not. I think I probably didn't explain
that clearly. But Hall was the sheriff, not my grandfather,
and Bob Hall was the sheriff, not my grandfather. So
my grandfather always wanted to get in law enforcement, and
he had an opportunity one time to join the Texas Rangers,
(04:17):
but decided that he was doing so well farming and ranching.
It was he didn't want to make that bigger change,
let everything go. One thing though that did that was
in my family that had a lot of influence on me.
Is at World War Two, and when my father came
home from Europe, he was a navigator on b seventeen,
(04:42):
and they brought him home and put him through pilot training.
I was getting ready to go to the Pacific in
p fifty one and when the war ended, but he
came home and just like a lot of other small
towns in South Texas, we had a National Guard unit
and he was a company commander of the Guard unit.
So I spent a lot of my time when I
(05:02):
was young out there sitting in tanks, pretending I was
driving that kind of stuff. But in nineteen sixty one,
the Guardian a here was mobilized and sent because of
the Berlin Crisis and sent to Atlanta General Depot, where
I spent most of my sophomore year in high school.
Came home. So they're just you know, it's really difficult.
(05:26):
There's so many stories that I could keep you in
the rest of the day. I guess. But let me
go back to Bob Hall, and he was the sheriff,
but he and my grandfather were best friends, and they
both ran Bramer cattle, and they used the same brand,
only turned in an opposite direction. There's a question mark
(05:48):
and it was on each side, and my grandfather turned
it to where the dipper was down. Bob Hall turned
it the other way where the dipper was up, and
he always said, they both said the Bramer cattle were
just almost unable to truly understand how their brains worked.
And they both thought it would be a great idea
(06:10):
to go out and shoot an old Bramer cow someplace
and cut the top of her head off and examine
her brain, because they knew there had to be some
significant difference between Bramer cattle and any other cow. And
they talked about it for decades, but neither one of
them ever did it.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
They were convinced that's so funny. Bobby. Uncle Bobby was
our first exposure to somebody that actually owned and operated
a ranch in livestock. And to this day, Bill I
will never ever forget riding in the back of the
(06:48):
truck and he would call out to the cattle and
they would talk to him, and I think I always thought,
is my uncle Bobby, doctor Doolittle. Do those cows know
him and do they have a personal relationship with him? Well,
would you tell me your perspective on that.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yes, they do. They get to where they know you
so well that when I did the same thing, I'll
go every day now because it's a dry I'll go
out and put out cottonseed cake, which is high in
protein and supplement the cattle. They can fill up on
the dry grass, but it really isn't nourishing unless you
add some protein to it. But I'll get out and
open the tailgate and they'll be one or two old
(07:31):
cows and nibbling on my shirt and they I feel something,
look back and they're trying to bite my shirt to
get my attention. But they if they if you see
them every day, they fall into the routine. They know
who you are, they trust you. But if I bring
somebody else with me and they get out of the truck,
they'll back off and look very suspicious at them. So
(07:53):
it's just just acclamation, I guess on their point, and
they know they recognize the truck too, And in fact,
the truck is white and not only do they chase
me through the pastor wanting to get fed. They chased
all the off field workers through too, So color blind
(08:16):
they are, but they recognize light and dark. So a
white truck they visualize that different than you know. I
guess everything is either white or black, and a white
truck that they will chase. But that old story about
waving a red flag at bulls, that's just something lighter
door does because it looks good. The truely didn't make
(08:37):
any more difference. They noticed motion quicker than they do colors.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Did you ever work at the Delmani plant or know
anybody other than my dad and Bobby that worked there.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Oh? Yeah, there was a man there named Jack Garra.
He and Bobby were really good friends. He was raised
here Increasing Springs, and Jack's son, who was was older
than I am, but we played a lot of tennis
together and been family friends basically for a long time.
But Jack was charging of maintenance over there, and one
(09:14):
time they had a plant up in Illinois or somewhere
that some big fancy piece of machinery couldn't work correctly.
Something was out of line. It was shaking itself to pieces.
So Bobby said Jack go up there and fix that thing.
So they took him up there, and he looked around
at it and got a hammer and red she started
beating on stuff and shimming other stuff up, and they
(09:36):
got that thing, turned it on and it ran smooth
as anything could be. There is a guy that probably
had about a fifth grade education Emmitt County, Texas that
was showing all the fancy engineers took to make that
thing run.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
And what I'm talking about the people that came out
of Corrizo Springs are historic and sometimes we think in
our hearts more important than others, especially our dad. And
to that point, I want you to speak to my
siblings about what was life like growing up, especially for
(10:14):
my dad and Bobby back in Karas of Springs in
the depression.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Well, one thing I always say is quick, if you
ever drink the water and denn the county, you'll always
come back. And amazingly, there's some people that went to
school with us, with me only here maybe two or
three years junior high, maybe a year or two in
high school, and they can still be ask them what's home,
say Carrizo Springs. But when I grew up as a
(10:42):
child of depression, their parents We learned to be frugal,
and my mother made sure of that. And it was
just ingrained in people that had to live through not
only the Great Depression but the drafts of time. Also
that you didn't throw anything away. You always tried to
(11:03):
utilize things. But we never lacked anything. If we needed meat,
we'd go out to the ranch and take out a
big calf and take him into the walk a plant
you don't have a process would eat that, and my
mother would make sure we ate every bite. I'd get
(11:23):
out off school bus sometimes or come home and I'd
smell a liver cooking and I'd say, oh, crap, we
ate ever ingeo that calf. But other than that, my grandparents,
my grandfather and my father. When Daddy graduated from Texas,
he was a civil engineer, but my grandfather only had
(11:44):
my mother and the family, and he offered my father
a chance to come back and start farming, which you did.
