A LUCKY MAN by his own reckoning, Oklahoma cowman Creede Speake credits good fortune for his ability to build and maintain a viable ranch over roughly half a century. He considers himself doubly lucky that he has a grandson eager to carry that operation into the future.

Grandfather Pleased To Have
Grandson To Take Over Ranch

ARDMORE, Okla. — Seventy-eight year-old Creede Speake considers himself mighty lucky. He has a grandson, Travis Ritter, who is more than willing to work hard and sacrifice a lot to carry on what Speake started many, many years ago.

"I’m the luckiest guy in the world," Speake says. "For me at my age to have someone like Travis who is dumb enough to be interested in ranching … he really loves it and he really loves every minute of it.

"There’s no way anyone like him can start like I did. Those days are long gone. Travis is the only grandson who cares at all about it, and I’m going to make sure he has a place. Maybe it's false pride, but I’ve worked 50-odd years putting this place together and I’d just like to see it continue."

Speake has been in the ranching business full-time most all of his adult life. He started out leasing country, improved the leases and then used the profits he made in the cattle business to buy many of those leases outright.

That native Oklahoman is not in the least bit boastful about his success. Instead, he attributes what success he’s had mostly to good luck. That and his optimistic spirit and love for the ranching way of life kept Creede Speake going through the tough times, and in his tenure there have been plenty of those tough times.

"How can you live with yourself if you’re not an optimist?" Speake asks. "And as for ranching, it’s just part of me. I’ve always said there’s nothing dumber than a cowboy who sees green grass and has a line of credit."

Grandfather and grandson have a unique working relationship. It’s a relationship based on genuine respect — the grandfather because of his grandson’s willingness to take a risk in a career that will likely never make him rich, and the grandson for a grandfather who is willing to show him the ropes by allowing him to make his own mistakes.

Twenty six year-old Travis graduated from OSU. In 1999 he completed the TCU Ranch Management program and then he came back to the ranch to work alongside his grandfather.

"Travis is smarter than me by a bunch," his grandfather insists. "What I’m trying to do now is not tell him how to do things."

Speake admits that it’s hard, but then he understands all too well that the best education comes from making mistakes.

Speake’s own father went broke in the cattle business in 1924, the year Creede was born. He found work with Humboldt Oil Company, but Speake says his father never really gave up on the cattle business.

Creede was an only child, but his parents raised three of his mother’s younger siblings. Both of Speake’s grandfathers crossed the river from Texas down around St. Joe sometime in the 1880s. His granddad on his mother’s side cowboyed for a rancher who settled back in the mountains just north of where Creede ranches today. It was here that he spent most of his childhood.

Some of the childhood memories that stand out are riding horseback to school every day. It was a four-mile trip one way.

The time he and a cousin got to bring the lead steers back from the Davis railhead is another vivid childhood memory.

"We were only five or six years old," Speake recalls. "We had to cross a swinging bridge on the Washita. We thought we were tough stuff."

A not so pleasant memory is that of chopping cotton, though in the end, the fruit of his labor was worth it. He bought his first saddle from money he made picking cotton. The saddle cost him $12.50, and on cotton picking wages it took awhile to collect that much money.

"I was the world’s worst cotton picker," Speake says. "All the other kids could pick 100 pounds in no time. I never could."

Then there was the matter of a particular horse that the youngster wanted.

"I bothered my dad so about buying that horse that he told me if I could raise the money to buy the saddle he would buy me the horse."

Speake says he strayed a bit when he was in high school. He went off to the Osage and got a job in the gas industry one summer. He ended up staying and graduating from high school there. He fell in love with the Osage, but Speake says he realized all too well that he’d never be able to get a start in that country because most of the land had long been operated by ranchers whose families went back several generations.

Speake attended Oklahoma A&M (OSU) for a year and a half until the war broke out. He enlisted then as a naval cadet and graduated from flight school in Pensacola, Florida.

"I grew up on a horse but always wanted to fly. That was me," Speake says.

And fly he did. He doesn’t talk much about his war days, but he was a decorated Marine Corps fighter pilot who fought not only in World War II but in Korea as well. In the Pacific Theater he flew the Corsair and in Korea the Panther Jet.

