Neil Dudley: The Cowboy Perspective, well, it might be hard to define, but I guarantee if you think about it, you’ve got one in mind. Whether you’re building a legacy, an empire, or a fan base, I bet when your friends look at you, they see some cowboy in your face. Y’all come along, let’s talk about this or that. Maybe when we’re done, you’ll go away with another perspective to put under your hat.
Hey everybody. Welcome back. This is another episode of my Cowboy Mentor series or the Cowboy Mentor series. I hate to say it’s mine because it’s partially, it’s just as much my guests as it is mine. I hope you’re excited for another I guess exploration of somebody that I really look up to his thoughts and perspectives on things. I hope you all enjoy this, find value in it. If you do, please share it. Tell a friend, like, go subscribe to the podcast on whatever app you use to listen to podcasts. Anyways, there I go rambling on about stuff. Let’s get to the meat of the matter. And that is a guy who I really look up to. He was raising a couple of daughters that were about me and my brother’s age, so we got to know him a lot through our high school and even younger than that years. Let’s hear what he’s got to say. Mr. Gerald Burns.
Well, hey, everybody. I always start the Cowboy Perspective off with some kind of saying or thing that I think is special, but I don’t know what to say this time, so I’m just going to say, I want to introduce you all to Gerald Burns. He’s a guy, you might have heard his name mentioned in a previous podcast that I had done with Billy Albin. I’ve talked him into coming onto the Cowboy Perspective. He qualifies most certainly as a guy that’s been a mentor to me in maybe not specific ways, but in ways that I just see him as a man, a godly man and somebody that well, his picture is in this house all over the place – we’re doing this podcast at my house, and he married me and Stacy. So, we got quite a few pictures of him hanging around here. Well, anyways, Gerald, welcome to the show. I’m so glad you’re doing this. I appreciate it very much. And if you don’t mind, tell everybody just quick who you are, where you came from so they get a little picture of that. And then we’ll talk about a few specific things and see where it goes.
Gerald Burns: Okay. That’ll be great. Thank you for asking me to come by. I heard you when you interviewed Billy and really appreciated that and really enjoyed listening to it. But anyway, I’ve lived here a good long while, about 40, well, Brenda and I’ve been married about 46 years, and 45 of that we’ve lived here. But as you well know, if you weren’t born in Comanche or Comanche County, you’ll always be an outsider. You’ll never be a hometown boy. So, I guess I’m still outsider. But anyway.
Neil Dudley: I don’t know where that comes from. I wouldn’t, matter of fact, me and Billy said something about where’s Gerald from, and I was guessing Vernon or something.
Gerald Burns: I was thinking on the way down here, my roots go back not far from here. My dad was raised at Burkett. My mother was raised at Cross Plains. So, I still have kin in counties that joined Comanche County. I’ve been through and around Comanche County nearly all my life. But I was raised up south of Fort Worth, went to school at Crowley. Crowley was just a little class B school then. And anyway, we lived there and my dad worked on ranches there, Mr. OC Armstrong, he had three ranches along there. And back then Fort Worth was just, it wasn’t even grown past Seminary Drive hardly back then. We had to go to Seminary Drive and old Granbury Road to go to the grocery store, and it was all cow country up until then. And so anyway graduated from high school in ’68, came down to Tarleton and went to school, got out of there in ’72 and worked on a couple, two or three outfits, worked on some while I was going to college and then went to work for an outfit at Crescent and worked there for two or three years. And then my niece kept telling me about this girl that she knew at college she was wanting me to meet. And anyway, at that particular point in time, I was enjoying life pretty good. But Brenda and I met in the Fall, and I gave her a ring sometime after that in the next Spring, in June, we were married. So, we lived at [inaudible] mountain on a Chaparral Ranch down there for a year while we were first married. And then we lived down here at the Comanche and started our life here. So, that’s how I came here.
Neil Dudley: Yeah. It’s always fun to hear how somebody kind of ends up where they call home and home can be a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So, you probably feel a lot like this, I kind of floated along there quite a while, just doing my thing. And then when I kind of met Stacey, well things, a lot of different things changed in my life and my perspective got a lot different. So, if you’re listening out there and you might not have found that significant other, that special person in your life, well, don’t give up on it. Keep looking. You may not understand it today, but it’s going to be something you’re really, really happy to have when it all comes due or at least to fruition. So, we were just talking about running the chains at the football game, and you did that for a lot of years. And I was reminiscing a little bit about pep rallies, and I just think, I remember you kind of speaking at some of the pep rallies and how you become a- my dad, I mean, I feel like I’ve always kind of known you, and you shod horses for us. I just always looked up to you. Talk a little bit about, I think it plays a big role in your life – and then here we go, jumping from running chains to tell me a little bit, but I think it’s just, I saw you and then I noticed, oh, well, he’s a preacher out here in Board Church. That was kind of like surprising to me. I don’t know why, but just in all honesty, oh wow, that’s kind of cool. How did that come about? Or tell us all a little bit about what that means to you.
Gerald Burns: That was surprising to me also. Never really intended, in fact, I was thinking about where my life has taking me and probably the two things that I’ve been at for the longest period of time, neither one of them were something that I planned on. One of them was working at the bank. I started back in ’91 working for the bank and that lasted nearly 30 years. I never planned on that. And as far as me preaching, I was raised in a Christian home, and I have always been exposed to the Bible and to a relationship with the Lord and those kinds of things. But as you well know, when you get off home sometimes, like going to college, things happen, you kind of jump the track, kick over the traces, whatever you want to call it. And that happened to me. And I spent several years of my life just enjoying life and doing lots of things that my dad and mother probably didn’t approve of, but they certainly, they supported me, and more than anything else, I’m sure my dad and mother prayed for me all those years. So anyway, came back around full circle. Well, we had been attending members, I guess, of the little church down there where my wife grew up in Comanche County. I don’t know if you remember this, but in every little, near the crossroads, they had schools back in the day. You had to have schools close enough to where the kids could walk to school. And along with that, usually when there was a school, well, there’d be a church. Maybe they’d become, there’d be a little store or something, develop little communities all over Comanche County. Anyway, Board, which is B O A R D not B O R E D.