It was highly successful doing it, and then my grandfather
continued to ranch after about sixty one or two, I guess,
so I really grew up more on the ranch anywhere else.
I was on a horse when I was seven eight
years old. Are you ready for interesting stories. Yes, sir,
(12:09):
We were working cattle one time, and I was about
seven or eight, and they always gave me a short
legged horse or if I fell off, I wouldn't fall
too far. But we were out pushing some cattle and
Grandpa looked down and I saw it too. It was
a big rattlesnake going into a hole in the ground
about halfway in. So he got off his horse and
(12:31):
he grabbed that snake by the tail and yanked it
out of the hole and went around his head about
three times. And any how, and that snake's head flew
off just like a bull whip cracking. And I bet
that head flew one hundred feet. And I thought that
was the greatest thing I'd ever seen life, you know.
So I went home and I told that story to
(12:52):
Mama about how I couldn't hardly wait to do it
myself when I had the tent. I found out that
day there's some things you don't go home tell mama, So.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
I imagine not I was told no one.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Certain terms that I was not going to be popping
the head off sakes like he did. But he just
he was almost legendary in town for some of the
things he had done. He caught an alligator one time
out a four foot alligator and put it on a
leash or rope and was parading it up and down
(13:25):
in front of the old Sunshine Cafe where everybody went
for coffee, you know, twice a day, once a morning,
once about four in the afternoon. And a guy that
had a feed stool right there next to us where
office was, thought he was stuffed and walked up, kidd
kicked it, beat him on the foot, and I got
a picture right now, grandfather and that damn alligator posing together. Oh,
(13:51):
just story, story, stories, and Bill.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Where are the springs in Carrizo Springs.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
When everybody arrived here in uh in the middle eighteen sixties,
they were basically everywhere the Corrizo watersand actually starts where
Bobby ranched or Bob Hall had the ranch, and then
goes further north into where my main ranch is, which
(14:18):
is the Hut Ranch. And as that sand goes east,
it goes underground, and it gets deeper and deeper and
deeper until you get up into East Texas and is
an all sind. But it's at the times there were
there wasn't any pressure release on it, No wells drill,
so Springs ran basically all over. I've got a copy
(14:40):
of an old movie that was made in nineteen thirteen.
It was called gun Runners of the Southwest or something,
But this is a true story. About nineteen eleven or twelve,
there were some Mexican gun runners that run guns amminition
into Mexico for whatever revolution was going on at the time,
and the sheriff and the deputy sheriff went out and
(15:04):
found them, and they took them both hostage, and the
sheriff got away but to kill the deputy. But he
decided a couple of years later to be a good
subject to make a silent movie about, and he starred
in it as himself. His name was Tom Buck, I
think something Buck. So he made the silent movie where
(15:24):
it shows him going out and even though it's obviously
you're in we're in a drought because it doesn't look
like there's a blade of grass anywhere, there's a scene
showing them wading across the one of the creeks in
this area and it's chest deep. So the Springs continued
to run untileen fifteen or so. Because this was such
(15:49):
good formuling, a lot of people kept coming in a
lot more drilling water wheels that took finally took the
pressure off, and so now the water levels have dropped
now to anywhere from three to four hundred feet wherever
you are. But at the time the water was right
up picted to the ground.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Yeah, that's that is an incredible I'm going to dip
back into my memory of speaking of rattlesnakes. So we're
driving down the road with Bobby and we're coming back
from shooting quail if you want to call it shooting,
because he would go point that direction, boys into a covey,
(16:30):
you know, when you're shooting three or four at a time. Yeah,
take them back and aunt lie Ane would fry him
up and it was extraordinary food. And we go. We
get to eat a whole quail, you know, because we
didn't have a lot of food back then. But on
the way back he would invariably stop build to kill
three or four rattlesnakes on the road, and we were
(16:52):
just wide eyed little kids from Sherman, Texas, going, what
is he? Why is he doing it doing? Is that
still common occurrence down there?
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Not so much anymore, But what if you were shooting quill,
it was probably fall cooling off at night, and those
snakes would come to the pavement to because it was
warmer from the tun and that's why there'd be out there.
And it was a common deal on Friday and Saturday
night and crazy if we couldn't find the girl to
(17:24):
go out with us, and we just all jump in
the vehicle and go out and hunt snakes. And it
was very easy. You'd find about them the highways or
the back roads and a lot of places. I think
they've learned, truly, because they don't do it so much
anymore recently. I say that kind of thinking now that
(17:45):
the snakes had learned to not rattle, because the snakes
that rattle are the ones that get caught during the
rail snake round up, and you're leaving the ones that
don't rattle, and so pretty soon you've got a whole
generation the snakes that don't realize they don't radley don't
get caught. And I've had two occurrences recently that were
(18:05):
snake never rattled, even though I was close to him
and picked up some sacks. One time we were harvesting
onion plants in the farm and threw a bunch of
sacks in the back of my truck and we were
unloading them and one of the guys that was helping me,
I heard him holler and looked around. All about a
three foot rattlesnake had come out of that sack, hit
(18:26):
him in the chest but didn't bite him and just
was trying to get away and fell to the ground.