Speake came home, the first time, in 1946 and had every intention of returning to college, but when he went to enroll one of his professors recommended that he get his feet back on the ground before he came back to college. He hitchhiked back to Ardmore from Stillwater, and while in Ardmore trying to hitch a ride back to the ranch, he ran into an old friend whose daughter he’d dated back in high school. His friend asked what he intended to do and he told him he thought he’d lease a little place and run some cows. His friend knew of a place that was up for lease, so he hooked him up with Oscar Major, the owner. The lease encompassed about 2500 or so acres.

Speake did get his feet on the ground again by ranching, and he never looked back again to college. The military, however, had other plans for him, and in 1950 he was called back to active duty. He served another three years, but he managed to retain his lease while he was away.

He recalls that the year he came back from Korea, 1953, the cattle market was a "sick rascal." That year his five-weight steer calves brought 13 cents a pound and the heifer mates 11 cents.

Speake has always had black cows, even when Herefords were more popular.

"I’ve been out of sync with the world forever," he comments.

He fell in love with them as a kid. When his granddad was working up north in the Arbuckles for U.S. Jones, he bought some JY branded cows off a place west of there in Texas. That was back in the late 1920s or early ‘30s when there weren’t any Angus cows in that country.

Those Angus cows had proven themselves with his grandfather, so when the younger Speake went to ranching on his own, he wanted the same kind of black cows.

For many years he ran strictly a straight black cow herd, but when the neighbor’s Hereford bull would get in with his cows, he began noticing that those black baldy calves always outdid his straight black calves.

"I remember I was selling my calves to a good Jewish fellow named Angivine out of Genesee, Illinois. I only saw him one time. He came down the first time, and we drove around out in the pasture and found a handful of cows and calves lying under a pecan tree. We circled them. I thought he’d want to look at some more, but he told me he’d seen all he wanted to see. I didn’t know what he meant, but we made a deal anyway."

There were eight or 10 black baldies in that calf crop, Speake recalls, so he took off a buck a hundred on them when he sold them.

"I just thought that was fair," he comments, "because back in those days, if you sent cattle north, they had to either be a feather-neck Hereford or a black."

The same man bought Speake's calves the following year and for several years running, but after that first year all their trading was done over the phone.

"That next year when I was making the deal I told this fellow that I was going to have a few more black baldies than last year, and I asked if that was going to be okay.

"The buyer said, ‘Well, I haven’t felt good about that all along. Send ‘em straight.’

"We thought all along that the black baldies were better, but the market didn’t reflect that. Today you get a premium for a black baldy."

In 1954, Speake started his own crossbreeding program and he’s stuck with it since.

Not long after initiating his crossbred program, Speake began to diversify his operation. He started a wheat pasture stocker program with outside cattle.

Ralph Wright had a commission company on the Oklahoma City Stockyards, and he was a good friend to Speake.

"He told me to come to OKC every Wednesday about noon and he’d have a load of calves ready for me," Speake says. "They were usually the cuts off the calves going north. They were good calves, but usually I could buy them $4 to $5 a hundred back."

Those calves went on graze-out wheat along with his own ranch-raised calves and then sold as feeders. It was a good program for him for many years. Then Speake began to wonder if he wasn’t leaving something more on the table, particularly with his ranch-raised calves, because he’d noticed that the same buyers were coming back for his cattle year after year. Thus Speake diversified again, this time into the feeding business. He hasn’t sold a calf crop since 1966.

"When I decided to feed, I took off one day headed straight for Hereford, Texas. My banker friend told me to see Henry Sears, a banker there in Hereford," Speake recalls.

"Sears was like 85 years old then, but still active in the business. He took the day off and showed me around every feedyard there in Hereford. We came back that night to the bank, and he pulled up the closeouts on the cattle and gave me a short education on cattle feeding."

Unfortunately, all the yards in Hereford were full, so Speake put his name on the waiting list and headed north to Dumus. He ended up at Texas County Feedyard in Guymon, Oklahoma. He really took a liking to this yard and decided if he was going to feed cattle this was the yard where he wanted to do business. So the next morning he went back to the yard and introduced himself to Ray Kimsey. Kimsey gave him an official tour and then told him he simply didn’t have room for his cattle.

About a week later, Kimsey showed up unannounced at Speake's ranch. Kimsey said he was just passing through and wanted to have a look at his cattle. They did and then Kimsey asked when he wanted to start coming with them.

"What I found out was that Ray chose his customers. That was his way over the entire 40 years that he was in the business," Speake says. "He wanted producer-raised cattle. It wasn’t so much the cattle…Ray wanted to deal with people who raised their own cattle. In all the years I fed with him, I rarely saw any put-together cattle in that yard."