Neil Dudley: I used to get licks with that board.
Gerald Burns: Anyway, Board Church is about eight or nine miles southeast of Comanche on a dirt road down there on Indian Creek. Anyway, we were going to church there, and these little churches, country churches have had, they’ve kind of gone through hard times and then they’ve begun to rebound a little bit now, and there’s a lot of people that attend these little churches out through the country. But we had always depended on preachers or pastors that we could find and usually a little church like that can’t afford full-time pastors. And so, they have pastors that maybe are retired or maybe they’re fresh out of seminary, Howard Payne or somewhere, and they’d come by and they stay a little while and then they’d leave. Well, back in ’90, about ’90 or ’91 we had gone without a pastor. And there was two of us, Mac Rickles and I were there, and we began to alternate filling the pulpit on Sundays and Sunday nights and whenever we met. And so, we did that for a while and then [Mac Donna], for whatever reason, moved there, led her over to a Rocky Point over south of Stephenville. And so that left us there. And so, the congregation asked me if I would fill pulpit for them. And I told them I’d be glad to do that until we could find a permanent. And that was about in1994, I guess. And when we could find a permanent, or do something different, we would. Anyway, so I’ve been filling in that interim position for those years since then. So, I’m still just a part-time preacher, just you know, bivocational, I guess, is what the correct term is. And I’d say, it’s probably been the best thing that ever happened to me because it caused me to begin to get into the word of God more intensely and to watch, to be more aware of what kind of individual I am and all kinds of things like that. In fact, I was reading in the part of the Book of James yesterday, when I was doing my cowboy church, it says not many of us need to be preachers and teachers and that kind of thing because we’re held to a higher standard than just one that is a believer, because you’re responsible for what you say. So that puts a pretty good burden on you, and it makes you think about what you’re doing. So anyway, I’ve been filling that position for a good while, and I’ll tell you what, it’s been good for me. Sometimes it’s hard on family. We don’t get to go sometimes on the weekends like we would or used to. But anyway, my wife’s been very supportive of all that I do. And so that’s how I ended up in that position.
Neil Dudley: I mean, where did you develop that skillset?
Gerald Burns: You know what, Neil, I think the Lord prepares you for opportunities in life. When I was in high school, I was active in the things in high school. I was for a while I was president of the student body, and I had opportunities to be in front of people speaking and talking. And so, when this took place, I had been through the years, I taught Sunday school and I’d done this and done that. And I was talking about living down there on the ranch there at Crescent. I worked for, there was three guys, at least a good bit of that country there west of Crescent, between Crescent and Weatherford up through there, of course, that’s cowboy country. And a good friend of mine, James Penniston and I, batched over on the back of that rancho over there close to Baker. And we had a great time, did a lot of work together, cowboyed a lot back then and had had a great time. But in 19- oh, about 73 there was some things that took place in my life that turned my life around. Not that it changed directions completely, but it began to change my focus and sort of rededicated my life and got my business a little straighter, not completely straight, but better. And that’s when things began to happen in my life. That’s a little bit later on is when I met Brenda, a little bit later on that’s when we got married and we moved down here, finally stuff. So, things began to happen. And I think the Lord just prepared me for that. I began to study the word very intently. I read over and read through and went back and rehashed. And now after close to, I don’t know what it’s been, 16 or 17 years, I’ve become a little more familiar, not in any way knowledgeable, but a little more familiar with God’s word. And I depend on the presence of the Holy Spirit in my life to guide me and that’s kind of where I’m at.
Neil Dudley: That’s a great insight is I see it in my life, just God prepares you for things in a million ways. I may never be a preacher, but God’s using me. He’s working in me and through me to accomplish things. And I hope to be a good vessel for that. So anyways, I really admire that. That’s one of those things that I look up to. I’m doing my podcast, it is kind of a series right now that I’m doing with just mentors and specifically cowboy mentors and cowgirl mentors. I’ve got a few of those that I want to get on. And so, that’s one of those things I watched. Then I knew you’re kind of a cowboy. I mean I remember as a little kid going with Dad up, they’d have team ropings or something, I’d see you there. And Dad would kind of talk about, yeah, that Gerald, he’s a good healer. And just so you were in my kind of periphery just because you were part of the community and a cowboy, and my dad and you have a relationship. So, all those things kind of made you part of somebody I was watching, and then I’m getting a little older. And like you said, you went to work at the bank, which was something you never expected to or was planning on doing. How did that happen? And what do you like or not like? Or how come, I feel like you must like it a little bit, you still do it. So, let’s talk about that a little bit.
Gerald Burns: I’ve always said Comanche County was a great place to live, but sometimes it’s a little hard to make a living here. You know what I mean? Back in the day, in fact, people used to leave out of here to go places and work, and then they’d come back to Comanche County to live here. But anyway, when Brenda and I got married, we worked on that ranch there at Chop Mountain for about a year. And then we came down here and at that point in time, I was riding some colts and I was day working and shoeing some horses and just whatever I can do to make ends meet, and through the years, that’s what we did. And there came a time after my daughters were born and then they got up in the nineties when you kids was in high school, began to get in high school, and things begin to change. There wasn’t, I think Billy mentioned it too, there wasn’t a lot of money in some of those things we was doing back then, you worked from can until can’t, but you didn’t really-
Neil Dudley: Make much money.