And that I loaded him up and never rattled, took
him out to the field, And even when he was
coming out of the sack and scaring the dickets out
of everybody, he didn't rattle in it. And that's kind
of scary, very scary.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Let's take a minute to honor your good friend and
my cousin, Chuck o Elkers, who just passed away. I
missed the opportunity here if you had a chance to
eulogize him at his celebration, lot tell our listeners about
what Chucky meant to you.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Well, we went to school from first grade only, and
so there was when he died just a few months ago,
there was over seventy years worth friendship there. And it's
getting to the point that I'll be eighty in this
next June. And we were class sixty four and starting
(19:26):
to lose class members that are pre rapid right now.
But it's still difficult to realize that he's not gonna
call me once a week like he always did. And
we visited for a long time, and Chucky was kind
of an organizer. He literally loved for all of us
(19:47):
as many classmates as we could find at the time,
or we could come to get together like San Antonio
for lunch, and not more or less than a year ago.
They were probably twenty five of us that got together
at the restaurant in San Antonio. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.
We spent quite a bit of time with Chucky and
(20:11):
Dottie down in Houston shared many a meal with him.
He was it's goed to be missed, really going.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
To be missed, yes, sir, And I second that about
him organizing. And he always organized a birthday party for
my aunt Rosalie every year. And we went and visited
her when she was one hundred or one hundred and
one down in the in her final days, and she's
(20:41):
so mentally bright, could still speak two or three languages
that I didn't understand.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
In Spanish and Bill.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
She keeps her story of being abducted by Pancho Villa
still rings in my head, and Chucky would always deny it.
Did you ever hear that story? Whether that was is
that just your Rosalie legend?
Speaker 2 (21:07):
The timing would have been awful a little bit because
she was probably born about nineteen twenty. I would think
her baby, yeah, yeah, and I think he was raising
no Passo in nineteen seventeen or sixteen. But there have
been so many want to be dictators down there. There
(21:27):
could have been somebody else. You know. She had a
real funny senshumor. She told me one time when she
was getting right way up there and over, she said, Bill,
you know what I've done? And now I said, what's that? Rosalie?
She said, you know, it used to be I'd lie
about my age, and now I've gone to bragging about it.
She said. We had dinner with her one time, several
(21:51):
of us, and everybody was ordering, and she this little
waitress said what would you like, ma'am? She said, I'd
like a in milk cocktail. And I could see the
little group of what glass of water?
Speaker 1 (22:10):
It's classical.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Oh, branching was really the main part of it, and
that the cows, Becky and Betsy referred to them as
Bobby's girls. They weren't, and they had individual names, but
as a collective group, there were Bobby's girls. And when
I leased the ranch from my boat, all those cows
(22:32):
and they became my girls, so and they and it was,
what's the funny, Bobby. When you're in a drought, you've
got to feel feed, protein content. And one common feed
is the ground up either corn. Grind up either corn
or maze and mix it with some glasses and put
(22:55):
salt in it to regulate how much they eat. Because
if you don't do that, if you just pour the
feet out, there a big strong cow just standing there
all day and be a weak cow. But if you
put as much at fifteen percent salt, after a while,
they can't eat anymore and they walk away in another cow.
And Bobby mixed the feed, he left the salt out.
(23:18):
In other words, he just fed them all they wanted
to eat everyone. I told Bobby one time, I said,
you're the only person I know that when a drought ends,
the cows are upset because they got to go back
to eating on their own. You're not standing there feeding
them every day. It's not really a funny story. But
(23:41):
Buddy was the Farm Bureau president and I was on
the board for When I moved back here, they said,
do you want to be on the Farm bureo board?
Might as well well. Buddy died that art attack, died
one night after a meeting coming out of the out
of the building, and then elected me president. And I
(24:01):
realized a few years later the only way I'm gonna
get out of being president is back Buddy did. It's
not funny, but it's also true.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Goodness, what does the Farm Bureau president do?
Speaker 2 (24:16):
We just conduct the meeting is about it, and anything
that comes out of Waco comes through the Farm Bureau president.
That's basically what it is. Because the Farm Bureau is
they don't want to be known as an insurance agency
because then they have to pay taxes. They want to
(24:36):
be known as a farmer's co op. And the government
watches real closely to make sure that we don't kind
of veer over in that insurance agency slot, and they
will let us call ourselves, say a co op you're
all about. Let me tell you another funny story. My
(25:00):
grandfather put in a dry land crop the watermelons at
the ranch. One year. Bass had to be back in
the thirties or forties, and he made a pretty good
crop and dry land fall watermelons come off about the
time the quail almost time quail season starts, but it
hadn't started yet, but the quail were just flucking in
(25:21):
there because the insects. Grandfather would shoot several of them
and bring them home, eat them that night and dinner,
and of course it wasn't quail season, and a game
warden suspected him of doing it, and one day when
grandfather had somebody with him, he said they shot the quail,
and he said he'd been hiding them in the watermelons
(25:42):
he'd be bringing in town. And he said, I think
he figured this out, so we're going to put these
in the hubcaps. So they popped the hub caps off
a truck and put the quail in the hubcaps, put
the hubcaps back on. Sure enough, game warden stopped him.