The 1970s wreck was a tough one, but Speake managed through it. When the line of credit started drying up, he says, he and "eight other dumb cowboys found a dumber banker." Together with a small independent bank, Lone Grove, they formed an ag credit corporation. They operated it for 10 years or so with zero losses, Speake says. When the shakeup in the banking industry started, the owners feared they might lose their capital so they cashed it in, but by then they had grown to where most of them could kind of handle things on their own.

Speake says even his own ranch-raised calves weren’t worth much on the feeder market, so he simply fed them himself.

He also got into a program where he fed cutting bulls for Swift. Swift had a program they called the "Pro-Ten program." Cutting bulls were injected with an enzyme from the papaya plant, which supposedly helped tenderize the meat.

"The meat was tender," Speake says, "but the problem was, it wasn’t firm."

The program only lasted five or six years, but it worked well for a time and it was this particular program, Speake says, that softened the wreck some for him and at least allowed him to pick up the few pieces and start anew.

"One of the few things my grandfather always told me was, ‘Son, always keep your inventory up.’ He was right."

Speake says he had pretty good luck feeding during the 1980s, but the current wreck is another matter.

"It’s worse than the one of the 1970s, mainly because the overhead is so much higher," he remarks.

Speake's program hasn’t changed much in recent years. He still retains his calf crop and then buys another 700 to 800 head of outside cattle.

"We’re just hoping this year that the stockers bring their money back. There are some cattle out there that might be bringing back their first cost, but not many," Speake says. "Anymore, just to process a calf costs you $25 or so, and a few years ago it was just $3 or $4. Now if one gets sick it’s another $40 or $50 to get him well. The costs just eat you up.

"My first pickup was a three-quarter ton Chevy. It cost me $983. Now you have to add some zeros to that."

The country where Speake and his grandson operate north of Ardmore was once Chickasaw and Choctaw Indian country.

"They were farming Indians," Speake says, "and they liked to have just about worn all the tillable land out."

Today the Speake Ranch is a mixture of native grass, improved bluestem varieties, Bermuda grass, and dryland wheat.

The cows are pulled off native grass about the first of March. It’s rested through the growing season and then after the calves are weaned the cows are wintered on the stockpiled native grass along with about five pounds of 38 percent protein cubes every other day.

An average stocking rate on the native grass in this country is 12 acres per animal unit or six acres to the unit if stocked only for six months.

Speake uses Hereford bulls on Angus cows and Angus bulls back on black baldy cows. Bulls go out March 1 for a 120-day breeding season. Speake says he’s not that concerned with shortening his breeding season because all his calves are carried over on wheat.

"By the time they come off wheat you can’t find those late calves," he insists.

He counts on a 90-plus percent conception rate, though last year they had a problem with some of their bulls.

Speake says a winter-calving program works well for them, though like many other things, he admits that here too he’s out of sync with the rest of his neighbors. He likes winter calving primarily because by the time the grass comes on in the spring the calf is usually big enough to take advantage of it.

They raise their own replacements, though he fully admits that doing so is often an expensive venture. He values knowing the breeding he has in his cows more than the cost to raise them. A 1000-pound cow, he says, is ideal for his country.

"All she needs to do is raise a 500 to 550 pound calf."

As for their yearling program, Speake fills his order with as many country cattle as he can get his hands on and the remainder come from area auctions.

Mainly he looks for conformation. Speake says he isn’t particular about color.

"I don’t want any pale nose Charolais or Simmentals. We get quite a few red Limi-kind of cattle. I don’t like them much, but they’re marketable," he says.

Speake says he would prefer to buy straight steers.

"We only have so much room, and it can be difficult to keep the heifers open. Lots of times heifers can be a better deal, but if you can’t keep them open … all it takes is to send one set of bred heifers to a feeder up north …"

"When we started out buying these stockers this year, they were pretty cheap. By the time we got finished they weren’t so cheap."

Speake prefers a five-weight animal, though this year they were a little bigger. They shoot for 300 pounds of gain on wheat.

"We had a wet winter this year and our gains weren’t as good as they should have been, so we decided to feed them ourselves rather than give someone else the compensatory gain.

"It was the right thing to do until September 11^th," Speake says. "The steers gained almost four pounds a day going in and the heifers gained 4.5 or 4.6. They were worth $72 when the plane hit the building and a couple of weeks later they were worth $62. We took a heck of a licking along with a lot of other folks," he says.