Gerald Burns: You can make ends meet sort of. And one thing that was very important for us was when we began to have children, well, Brenda was at the house and she stayed there, and until the girls got older, she never took an outside job and stayed home. And so the burden of the of really her burden was to be there at home, which wasn’t a burden, but it was her responsibility. She was at home and raising those kids. And then I worked and, like I say, spent a lot of time away from the house. We’d leave, a lot of times, I’d leave in the dark, saddled horse in the dark and took off, and I’d meet Billy somewhere and we’d work all day. And a lot of times it’d be dark coming home. So long story short, along there in maybe probably 1990, Danny Armstrong was working for the bank. And he asked me one time, he said, “Do you think you might be interested in maybe doing a little work for us, inspection work? Maybe a little appraisal work” and stuff like that. I said, “Well, I don’t know. I said, “I never had thought about anything like that.” He said, “Well, you think about that and see what you might think.” So, it rocked on, nothing ever happened. I never thought any more about it. And at that time, I was staying at Joe Paul’s working a good bit then. We wasn’t really, we didn’t really have a lot, like I didn’t work for him, but I worked there all the time. You know what I mean?
Neil Dudley: He didn’t tell you what you were doing that day. You just showed up every day.
Gerald Burns: He was running a lot of yearlings back then. And we worked. Anyway, it came up again and Jerry Vines called me, and he said, “Would you come up and talk to me about something we’ve got on our mind?” And I said, “Yeah.” And I went up there and he told me what their situation was. They had a good many dairies back then and then a lot of livestock and agriculture loans. Back then, Comanche National was a huge lender in the area with that kind of agriculture stuff. Anyway, the LCC and all them had began to put the screws on them, screw down on them a little bit, get a little bit tougher on them about seeing their, what they were loaning money on. Anyway, Mr. Nicks used to say, inspect what you expect, you know what I mean? And so, that’s where I, they said, and it always tickled me, Jerry Vine, he said you know, “I don’t think this will work.” He said, “We’re going to try it a little while,” and said, “Are you willing to try it?” And I said, “Well, we’ll try it.” And so, we’ve been trying for 30 years, and you know Neil, he never did hire me on permanent. I guess I’m still part time.
Neil Dudley: Have you got a permanent position anywhere?
Gerald Burns: No, not really. But anyway, the bank, Comanche National, was really good to me, and it came at a time of my life there was some things changing around and came at a good time. Again, providential. I went to work for them, and that was, boy, that was a transition. You talk about a change. Anyway, but there was some good things came out of that. And over time, it’s been something that- the main thing was the support. I had two girls. I mean, you know what that is. You’ve got three.
Neil Dudley: Well that’s our next topic, so you can start- don’t think too far ahead, but we’re going to talk about raising-
Gerald Burns: But they had needs. And I knew there was going to be college ahead, and I knew they needed automobiles, and weddings down the road and that kind of stuff. And I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to, and Brenda had taken a job then. She’d gone to work for Farm Bureau where she worked for a good long time. And I just felt like this was something. And it was, like I say, it was at a point in time, and anyway, Billy had asked me not too long before that, we’d kind of, things had kind of changed around this part of the world, and we weren’t working as many cattle as we used to and doing the things we did. And he asked me one day, he said, “What do you think about going to west Texas to start day working out there in west Texas?” And I said, “It sounds really good to me, but I can’t do it.” I just wasn’t able to do it. And so, he did, he’s had, talk to him about some of the great experiences he had out there. And anyways, so I, but I stayed here and hired out to them I was going to try it. So, we’ve been trying it and they’ve been awfully good to me. Of course, it’s changed hands since the last couple of years. And didn’t know how all that was going to turn out.
Neil Dudley: You mentioned Jerry Vines and I just know the succession of the leaders and that ownership stayed pretty solid until recent, but then you think about just the different guys that have been leading that bank that you’ve worked under. There’s a lot of I think fun in just getting to know those different people and they think about stuff.
Gerald Burns: I met a lot of people and had a lot of friends and got to see a lot of stuff I probably never would have got to say something. Yeah, it was good for me.
Neil Dudley: Cool. Alright. So now then, let’s talk about raising girls. I don’t know if there’s a blueprint, but if you got one, hand it over.
Gerald Burns: I tell you what, I took the blueprint and shredded it and threw it away a long time ago. I don’t know. I was going to tell you, you’re a better man than me because you went ahead and had the third one. We had two, and I told Brenda, I said I’d like to have a little boy, but I don’t think I can raise three girls. So anyway, we stopped our family at two, but they were great, great kids. Like I say, their mother was the mainstay in their life for their first few years, because I was gone so much, and she stayed there and that was a great foundation for those girls. But, as you well know, I believe it takes two to raise a family. And I believe it’s important, the female influence from the mother is very important, but the male influence from the dad, the authority figure, the someone that represents what a father should represent. And I found out after, and a lot of this goes back to what I found out in the word of God, but you know, it’s just very important for us to play our role out in a young girl’s life, to be the kind of man and to be responsible, to be all we need to be. And as a result of that, I’ve got two very special daughters, and they have given me eight grandchildren.
Neil Dudley: Well, how about them son-in-laws?
Gerald Burns: I’ll tell you, blessed there also, got two fantastic son-in-laws.
Neil Dudley: You’re feeling a little emotional there and it kind of makes me feel the same way because my kids, I can’t even really picture it, but I can see in my life, if the Lord grants me the time, I’m going to be in a place where they’re going to bring home a boy that they feel a lot really important. And I think, some people have told, I kind of come up with it in my own head, but also people will say, or other men I look up to and women, a girl’s going to marry somebody probably a lot like her daddy and she’s going to think that how you treat your wife is how she should be treated. So, I take that as a pretty true statement. So, and I’m no- man, I mess up so much.