I mean, he's digging around through those watermelons, and he
had a young bird dog with him, and my grandfather
(26:02):
looked down and that damn bird dog was on a
dead point in one of those hoopcaps. Grandfoot runs over
there and he kicks that damn dog and he said,
don't you piss on that tire, son of a bitch,
and the dog hollered and jumped back at the dateboard.
Truck gameboard never saw any point.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Quail, Oh, I love that. That is so great. I'm
going to shift into some other deeper philosophical questions. You
spent much of your life work in the land and
caring for livestock. When you wake up before sunrise on
the ranch, what gives you that deep sense of purpose
(26:45):
each day?
Speaker 2 (26:47):
You know, I think it's to almost time out before
the sun comes up, and there's no nothing more spectacular
washing the suns. It just it. It gets you in
a frame of mind that And I'm a pretty strong Methodist,
and in fact time are a la laid leader. And
(27:09):
I've preached sermon one time about how this earth is
too engineered to be haphazardly where it is now. And
one of the things that I pointed out was that
things I see out there are impressed by sunrise or
at night even you see stars like you never see
(27:30):
anyplace else but it. You know, I guess you can
work hard on it all your life. And there's saying
down here that Kariza Springs, Demo County can promise you
more and bell and ever less, or promise less and
deliver more in any place in the world because we
are so so dependent on mother nature and rain. You know,
(27:55):
if you if you go into a small community like ours,
and you might say you're from San Antonio, you'll be
really amazed at how the topic of conversation for everybody
starts with how much rain did you get? Or you
think it's going to rain? Because we as growing up
part of it, you realize, or so I tell people
(28:15):
that I truly don't sell cattle. I sell rain because
rain falls, the grass grows, the cattle eat the grass,
and so I'm selling what was the by product of rain.
But it also it just gives you anything more beautiful
and watching. If I haunt my horn, cows will come
running in, and these little baby calves that are about
(28:36):
three year maybe three weeks old will come running in
beside them. They'll all have their tails curled over their back,
and they don't know why they're running, but they just
see the enjoyment in them for running with those other cows.
They just, like I said, they don't know why they're
just doing it. It just feels good, you know it teaches
(28:58):
the true meaning of hard work. It teaches you that
you reap what you sold. You know, it's difficult. You
got probably a real renaissance man in some ways. You
got to be everything from a plumber to a veterinarian
in some areas. So my grandfather always told me, if
(29:19):
you spend the money on a cow with a vet,
you lose the money. You go yourself.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Oh my goodness, tell us about when you first came
to the Tolkini ranch. What do you remember about those
early days and what's drawn you to stay in Corezo
Springs and live out your life story.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Well, Bobby in particular had a field out in front,
about three hundred acre field right in front of the
headquarters that he kept just immaculate. He kept every bit
of brush off of it, and it was a just
to big trap. But he had it planted in buffalo
grass and that when it did rain, it would be
the most beautiful field of grass and buffle grass and
(30:10):
imported grass from South Africa. But it's it's one of
the absolute best things it's ever been introduced into this
country because it's very high protein and cattle of it.
But he always took care of that field and he
uh uh, he had built cross fences around it to
make cattle. He always worked cattle by himself with one helper,
(30:34):
and he was he would make it easier for them
to work by you know, his engine ingenuity and where
to put fences and how to do this and that.
But I said, I'm going to tell you something about Bobby.
You probably didn't know. Bobby was hell of a crap shooter.
He shot dice like very few people you've ever seen
(30:55):
in your life.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
Never heard that.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
There was also a story out of World War two
that Bobby want enough money on a troop ship coming
back from the Pacific that he had to hide at
someplace because he just wiped everybody out. And our Lions
Club every year would have a Texas A and M party,
and it would they'd have a meeting and then afterwards
it would they'd set up the crap tables and Bobby,
(31:21):
my father and one other would never be They just,
I mean amazing. I don't know if you say lucky
or they just were able to compute the odds immediately
in their heads on what was you know what the
first roll of the dice would come up with, and
very few people knew about that. In fact, Becky and
(31:42):
Betsy didn't. When I told him that story, they said,
are your kidd said, oh no, I saw him stood
there and watched him do it.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
I've never heard that ever, ever. Ever, I wonder if
there's anything tied to the mathematical brain of Toki, which
is Alex, my dad, Bobby, Joe, and how how smart
they were, and how that might apply to what you're
(32:15):
talking about.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
They very well have because my father was a civil engineer.
It was a tarbata pie, which is a piveta kappa portion.
I mean for the engineers, one smartest man I ever knew.
But and Bobby is say I had the same kind
of uh brain that just would like I said, figure
odds just instantly, and not that it has to have
(32:41):
something to do with being a very good crap shooter.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Isn't that amazing? You made me think about this. This
is a bit of a tangent. But he was the
Bobby was the singular funniest uncle that we had, and
I always wonder why everyone else was so serious. Bobby
would come up to Sherman and he would have this
(33:06):
glass eye and we would all go what happened to
your eye and then you would pop it out and
he'd show it to us. It's like, who is this
magical uncle of ours? I remember his laugh to this day.
And so where did that in the midst of the
(33:27):
toughness and sometimes the grind of Corrizo Springs? Where did
that sense of humor.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Kind of story that will really tells tell you about that.
