Rachael Van Horn
April 04, 2008 08:48 am
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GAGE – The grain milling business is all Rodney Ford has ever known.
“It’s an art form, really,” Ford said this week when he dropped a note to local news outlets to make an announcement.
Grain milling is something that one rarely finds anymore and now will no longer be available in Gage either.
After 55 years spent mixing grain just like the customer wants it, R.A. Ford and Son Roller Feed Mill is closing its doors. Ford has been diagnosed with Mantel Cell Lymphoma, a type of cancer that begins in the lymphnodes and can affect the spleen and bones, especially the spine.
While his passion for the business has never waned, Ford admits he needs to be able to focus all his energy on the treatment.
Monday, Ford spent the day emptying out the last of a bin of corn for one of his customers. His hired hand Joe Schroeder, a ubiquitous character known to hundreds of locals grown used to seeing his growling truck, unloading feed at their farms, helped Ford with the sad task.
“Don’t rightly know what I’ll do but I’ll have to find something,” Schroeder said and he brushed at the grain dust on his overalls. Schroeder has been working for Ford for nearly 10 years.
The two shuffled around in the mill, housed in buildings old enough to have seen the Great Depression. Each stopped intermittently, looked around and considered the task of taking the operation apart.
Ancient tools, no longer used, hung dusty and rusted from the rafters, perched there perhaps 20 or 30 years ago, forsaken for a newer, better tool. A hint of molasses still hung in the air from the last batch of sweet feed Ford made.
The business began in late 1952, when Ford’s father, R.A Ford, learned of a small grain elevator operation situated right next to the railroad station in Gage that was for sale. Knowing the business the way he did made R.A. confident that he could make a go of it, said his wife Ann Dycus Ford. So after visiting and with the help of the First State Bank of Gage, the family moved to Gage.
“In the 1930s, 40s and 50s many small towns had elevators with small mills,” Ford wrote in an historical overview of his family’s move to Gage. “When visiting Gage, my parents were surprised at what all it had to offer.”
Indeed, he wrote, the town was replete with three service stations, two grocery stores, two drug stores, a locker plant, two dry goods stores, several cafes, a bank, a couple of bars, barber shops, beauty shops, doctors, dentists, a creamery and bottling plant a lumber yard and several feed stores. Finally, of course - peculiar to most Oklahoma small towns - the lawyer’s office.
“There was even a movie theater there that was open seven days a week,” Ford wrote.
But perhaps most notable, Ford said of Gage, upon his and his family’s residency there, a large airport and a fairly large presence of Federal Aviation Agency personnel in the community.
Despite that seeming abundance though, Ford said times were pretty difficult for farmers when his father chose to purchase the grain mill.
“It has been dry and the average wage here was only 75 cents per hour,” Ford wrote. “ The Fuquay family only wanted $4,000 for their Gage facility, which was comprised of two iron clad elevators, a large system of coal sheds and a scale house facility, all still on the property today.
And so, both Ann Ford and her son said, R.S. Ford took the leap of faith required in a time when just to continue farming in dry, Western Oklahoma was its own leap of faith.
“For the first several years things were really tough,” Ford wrote. “R.A. told of farmers who brought wagon load after wagon load of tumbleweeds to Kearns Milling Co. of Amarillo, Texas. The tumbleweeds were finely ground, a little protein and a lot of molasses added to them to make some type of food for starving animals.
Ford wrote that his father tried several combinations of service to offer patrons from his grain elevator, which is how he finally settled on a combination of grinding and mixing different grain products to create feed for an ever increasing number of dairies that were springing up on the region a the time.
“Business boomed,” Ford wrote of his father’s success.
In 1962, he said his father decided to modernize the mill operation. He said without the cooperation of local carpenters such as Travis Reanour, Clifford Hanan, Clarence Dunnihoo and Shattuck electrician Archie Roper, his father would not have been able to keep the operation going while still updating.
Ford’s father updated the mixer with a brand spanking new one that arrived by a rail line that still runs just to the south of Ford’s operation. He said trucks that hauled feed to area farms at the time were also updated to alleviate the need for labor intensive scooping.
The new equipment cut hours and now there was no need for a “swing shift at all,” Ford wrote. At this time, dairies continued to prosper and marked a time in history during which the small, family owned business would service 40 dairies, the most in their history.
But like all ebbs and flows in business, the dairy business gave way to the horse business that gave way to the starter calf business which finally gave way, sadly to the business of the owner’s health.
Ford wrote that his father became ill in 1975 and after a rather short illness, died in 1980, leaving Ford and his mother to run the mill.
And Monday , the two worked together serving the last of a few customers who trickled in for that one last sack of grain.
“I just found out today,” said friend and long-time customer Todd Crouse. “I’ve been knowing them my whole life.”
Ann Ford spent Monday with Ford’s wife Lois. The two moved about in the makeshift office that has served the business for many years, clearing up all the office business that goes with closing a lifetime family operation.
Lois Ford was short on words but long on expression. “This is the right thing to do,” she said and shot a furtive look of concern at her husband, clearly aware of the difficulty of his choice. “He needs to retire,” she said in almost a whisper.
In the last four decades, Ford remembers summers so hot that corn dust stuck to his skin and formed a layer he thought he would never get off with just soap and water. There were days so cold it made Schroeder and Ford look at each other and wonder why they continued in the business. “For sure, our attitudes were temperature controlled at times,” he said, laughing.
But finally, it’s the people that make you continue, Ford said. The customers, the employees and the memories of family working together that tips the scale in favor of watching the sun as it dips just behind the Gage water tower and knowing you get to do it all again tomorrow.
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