Gerald Burns: Well, we all do that. None of us are perfect. But you’re right. In this world and the way we are now, I really think that I got to enjoy, people that your dad, your dad’s age and Tom R’s age and stuff, he and I are the same age. And I think we grew up through probably the greatest opportunity, even though we went through some tough times when we were in high school in the sixties, there was a lot of opportunity to mess up if you wanted to. But we grew up in a great time in these United States and things weren’t like they are now, and I really hate it. But, and yeah, you raise those girls right and they see and they know and understand, and they have a foundation, and then when they go looking for somebody, it’s pretty neat. You see the thing, you see the ones, they’ll bring some home you’re not very proud of, to be honest with you, but anyway, you just, you go through those times
Neil Dudley: How do you deal with that?
Gerald Burns: I don’t do well.
Neil Dudley: Well, you have to probably just understand each kid’s different personality. To me, I think all humans have this issue, but I might play it harder than most is I kind of think everybody thinks about things the same way I do. And that’s not true. They see it from a whole different lens, and I’m hoping I’ll have the maturity, I’m hoping God is just preparing me that when those days come, I’ll have the maturity to understand this isn’t going to be my husband, it’s going to be her husband. She needs to figure that out.
Gerald Burns: That’s a wonderful way to look at things, but the truth is that I didn’t do a very good job like that. It’s very easy, my wife will tell you, it’s pretty easy to see what I’m thinking. It comes out all over me and it’s hard to- but my son-in-laws the ones, Johnny and Trey that they wound up with, I wouldn’t have handpicked somebody for my girls exactly like me, because like you say, I see the faults and the shortcomings in me, and I want them to have somebody that they can make a life with. Both my sons-in-law are very involved with their families, with their kids. They’re there for them, something I wasn’t in the early years. And so, I’m thankful for that. Brenda and I, we often talk about how blessed we are.
Neil Dudley: I think I kind of relate it to a movie scene and McLintock! where John Wayne’s talking to his daughter over the horses back, and people are going to think I’m leaving you all this money or whatever it is, but what I’m really going to give you just enough to get a start because the blessing is in the growing together. And that’s the thing I hope I can give my daughters. I think you’re feeling like you’re really excited to see what your daughters have, and we are so blessed. And I bet you didn’t expect to come in here and get in to all these kind of emotional. But I know this much about you, you’re an emotional kind of guy and that’s okay. I think it gives me the freedom to be emotional. Like I look up to that.
Gerald Burns: Yeah. I’ve seen people that more or less hide their emotions, you never do see them. And, but I do, I cry a lot. Our whole family’s that way. Our emotions come out of us. And I know that in men sometimes holding those emotions in and bearing those things by yourself can ultimately kill you. And so, it bothered me, it used to bother me a lot. It don’t bother me more. My folks out at church, they’re used to me getting where I can’t talk and stuff all the time. But it’s like you say when you’re talking about stuff that means something to you.
Neil Dudley: And to me, it’s happy emotions. I think a lot of people and maybe how they’re raised or even perceived, some of that is sometimes just a cry or trembling lip, whatever might mean, oh man, they’re going through something that’s really hurting them. I don’t think there’s a thing hurting you right now. There’s only happiness in your heart and life. Anyways, that’s awesome. So, you should know, I value that, like even just in this moment, seeing that in you makes me think that’s something I want to make sure I let happen in my life is my girls see me. And you were talking about your family, I promise, and almost everybody can probably read you, like bam, Gerald’s not happy right now. I can tell. And my girls, they know the same thing about me. They tell me, like we’re driving and Daddy, when you do your lips like that, we know you’re not happy. And it’s just a thing I think I got from my dad.
Gerald Burns: It’s a curse, I’ll tell you.
Neil Dudley: It probably is because a lot of times you don’t intend to have something really known because you don’t want to let it just lay out there because you might need a second to think about it and to figure out where you stand. You have a knee jerk in almost every scenario, man. Anyways, controlling those, I don’t know, if we figure that out, that’d be a nice thing to help everybody. So, anybody out there, if you’re listening and you know how to really control your emotions or build your opinions without everybody understanding you’re in that process, man, we’d like to hear about it. I’ll take all that into consideration and see if I can’t play it in a way to raise my girls a little better, just do the best I can. That partnership is huge.
Gerald Burns: Yeah. And just do the best you can, and any more for these kids, just being there is a huge thing, just being a part of their life. Because you know, you can do things for them, you can give them things, you can provide things, but what they need is just somebody to be there.
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Now, what was your home life like as a kid? Was your dad around?
Gerald Burns: Oh yeah. My mom and dad, my mother, she never did work out of the house until I got on up in, I guess maybe I was in high school, maybe I was a junior high, but she was always home. And then when she finally did, or maybe I was a little younger, I don’t remember. I tell you, Neil, a lot of things have kind of-
Neil Dudley: Get foggy?
Gerald Burns: Well yeah, with age. And when she did finally start going to work, well then I’d get off the bus. We lived a good ways. I was the last to get off and the first to get on the bus, and usually rode the bus an hour and a half or longer, or maybe two hours sometimes.
Neil Dudley: See I rode the bus, and I learned a lot riding the bus. My girls are never going to get that experience.
Gerald Burns: I learned a lot too.
Neil Dudley: I mean, good, bad, lots, it was a breeding ground for lots of things.
Gerald Burns: It really was. And but yeah, mother sometimes, she’d have to be gone or something somewhere for a period of time. And I remember Daddy, he’d put a mattress in the back of an old bobtail truck and it’d have grain boards on the side of it. And he’d string a tarp across the top of that, those grain boards. And he’d carry me to the field with him. He’d be plowing. And of course, I was little then, little bitty. Mother had to be gone somewhere for a family deal or something. And I remember playing under the back of that old bobtail truck, I’d have me a tractor or something and play in the dirt.