I had a good friend down here that always said
he had to be tough to live on the border.
And one time I saw a family, this guy worked
for us, going into a coyote bar and somebody sat
down beside him, had a feud with and he just
pulled a pistol out and shot him. Well, he gave
(33:54):
him twenty years in prison. And I saw this family
at the post office, his wife and a couple of
kids in the car, and I kind of smiled and
waved at him, you know, tell him I'm sorry about it.
And there's about a three year old boy in the
back seat, and I look over and that little old
boy sitting there. You know, I could get angry, but
(34:17):
I had to laugh. And I told my friend, I said,
you don't have to be tough, you got to have
sense humor. And Bobby did. I'd go out and sit
down visit Bobby and Leanne quite frequently and just thoroughly
enjoy the visit. In fact, we were I was visiting
with Bobby one time and had a picture of one
(34:38):
of his granddaughters on the wall and a cheerleader suit
or something. I said, Bobby, he said, that's where whichever
one amy I think? He said, she's cheerleader somewhere I
think for maybe the Texans. And she was. And Bobby
didn't he know what, you know, what an accomplishment that was.
(34:59):
But I thoroughly enjoyed this, and with both of them,
just they were at the stage of life that Bobby
would start out telling something and Leanne would finish your sentences.
I I sit there hours talking to them, and I did, well.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
What happened to that antique business and what spurred them
to go to the almost like a light switch flipped
and they would be driving up to Sherman with a
trailer and hauling back furnitures, Like what happened to you two?
Did you just become instant antique dealers?
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Leanne had always had an interest in it. She would
buy all these old dogs and little nicknacked things. Like
one of them that she gave me one time. It
was supposed to walk to my great grandmother was a
little I don't know what women did with it, but
a little dish that the lid was like a little
hen and you'd open it up and you'd keep I
don't know, rings, something like that. Then she brought it
(36:03):
out that she had bought him some relative minds. He said, here,
take this you sure, yeah, just gonna give it to you.
And I think, I I don't know who I gave
it to, but maybe my wife. It's around here somewhere.
They got very big into it, and Bobby had a
guy working for him that did all the physical labor,
stripped him down and then he would refinish them. And
(36:26):
we had found an old dresser out of the house
at the ranch where the guy worked for us lived,
and apparently some of the furniture that he was using
when he left moved in town. I looked at it
and I picked it up and bloated it up, took
it in to Bobby and says it's worth fixing. He said, hell,
(36:47):
yeah it is. That's solid oak. And he worked it
over and tightened up the joints and it's in our
bedroom right now, and that was forty fifty years ago.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Yeah, we are talking to the one and only Bill Martin,
who knows more about the Tolkeenis than the Tolkeenis know
about themselves. Okay, Ranching isn't a job, it's a calling.
Who or what shape your worth work ethic and how
have those values carried through those long days and hard
(37:23):
drought seasons.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Well, I grew up with it. It was either going
farm when Daddy was young or more so, and I
just I guess I just fell into it and really
didn't didn't know that it was not that way everybody worked.
(37:45):
I took and he was My grandfather was kind of
a natural naturalist, I guess you could say, and that
he knew the names of a lot of brush out
there and things like that, and I grew up with
him being able to identify them. And my daughter had
two classmates who were in FFA and they had to Well,
I didn't find ten different species of brush to identify,
(38:08):
and of course the mamas ended up doing and asked
me to take them the ranch and we did, and
we found everything they needed and they were just amazed
that I knew all that, and I was just truly
amazed that they didn't. So it was a you know,
it's just what you grow up with. And sure, so
I never really you know, bought it through, just following
(38:33):
the lead.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
That's what it was, of course. Okay, so how do
you define a good day's work?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Well, good days work is when I don't find anything wrong.
I go. I go to the ranch every morning. I'm
out there by daylight. I check every water source. I
uh checked gates, we did. We until just recently, we
had a lot of where the league was coming across
cutting fences, leaving. So in fact, I'm a pilot and
(39:07):
I had a little one fifty until about two years ago,
and i'd use it to check the ranch. I'd fly
and if I didn't see any water leaks or see
any cattle where they weren't supposed to be, then that
was good. But then if I found it, I would
have to go fix it. But it's always there's always
something to do. There's always a broken wire someplace, there's
(39:27):
always you know, a water float of a water trough
that needs a jesting. And right now it's more busy
because i'm putting out that supplemental cotton seed cake cubes
to my cattle. But we've had good rains back at
the end of June in the first of July, and
(39:50):
the grass was just knee deep green. And one day
about ten o'clock, my wife called me and she said,
what are you doing? I said, well, every tanks will
water Trough's good cattle or not paying attention to him
because they got all the grass they need. So I'm
out of my truck hunting airheads. I was wading around
in upon particular area picking up areas and Becky used
(40:12):
to hunt those over the far northeast corner of the range.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
We used to hunt them, did you. Daddy used to
take us to hunt arrowheads in Kariza springs.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Well back during those days when the Indians were here,
the springs were flowing, so it was a very good
place to live if you were an Indian. Well, about
a week ago I found an airhead that was actually
chipped out ten thousand years ago. What yep. It's called
a golden drina, which means swallow in Spanish, and it
(40:50):
has where the little ears are. It looks kind of
like a swallow. The wings on a Swallow, And I've
got a good friend that probably is a PhD in
archaeology and graduated high school with me, and as the
knows more about South Texas archaeology in anybody in the world.