Neil Dudley: Now, did you have siblings?
Gerald Burns: Yes. I’ve got an older brother. We really kind of had three separate families. My older brother is six years older than me. And then my sister is the oldest. She’s 12 years older than I, and she kind of claims she raised me. I don’t know whether she did or not, but I know she probably took care of me a good bit. See, my sister got married when she was pretty young and had her first child pretty quick. And that daughter was the one that got Brenda and I hooked up.
Neil Dudley: Yeah. Your painting- now, I’m coming full circle because you said niece, I thought I wonder if he meant to say aunt or something.
Gerald Burns: She’s five years younger than me. And so, she and I grew up and were more like sisters. And you remember Byron, Ty’s daddy? Well, that’s her next brother. And he and I are like nine, no, seven years apart, maybe. So, we grew up more like brothers and sisters then we did nieces and nephews. But Glenda had Sue, she was born on the 4th of July and anyway, she messed up our, we had a little barbecue plan. She messed up the whole barbecue. But anyway, yeah. And then my sister went on to have four children and then they adopted one. So, they had five. And then my brother adopted two, he and his wife, and then, they had one. And so, they all had families. They were all pretty close to around there. My sister and her husband were in the dairy business and they dairied there on the south side of Fort Worth and then moved down to [Rivista], which is south of Cleaver. They finished up their dairy career down there.
Neil Dudley: So, kind of part of that story, or what I’m trying, want to kind of go to is where’d your cowboy philosophy come from? Or, if you have one?
Gerald Burns: If you’re talking about the way you think about things-
Neil Dudley: Yes, I’m talking about that too, but keep, I kind of also want to just think what made you even know what a cowboy was or think that a cowboy was anything?
Gerald Burns: Of course, my daddy was, he was a cowboy. He wouldn’t have called himself. He was a horseback and not every day, but he did what you had to do on the ranch to make things go. So, my daddy was cowboy. And my brother, when he was- when he and my sister-in-law got married back in 19-, it was in the sixties, early sixties, I guess. Anyway, when they got married, Butch was living in California on a ranch right there south of San Francisco, which you wouldn’t think would be ranch country, but that whole country out there, you get a little way away from those towns. And he worked for an outfit called the N3 Cattle Company, which was right there south of San Francisco. In fact, there was a part of that outfit that you could ride up on top there on one of those mountains and you could see the bay of San Francisco. So, I went out there with them, and I was thinking about that, that was the first time I roped corriente steer. They brought Corrientes in from Mexico back then crossbreds and corrientes. And of course, California back then, that was before Texas ever went to heading and healing much as far as dally roping. They hadn’t healed here a little bit, but they tied the knot, and they didn’t do that in California. But down out there, when they’d get a truck load or two of cattle in, they’d rope them all, they didn’t use a shoot. They’d rope them, head and heal them, brand them, give them their shots, do whatever they had to do for them. And I was a little, I wasn’t very old in the early sixties, I guess I was about 12, maybe, I might’ve been as much as 13, but I got my saddle and mother packed me a bag and I got on a bus in Benbrook. That’s where the bus station was. And I got on the bus by myself. Wouldn’t do that anymore. And anyway, I got and three days, I rode that bus and she picked me up in Livermore. My sister-in-law met me in Livermore, California.
Neil Dudley: How did they make all that- was there- I mean, this could be real offensive, so please, was there a phone? I’m like, how did they make- did she know you were coming?
Gerald Burns: Oh yeah, they knew I was coming, and they knew when I was supposed to be there. But from the time I got on that bus, until the time I got to Livermore, they didn’t have a clue what was going on. We broke down on the side of the road somewhere in Arizona and you’d have to go to these bus stations and change buses, eat, do all this kind of stuff. And all that was strange to me.
Neil Dudley: Was anybody helping you along?
Gerald Burns: No, I was about half fractious. Of course, I’m sure they told the bus drivers. Yeah, keep an eye on- anyway, they did all that. But what I was getting back to is when I got there, it wasn’t long after that my sister-in-law came back to Texas to visit. Butch and I were out there by ourselves. And I got to ride quite a bit and got to rope some back then, and like I said, roped, the first time I ever healed steer, it was in a big round pen out there in California. And it was one of those places that you see in the picture shows – big white fences and big old- places, just the neatest place. First time I ever helped shoe a horse was out there. We had an old horse that Butch did, that they got off the Paiute Indian reservation up there in Oregon. He went to White Horse. They had a ranch at White Horse, Oregon. And they went up there to Oregon and picked up some horses. And he got one in his string that they bought, and his name was Paiute. They call him Paiute, and you couldn’t shoe that sucker for nothing. And we’d jack a leg up, hobble him and jack a leg up, and he ended up getting down. Well, you’d tie all four feet together and we had a [tube] which had a [tube], that long [tube], you’d put it over the horse’s belly and under his feet, whichever feet, cross tied like that, and they’d be up. And we put that [tube] on the end of it, and I’d sit on the other end and raise his feet up. And that’s the way he shod him. And later on in life, Billy and I shod a lot of horses around here and MacDougal’s had an old horse that you couldn’t shoe him for nothing. We tied him down every time. We didn’t even start in on him, we’d tie him down. And y’all had some horses out there in the day that they’d kick your hat off, but I never did shoe me, y’all didn’t shoe me them horses, just a few horses you’d use at sale barn time, or maybe Tom Morris rope mare or something. But all that stuff come back to help me. So, my brother was a big influence. That was the question you asked before I got off. My brother’s a big influence. But maybe one of the bigger influences was a man that worked for, he worked for Sid Richardson for 60 something years, do a check from Sid Richardson and the Basses. And they owned the place right across the road from us. And all my growing up years, I was influenced by him. And that country was full of old men that were cowboys and run those ranches and stuff. And I just, in Carlton, his name was Carlton Penn, and I guess he was probably the best cowboy I ever knew in my early life. And he, I’d see him, he’d be loping around that. He’d check his fences and he’d be riding an old horse and leading one, loping along through there, and I’d sit on the front porch and watch him. And just stuff like that. And when I went to him, I told him I wanted to learn how to rope. He said, okay. And so, he went over there to the saddle room, and next to the saddle room was what he used for a tool shed. And he had an old wooden keg. He poured that, it had some nails in it, but he poured them nails out on the floor. He brought that wooden keg out there in the hallway of the barn, and he reached up there and got a lariat rope off the wall. So, he put that keg out there and gave me that lariat rope. He said, when you get to where you can catch that keg and get your slack before it goes to the ground, in other words catch it, he said then come back to see me. And boy, I was really disappointed because I thought, well, we’ll get a horse and well get this, and we’ll get that, but if you can’t handle a rope on the ground, you know that, there’s no use in you being on a horse.