(41:11):
And I sent him a picture of me. He said,
that's a golden Dreamer and was made somewhere around nine thousand,
five hundred BP. I don't know if you're familiar, Rick,
but everybody has a different means of determining dates. Now,
it used to be ad hereby Lord BC for grass,
(41:34):
and then they went to Common Era CP. But anthropologists
have their own dating system and it's BP before present
and the present they said, is nineteen fifty. So this
erahead was nine thousand, five hundred BP. So that means
it was made nine thousand, five hundred and seventy five
(41:57):
years because you add on or twenty yep seventy five
you had that on too. And they chose nineteen fifty
because there were radiation or nuclear bomb testing that took
place after nineteen fifty in the atmosphere became more loaded
with radioactive material, which made it more difficult to carbon
(42:20):
date organic material that are found in their heads. But
this one was anywhere between ten five and nine five
and ten five thousand years VP.
Speaker 1 (42:34):
What tribe would that have been, that's not.
Speaker 2 (42:37):
It's difficult to say because they had a name for
the Indians down here. It was ko Wheel Tickens. That's
where the state of Kohela came from in Mexico. But
they weren't really a one unit tribe. They were a
conglomerate of several small tribes. And I'm pretty sure the
(43:00):
She's and the Apaches were in this area. And tell
you another funny story that you know. When I was
nine years old, it was just well, my great grandfather
was born in eighteen sixty nine and he was I
was ten years old when he died. So in eighteen
seventy two, the last known Indian raid in Dimmit County
(43:23):
took place. And they had a fort built and rights
on the edge of town. And everybody was congregating around
that folk for it, all the women and children anyway,
men were out, you know, getting ready I kiss. But
sure enough here they came Indians. And he was outside playing,
he was three years old, and his mama runs out
(43:44):
to get him and the first thing she could grab
is his hair, so she yanks him into that fort
by his hair and they slammed the gates. And when
I remember thinking, when I was nine years old and
he told me this, that that was the greatest story
in the world, because there's nothing more blood thirsty for
tales like that. But then later on I realized that
(44:07):
what that was was a passing of knowledge, skipping two
generations from him to me, telling stories of what it
was like when he was a child. And you know,
his generation, maybe more than any other, saw the greatest
changes ever. Saw automobiles and airplanes that went from harson
(44:29):
buggies to cars, electricity. He got nineteen six, seen amazing changes.
But that story of what took place in eighteen seventy
two stuck with me.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
That's what I'm talking about. Thank you, Betsy, because that's
a that is a pricess story. You said you're a pilot.
You also said you're a methodist. Let me see if
I can tie those two together somehow. So you believe
in God, you think Earth is sometimes too well engineered.
(45:08):
When you're flying, what do you see that other people
don't see?
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Well, I tell you, And when you do, you remember,
do you that poem that guy wrote about uh uh,
I leave the bounds of earth and he's flying. Do
you ever hear that poem?
Speaker 1 (45:31):
Yes, sir, I wish I could recite it.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
But leave the surly bounds of earth and dance the light.
Just dance the silver wings. And anyway, when you get
up some days and there are a lot of cumulus clouds,
you're not supposed to fly into them. But if you
just fly by them and the wisps of the clouds are,
you're have a wing tip in the wisp of the clouds.
(45:56):
And it's just the most beautiful sight and sensation in
the world. Because the end of that poem is that
he reaches out and touches the face of God, and
up in an airplane like that, I can very well
see where that poem is. Just it's manifesting what you
feel and what you see. And you know, it's another
(46:22):
thing that it just opens your eyes what it does,
it was this world is beautiful, and probably what I
do for a living makes me more. I feel sorry
for someone sitting off, Get out and go home, go
in the house. Don't spend more than thirty minutes outside,
maybe on the weekend, but I do this every day.
(46:42):
I'm outside every day. Just I couldn't work inside at all.
No way.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Now I want you to give some advice to the
young ranchers and farmers and ore f if a kids
listen about having hope in this occupation.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
Well it, like I said, it's the greatest thing in
the world. But the one thing that makes me know
or realize it will always be need for a farmer
because we basically feed not on the United States, but
a lot of parts of the world what we produce,
(47:30):
and with populations rising, it's going to make agriculture more important.
And you know the part of that is our water
down here. It's become more valuable too. And so if
you the problem is though you just don't decide you
(47:51):
want to be a farmer, because land has gotten so
expensive that you'd have a hard time finding anything you
could raise that would pay for that pay for the
interest on it. So the sad thing is that you've
got to be born into it. Really. Now you might
have a relative that you know, you could get into
(48:12):
it through them that owns the land, but most people
it's passed on but the family farm. I think I
saw a figure the other day that said, in the
last three years or four years have been one hundred
and forty thousand family farms that are gone out of business.
And it's not because they couldn't make a living. It's
just because land got they're selling out the Riar Grandy Valley.
(48:35):
They're very little farming goes on down there anymore. The
citrus is all gone, and it's just so many people
live in there that somebody's got a couple of acres
can make so much money off of the selling interest
that they could farm in it. So, like I said,
(48:57):
it's a beautiful thing, but it you have no control
over the price you're going to get for your product.