Neil Dudley: I think the first thing my dad did when I started, well, I want to learn roping and he said, “Well, here, when you can coil that up, we’ll start swinging it.” Everybody wants to jump all those steps. I was just listening to a podcast that another guy, anyways, his name is Patrick Bet-David, and he’s kind of an immigrant that’s built a big insurance business, and he talks about the sequence of life and the sequence of progress, how you can’t skip steps. So, everybody wants to go from step two to twenty, and it just won’t work doing that. I think that’s valuable, everybody, if you are out there trying to build anything, a family, faith, any of those things, I can’t just jump to Gerald’s relationship with God. There are steps in that – I need to get in the word, I need to do, I need to live life. So, everybody, it just can’t happen at the snap of a finger. Spend the time building it and getting the steps right. And then when you get to the end, you’ll have something that’s solid.
Gerald Burns: Anyway, Carleton was a huge influence in my life, and he was the first one that I ever performed a funeral for. Like burying my dad, the same deal. But anyway, he was a huge part of my life. In fact, I had, I think Billy mentioned two or three horses that I had that were pretty good horses, and they were. The horses were a lot better horses than I was a cowboy. Carleton gave me a two-year-old horse in about 1970 when I was going to college. And he’s a Hancock horse. He was branded with an eight on his jaw. I broke him while I was going to school. Anyway, there was some boys that lived next to me down there that roped and were on the rodeo team at Tarleton and stuff. And I’d lead him down there and get them to snub that coat for me and I’d ride. So, I broke him riding him at school and hauled him back and forth every weekend to the house. Anyway, him and I had a horse that Billy also mentioned, old Tony that was, he was out of a full sister to that horse. And then I had another good horse, old Dutch. He was kin too. So, a lot of the horses I had that I used a lot were horses that I got off of- and Carleton made the statement one time – when he got older, I used to go up there and help him a lot, work cattle, work his horses, do all that stuff – he said, “I’ve been raising these horses all my life.” And he said, “I’ve got some horses now that you can do something on.” And he said, “I’m too old to enjoy them, too old to use them.” And that’s the way you go. A lot of times in life, the things you worked for all you life, you finally accomplished some of those things, but you don’t really, you’ve heard it, you’ve heard old men say they’ve wasted youth on the young. And that’s kind of the way it is. When you get older, you are really not able to enjoy things. Like I was thinking a minute ago when I was talking about saddling a horse before daylight, I always, I saddled a horse in the dark forever and never got light until after I quit using the horse so much. So that’s the way things turn out in life a lot of times. But you learn how to get around the horse in the dark. You’ll get around the morning.
Neil Dudley: You learn stuff, and I think that’s part of the plan. You just have to go and when you, like, I’m pretty sensitive to this – I’ve managed to build a pretty good career and we’ve got a little money and we’re able to do this or that, and I’m afraid that’s a little bit of a disservice to my kids. Cause they need- like I had to ride the bus. I mean, I learned a lot of things, and I’m not saying that my childhood or anything about my life has been hard. It hasn’t, I’ve been very blessed in every way. But some of that, I want to try to keep that, at least in my mind, that I don’t want to make it too easy for them. And it’s hard as a parent because you just want it to be easy.
Gerald Burns: Oh yeah, you want your kids- Hey, you want your grandkids, that’s, wait until you get grandkids, that’s real special.
Neil Dudley: So, let’s see, we talked about your cowboy philosophy, where that came from, that was good.
Gerald Burns: Let me do a little more on that because that’s really, I wasn’t old enough to understand what it meant really to be a cowboy. When I went to, of course, when I was in high school, the biggest deal was football for me. So, I played sports and did a lot of things. But when I went to college, well, that’s when the cowboy deal hit me in the face. Of course back then, it was more like, Reba I think sings a song that says we were country when country wasn’t cool. Well, that was kind of the way it was back then. This cowboy deal, the allure and the people just thinking that’d be the greatest thing in the world, that hadn’t always been that way. But when I went to Tarleton, of course, it was all, it was 99.9% a lot of cowboys down there. And of course, Billy and them had just got through winning the national championship in the Spring, I guess, of ’68. And I was down there in the Fall of ’68 when I started. So, I heard a lot about them. And so, all during my college years, I began to turn, like I say, I got a pretty good horse. I’ve had horses through my life, in fact, I was raised on horseback. I can’t remember when I didn’t have a horse. But in fact, my mother told me one time, she said, “The first time I ever saw you on horseback, I was washing dishes,” and said, “I saw you,” I had a little painting mare that belonged to my uncle down in Houston and they got where they couldn’t keep it or something, but they sent it up to us to keep. And she said, “I saw you on old Baby and you was in your drawer tails going around that trap without nothing on her. And all you had on was your drawers.” And I thought, I remember she was kind of hard to catch, but I’d get me a little coffee can full of oats, and I’d take it out there. I’d put it down in front of her and she’d get to eating those oats and I’d jump on her right behind her ears, if you can figure that, and then she’d raise her head up and I’d swing around and shimmy back down on her neck, and then I was at her mercy. I’d just go where she- But I was always a horseback learned how to ride when I was little, but I never thought about really pursuing anything like that until I went to college. But really got thinking about stuff like that. And as I began to work with that old Hancock horse, get him broke, and there was some things that came up, some cow catching things and some things that went on and I began to-
Neil Dudley: Now you keep saying old Hancock horse, is this the one you called Brownie?
Gerald Burns: Brownie, he was the horse that everybody remembers back in the day. He was a big horse, big kind of a seal brown horse, had little snip over his nose, and a couple of little white spots. Those Hancock horses weren’t the prettiest things in the world, feather legged and had a little bit of a bigger head. But he was a good cow pony. He was the best horse I ever had to catch stuff on, and I guess because I caught so much stuff on him, but he could run a whole in the wind. And a lot of times when Billy and I started team roping together, he had a Roan horse he’s roping calves on. And we’d swap horses. We’d ride those horses during, what we’d work on them during the week. But when it would come roping time, Billy would head on old Brownie, and they were an awesome pair. They, I mean, of course Billy could really rope, and that horse could really run the cattle, and they were an awesome pair. And anyway, I’d heal on that Roan horse, and if everything wasn’t just right with him, he’d break too with you, and that wasn’t always good. But anyway, so I got out of college and went to work on that, Beau Cantrell asked me about going to work for them up there on that ranch station, they were running a lot of yearlings on that ranch at Crescent. And of course, that was right down my alley. Well, I learned a lot. And when you think about it, down through the years, you were talking about a cowboy philosophy, to me, a cowboy, it’s kind of like a lot of things – I believe you’re born at cowboy, and it develops over time, the mindset. And a lot of people can do a lot, horseback. A lot of people can rope, a lot of people can ride bulls or do whatever, but to me, they lack a little bit being a cowboy. And it’s all about the way you look at things, in my estimation. Now this is just my thoughts. But anyway, so I was around some people. The first big influences was there at Crescent, like I say, James Peniston was a good hand, a couple of years older than me, but a real good hand. and Mule Harold. And then you probably wouldn’t know these names, but Mr. George Glasscock, he was one of the originators in the Cutting Horse Association. He had a brother-in-law named Guy Harold and his brother, Fred, and all them were old cowboys, and I was around them all the time there. And I remember one time, we gathered a string of cattle up there north of Crescent and Mr. George had a big star streak faced horse that he rode, and he was old then I thought. He’s probably about my age, but I thought he was old. But I can remember him. And there was no way that you didn’t know he was the boss. He was the man. And everybody there kind of knew a little bit. He’d start off with them. We got those cattle bunched back there on the north end of that deal. And he started off and everybody just kind of flowed. And I thought to myself now, that’s the deal there. And he was, he’s a good hand. And I met a lot of good hands. Boy, I used to cut a lot of cattle for Joe Paul, castrate a lot of cattle for Joe Paul. And there was a boy there, we were running, we ran about 2000 steers one year. And then, we had a bunch of heifers one year, but those steers all came in in intact and we had cut those steers, those bulls, and this boy was there. I said boy, he was an older guy, but he taught me how to castrate those cattle where you can do it without them bleeding real bad. And I learned that, and that helped me get a lot of jobs around because just knowing that because that’s important. You don’t want them cattle to bleed so much that they die or anything.
Neil Dudley: Or that you just can’t get back to gaining weight and growing.
Gerald Burns: Right. A lot of things. So anyway, I learned a lot there and started team roping there with James. He and I, the first time I ever went to a rodeo that we won any money, we went up north side and he and I roped, and I was heading then, and I roped the steer and he turned him around and I remember arena, it’d been raining, it was wet. And he two footed him and we placed. We didn’t win it, but we placed somewhere and somebody mentioned it and he said, well, shoot, that’s what we do every day. And that’s the way it was back then. It wasn’t professional so much team roping back then. It was just kind of getting started.
Neil Dudley: You said something there, just for the listeners, I want to say it’s part of my philosophy, and I, like most guys and people that I think are real cowboys, they kind of don’t want to call themselves cowboys. Because they think actually the cowboys are those guys over there, I’m just kind of here watching and want to want to be like them. But I don’t know if I’ve gotten to that level yet. And that’s always kind of been interesting to me. And I feel like even with the name of the podcast, the Cowboy Perspective, and just kind of building my, if you want to call it a brand or whatever, persona, it’s a little bit risky for me to just call it a cowboy. I mean, cause it’s, to say that I’m a cowboy is a stretch. I think I’m a product of a cowboy or a product of watching cowboys, but could I do the things that they do, and do I have the patience? And I think cowboys a lot of times are real thinkers about things, and they spend time thinking about does that make sense or not?