You have no control over the weather that can either
save a crop or wipe a crop out in fifteen minutes.
But like I said, it's the freest thing in the world.
You're your own boss, and that that is extremely important.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
No one can fire you.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
No, and you you you know, however much you want
to put in it, you're going to get back.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Oh amen.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
There's a saying about people that some people are farming.
You just call them row farmers. Or they'll go out
and they'll look at a row of crops if they
won't get out and actually walk. Yeah, it's just a
step further.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
Yes, sir, I've got a few more questions for you,
and I would be remiss if I didn't ask you
to share a story about a moment on the ranch
where your patience and your intuition and your care for
animals made all the difference. And for whatever reason, God's
(50:11):
putting on my heart for you to tell us about
when you helped a calf, helped deliver a calf or
some other baby out there, because most of our listening
audience doesn't even know what it's like to pull a calf.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
Oh yeah, you know, calf's supposed to be born head first,
but sometimes they aren't. And more On one occasion, I
found one where the be hind legs are sticking out
and you just slow we pulled that calf out. My
grandfather wan't to had cow that he thought of what
(50:49):
he knew that was breeched birth. But the calf was
so big it was afraid he's gonna kill it if
he pulled it. All it was so you remember those old
window weights used to be yes, there would counteract. Oh yeah,
he had one of those things, and he tied a
rope around the calf's feet and put that wind to
weight on the other came back in a few hours
(51:11):
and that way that slowly pulled that calf out and
she was with calfs brilliant to the.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
Brilliant. See that's the kind of stuff that I think
the next general no offense youngsters. But where is that
common sense or practicality going to? Where you get that experience? Today?
We figure things out to fix a fix things without
fix things with wire, you know, not induct table.
Speaker 2 (51:41):
Yeah, and we the same family has worked for us.
And he was hanging for three generations now four, and
every one of them was a master craftsman at building fences.
They were just barn with a piece of wiring one hand,
a pair of flyers in the other. And they taught
(52:01):
me tricks that when I do and people say, how
do you learn how to do there? But I've been
talked by experts. But I worked cattle this morning and
we penned about one hundred and fifty cows. I cut
off calves I wanted to sell held back to half
ers all the key And one thing you learned real
quick is you don't want to push a cow. You
(52:24):
want to make you want the cow. And think that's
what she wants to do. So if you can convince
the cow and make the cow think, okay, I want
to run over here, and that's what you wanted to do,
then you can work them so much easier. And it's
not who can holler the loudest, who can work that
cow around where she thinks what she's going to do
(52:46):
is her idea, But it's what you wanted to do
all along. So this quieter you can do it, slower
you can do it, the better it you don't want
to and you know you can say I learned that
cattle on the same thing he use on people.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
Exactly same lessons. Hey, if you were the commissioner for
the Texas Department of Agriculture, what would be the first
two or three things you would do well?
Speaker 2 (53:19):
One time? This is kind of interesting. It goes back aways.
When Rick Perry was Commissioner of Agriculture, I got to
know him pretty well. He come to Creasis several times,
and I was visiting with him. One time he said,
you know what I want to see done? He said,
everybody in Texas at least our age is no more
(53:39):
than one generation removed from the land. He said, But
now we've got kids at school that don't know it,
don't come from They don't know that Larns starts off.
They don't know what this generation was born with. He said,
I want everybody in the school system to all these
kids growing to realize and appreciate what takes place to
(54:05):
feed them. And uh I when he was governor, he
did start some programs where UH schools would have department
and taxa department agriculture people go put on you know,
afternoon deals for them and teaching things like that. So
(54:26):
that's that's a lot of it's appreciating what uh you
know where it comes from.
Speaker 1 (54:35):
Teach appreciation. Okay, what else would you do?
Speaker 2 (54:43):
At one time, we had a lot of restrictions put
on us by the federal government and UH the uh
the navigable well us waters they have to be navigable
to have government influence like the Army Corps of Engineers
(55:05):
or But when they put that word it just said navigable.
That meant something a boat could go down. But they
took that word navigable out, which meant that if I'm
a farmer running water down a ditch, I could possibly
fall under the government control. And I need him to
(55:26):
be very very vigilant. What is coming out of Washington
that will affect me. I do remember back when Carter
was president, and I like Jimmy Carter as a person.
I don't think he was very wonderful man. But we
had a packing house slaughterhouse here, and that's where our
(55:46):
calves would go. And I had a calf. I had
a whole load of cattle. I was taking the valley
and one calf got down in it and the other
stood on him till he couldn't get his breath down.
When I got up there, he was dead. So I thought,
we don't he I'll just take him back to the
slaughter plane. Well, they had a government in specter there
(56:08):
that wouldn't let me unload that cap because he didn't
know how it died. He wouldn't believe me. He had
to have proof that it didn't have some kind of
disease or something. And it was very obvious because he had,
you know, blood out his nostrils from its lungs being crushed.
And I thought to myself, that's a little bit too
(56:28):
much government overreach right here. So I took him to
the ranch and gave him to the family that worked
for Uce, and they kind of rope and strung him
up in a tree and skin him and he was
in the freezer with about four hours. But they would
not let me do that, and they're just, yeah, there's
a lot of other things that we've got careful with
(56:49):
just and sometimes it just be easier because we know better.
We know better. Well, the only thing the government ever
really did was convinced Panhandle on Oklahoma farmers to change
some of their methods of plowing back into the Great Depression,
because that was, you know, we had such terrible droughts
(57:10):
and dust bows. And they finally convinced him to plow
across rather than with the direction of the wind, and
it made a big difference. So that was a good program,
And there are a lot of good programs out there,
But then there are others that wanted to just take
away our right to decide to determine how we won't liberalize.
Speaker 1 (57:33):
Good points. Let's think about ten or twenty years from now,
when we're hopefully at our in our eternal home, what's
going to happen to the future of the Tolkini ranch
And what legacy do you believe that you and the
family are building together now?
Speaker 2 (57:51):
Well, we're the same way our family. We own a
two thousand acre farm and no, not a single one
of the four children that I have, between my three
sisters and myself, I want to come back to it.
So we're in the process of selling it. And we've
been in business since nineteen thirteen, so but I'm almost eighty.
(58:14):
My youngest sister and her husband really running the farm
because I retired from that and they're both seventy and
seventy one. But we're selling it to an entity Bonnie
Plant Farm that if you go to a hardware store
and you see onion plants or tomato plants or pepper plants,
they're providing them. And they're going to continue running it
(58:36):
at Sixondale Farms and keep my sister and brother in
law for as long as they'll stay. And that you
go back to the Tolkeeni ranch. Becky has no children,
Betsy has two girls and either one of any interest
at all. So they have a price on it to sell,
(58:58):
but the price is so high that they nobody will
pay that kind of money, and it's just kind of
putting off the selling of it, which I will break
their hearts, I'm sure, and that's why since I leased
it from them, I'm their boots on the ground, so
(59:18):
to speak. If there's something that's got to be taken
care of with the appraisal district, I do it. If
there's something that has to be done through an RCS
or anything else, I do it for him because I
know they can't do it. In fact, when Bobby died,
they closed his post office box and the appraisal district
was sending farms to be filled out to maintain the
(59:42):
ag exemption. Post office are sent back because Bobby's post
office box was closed, and the appraisal district did not
look for how to get those notices to Betsy and Becky,
So all of a sudden they could. They find out
that they don't have the egg exemption, and their taxes
go up ten times for a couple of years, and
(01:00:04):
they finally got it back, and they were very, very
involved in making sure that they do everything needs to
be done, and I take care of that for him. That, yeah,
well I don't mind doing it because I told both
those girls that I got a raised with you, almost
like I've got two more sisters. So yeah, I got
(01:00:25):
to treat you all like that because when my mother
died and my father died. A couple of years later,
we were cleaning out their house and Mama saved everything
depression their child, and we found a box and in
it was this real pretty little dress and a note
there that said I wore this dress to Leanne Hall's
(01:00:46):
twelfth birthday party. Did save that and it just thought,
my gosh, we all just thoroughly enjoyed going through.
Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
Yeah, that's beautiful. Okay, I'm going to show you this
and then we'll wrap up the show. And this is
the only thing that my uncle Toki had Alexander TOKENI
in his railroad room and that was handpainted between Corezo
(01:01:23):
and North Grand in Sherman, Texas Railroad and none of
his kids wanted it, and I said, I gotta have it,
and I to this day, Bill, I think that there
is this core values route that comes from Corezo right
to Sherman to the other Tolkeenis and it was all
(01:01:47):
about hard work, common sense and being kind to each other.
Please comment on how you see the Corrizo Springs branches
out there.
Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
Oh, it's just you know, like I said, if you
drink the water, you're always going to come home. And
I had to help preacher do a funeral for somebody
a year or so ago, and I was reading scriptures
or something, and I stopped and I said, I look
at everybody out there that's attending that funeral, and I
(01:02:23):
see threads that connect family, threads, threads of friendship, and
it's just, you know, you may leave, but you'll always
come back in some farm or fashion. And it's just
I don't know. I think it's just like I said,
it's our relationship to the soil, and it's just it's
(01:02:46):
a small community, it's a more oriented, but we we
know each other. We look out for each other. And
I had to do a thing for Water District project
a while back, and they interviewed me for something and
that's guys said, well, what one word what would you
use to describe Crazo Springs? And I said, residient. Our
(01:03:09):
people are resilient, they're tough.
Speaker 1 (01:03:14):
Amen to that. Thank you, sir for being on There
are successful people in this life, then there's truly significant people.
And you have leaped way beyond any measure of success.
And now I know why you mean so much to
(01:03:36):
Betsy and Becky and you mean so much to the
rest of the tolkinis as well, So I thank you well.
Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
Rick here, welcome and it's so labor love. It's just
I couldn't do anything else.
Speaker 1 (01:03:50):
It's you. You have responded to the calling.
Speaker 2 (01:03:54):
I guess so. And my grandfather was a second too.
They both the community in many capacities. I've done the
same thing with school board, Livory board, things like that.
Speaker 1 (01:04:09):
Jory, thank you so much. You're so kind for spending
time with us, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. And again
my thanks to Betsy for introducing us. And we'll stay
in touch with you, Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
I expect joyed visiting with you. And like I said,
I see chokey. I see chokey.
Speaker 1 (01:04:31):
That's cool. Folks. We hope that you enjoyed this program
with our friend Bill Martin from Carrizo Springs and consider
everything that he says as you consider what your purpose
in life is supposed to be about. Have a great week.
Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
Yeah,
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