Gerald Burns: There’s different kinds of cowboys just like there’s different kinds of ballplayers, there’s different kinds and there’s different ways to do it. And one thing that helped me in life is I day worked a lot for a lot of different outfits and a lot of different, not a lot of big outfits, for a lot of different people. And they all had different ways of doing things. And that’s one thing that I believe helped me to learn how to do things pretty right was watching other people do it and taking what they did and adding it or subtracting it. And when you are around a lot of different people, then you began to see some things. And like I say, when I came down here, that that deal up yonder, we Neil Harold, he was a good, he was a friend of mine and quite a character. And anyway, he didn’t think he had a good shipment unless you roped something. That was his philosophy. Let that one by and we’ll go catch him. And that’s the way he used to be. But when I got up here, Billy and I, we got started and got acquainted, and I started watching him and the way he handled stuff, completely different from the way I had done that in the past. And one thing that really, you wouldn’t think about this, but his daddy run a lot of sheep back then. He’d take a lot of these buck lambs, these long tail buck lambs. He would take them and work them and then feed them. And he did a lot of that. And Billy, of course, was doing a lot of the work on that. And when you are gathering sheep – you’ve gathered sheep, y’all had sheep back in the day – that’s a different deal from gathering cattle. You got to know where to be and how to be and how to anticipate, and you got to know when to be still. You don’t remember Sam Rim, but he was a big-time cow man around this part of the world and a good one. And he bought a lot of cattle, a lot of little old Louisiana south, Southeast Texas, little heifers and brought them in this part of the world. He populated the world up here with them. And I used to work a lot of cattle for him. And he told me one time, he said, “You need to start smoking.” And I said, “How’s that?” He said, “Well, I’ll tell you, there’ll come a time when you’re gathering cattle and you get those cattle right up there at the gate.” He said, “Most people won’t jam and cram and do this.” He said, “Right then is when you need to stop and smoke cigarette.”
Neil Dudley: You’re going to laugh about this because I was just gathering cattle with Buddy- not Buddy, Billy. We got some cattle to the pens, and they were just not wanting to go through the gate and Billy looked at me and he said, “A lot of guys just light their cigarette right here.” It’s so funny. That that proves you guys spent a lot of time together.
Gerald Burns: That was something. And then old Sam, he used to say, he told me, he said, “Some people are for the cow and some people are for the horse.” And he said, “now, Billy, he wants his horse to do right. And he did. And he said, “And me,” he’s talking about Sam, he’s talking about himself. He said, “I want the cow in the pen. I don’t really care what the horse does, as long as we get the cow in the pen.” And that’s a lot of the way, Billy was always, one thing I’ll say about Billy, and I admire him to the nth degree as far as being a cowboy and that kind of stuff. He had so much talent, he’s one of the most talented individuals. He can paint. I don’t know if you knew that. He could paint. He could ensure enough plat, he’s one of the best braiders in the world now. And everything he did when he roped calves, he was an artist at it. And anything he did, he wanted to do really well, or he didn’t do it. We roped steers for a long time, but I finally got him where he didn’t want to rope steers anymore cause I’d most of the time miss them on the back end and that’d mess up the deal, so I made him sour on roping steers. But anyway, but he was always- and he was talking about the way we used to work and stuff, and I just learned his ways, and he and I, maybe I brought some things to the table that he had never been around before, probably not, but maybe. And then we, but we just kinda, it’s just like pouring something together and they just became one and that’s the way it was. And when we worked, like I said, we didn’t have to decide this is what we’re going to do. We didn’t make a battle plan. We just went and did it. And it worked for us. And we worked for several years together. Probably as far as my working life, that was probably the most enjoyable time of my life. I was in my late twenties up to well ’91, I was 41. So, all that time, we off and on worked together a lot and just became really close. In fact, one thing that when I went to work for the bank, I had some time on my hand and didn’t know how to use it. I’d get up there at the bank at 5:30, that’s when I was used- And back then, it didn’t matter. I had a key, I’d just go in and work and old Jerry, he’d come in there, I’d be getting done what I wanted done. Then the rest of the day I wouldn’t have nothing to do, and I got kind of bored. I started writing poems, if you can believe that. And I wrote poems, and I wrote a poem about me and Albin.
Neil Dudley: Do you remember it off the top of your head?
Gerald Burns: Oh yeah. I can’t remember it verbatim. He’s got a copy of it or used to have a copy of it hanging on the wall, hanging on the wall down there. But one of the-
Neil Dudley: I’m going to have to put that in the show notes. So, you’re going to have to either write it again or remember it and get it to me. Cause that’ll be something everybody listening is going to want. That’s really making this thing what it can be. So, I want to be sure and put that in the show notes.
Gerald Burns: Anyway, I wrote that poem and I gave it to him and along towards the end of it, I said, maybe you and I can grow old and talk about what we used to do. I’ve got a picture hanging over my fireplace at the house that a guy gave me, and it’s of two guys sitting on a horse and there’s a dog there and there’s an old house and old barn stuff, but it sort of reminds me of the way we were and special. And anyway, he’s gone on to do great things, and I’ve gone on to do other things. And so, but we still have that-
Neil Dudley: Connection, piece of life together. I mean, that’s really cool. That’s something I think Cody and I’ll have. We’ve spent a lot of time together in this world. And aside from Stacey, my parents, my brother, he’s one of the people I’m closest to in the world. So, it’s just really awesome.
There you have it, folks, another trip around the pasture. In this case, we were sitting around the kitchen table talking about things that I just know and believe are very important and valuable and worth thinking about. So, if it plays in your mind that, wow, that’s something I never thought about that way, or I really agree with that, I want to try to use it in my life, we’re accomplishing our goal and I’m so glad we are. I want to say thank you to Gerald and his wife, Brenda, for turning him loose long enough to come out here and do this podcast with me. Everybody, I can’t tell you enough, I appreciate your support. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate your thoughts on the podcast. If you liked something, didn’t like it, please tell me. I’d like to know. I am here to enjoy my life and do the best I can, but also take criticism and praise humbly and with a regard that uses it instead of discarding it. So, thank you. Once again, this is the Cowboy Perspective signing off. Thanks for listening. Hasta luego.
The Cowboy Perspective is produced by Neil Dudley and Straight Up Podcasts. Graphics are done by Root & Roam Creative Studio. And the music is by Byron Hill Music.