Interview with Tom Burton

I did this interview with Tom Burton, president of Rogler, Inc. for the Winter edition of the Matfield Green Newsletter. It is a 4-page quarterly printed publication by and for Matfield residents and friends. Let me know if you'd like to subscribe to future issues.


TOM BURTON RECALLS 45 GREAT YEARS ON THE ROGLER RANCH
As President of Rogler, Inc., Tom Burton is the one who will sign the papers as each of seven parcels of the Rogler Ranch are officially sold and turned over to new owners. It is a major transition, not only for the Roglers, a family that has lived, farmed and ranched around Matfield Green since Charles Rogler staked his claim in 1859, but also for the whole community, and perhaps most of all for Tom and Linda Burton. The Burtons have made their lives and raised their children on the Ranch, and they bear a large responsibility for its success in the second half of the 20th century. Tom started work for Charles’ grandson Wayne in 1961, and became lead man on the ranch just a couple of years later.
Now on the verge of his 70th birthday, Tom came to work at Rogler’s on March 15, 1961. Just out of the service and on his way to Guymon, Oklahoma to take a job with Cities Service Gas Company, Tom only planned to stay at the ranch for two weeks—but a couple of arguments changed all that. Burton had been at the ranch for just a week when a cowhand quit after an argument with Wayne Rogler. “Wayne wanted to know if I could feed for a week,” said Tom. “And I fed for a week and lo and behold the gentleman who had cowboyed here for 37 years and Wayne got into a little set-to and he quit. So Wayne made me a deal: If I wanted to stay, instead of going to Guymon, he’d just hire me. Gosh, that’s what I really wanted to do. I’d much rather be cowboyin’ and on horseback than working on one of those engines down there at that gas company.”
Born at Bazaar and raised west of Matfield Green, where his father, too, was a gas company employee, Tom figures that it was his local roots that engendered Wayne Rogler’s trust and his quick rise through the ranks at Rogler Ranch.

When Tom started work there were 16 employees, some of whom had been working for Rogler for as many as 30 or 35 years. “I’d been here about two years,” recalled Tom. “Anyway, [Wayne] and his lead man Jim Jackson got into a little fuss and Jim quit. So Wayne called me up one evening. He said he was going to Hawaii and he said, ‘Here’s the keys to the Buick and here’s the combination to the safe. Don’t let anyone else in that safe.’ And he said, ‘You’re going to run it.’ I said, ‘Oh this isn’t going to work.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you won’t have any trouble.’ I said, ‘I know some of them’s going to quit.’ He said, ‘That’s fine. You figure out how to do it. That’s your job.’”
Some cowboys did quit rather than work for a man so many years their junior. But many stayed, and Tom quickly proved to be a great choice as ranch manager. “I worked for several years just as the manager,” he said, “and then as time went on I took more of the responsibility of the office work, and Wayne took more vacations and just allowed me to run it. Finally it came to where I wrote all the checks and before his death he just made me the president of the company.”
In the early days of Tom Burton’s career, Rogler ran mostly Brahman cattle from Texas, a tougher breed than the Angus or Herefords of today. Other innovations have contributed to making the cowboy’s life somewhat easier now than it was in 1961. Tom spends about eight hours a week on horseback these days, compared to six full days each week 45 years ago.
“When I first got here everything was loaded on the railroad,” he said. “It came in on the railroad and went out on the railroad. Then you started getting these trucks that maybe would unload in the pastures but still you didn’t have a lot of these pens so you’d maybe have to bring them back to the railhead to load them out onto railroad cars. And when the Turnpike come through they built pens every so often, and we’d drive all the cattle to the Turnpike and you’d load out.
“Finally it got to where it seemed like there was a pen in every pasture, and you were just loading them onto trucks. So you didn’t spend nearly as much time on horseback.” Nowadays, said Tom, “we’re liable to just jump on that little Mule ATV and run out and check the cattle and let the horse stand and graze and eat hay or something.”
Tom says that the best cowboys (and there have been a few women among the ranks) are those that just know how to handle cattle. But even that has gotten easier over time. “We used to go out and round them up and drive ‘em places,” he recalled. “And now we use a feed truck so
much. You feed them for a couple of weeks before we bring them into the pens and you’d be amazed. They’ll just follow along by this truck. That’s something that when I started work here if you mentioned people’d think you were nuts. That’s not the cowboy way to do it! The cowboy way was to round them up and run them if you had to. But Wayne was always very careful. He realized that every pound you took off was bad for you if you were selling them.
“It’s changed a lot,” Tom continued. “It’s got a lot easier. But it’s still fun. It really is. It’s very rewarding to see one of those calves come in, spend the summer and see him go out and he’s put on a couple hundred pounds or 250 pounds of gain, and we’ve still got lots of grass left.
Tom has fond memories of the senior Roglers, Wayne’s parents Henry and Maud, who lived at Pioneer Bluffs until their deaths in 1972. Tom and his high school classmates hired themselves out to Henry and Maud from time to time to earn money for their senior class trip. He recalled, “There was two girls and three boys, and the girls would work in the house with Mrs. Rogler and Henry’d put the boys out cleaning sheds or as you got older and could drive a tractor he might put you on a tractor. But when it come time to settle up that evening, why you’d go in the house and Mrs. Rogler would say, ‘How many hours did you work?’ You’d tell her and she’d say like a dollar an hour or something. I think we were working for 75 cents an hour when we first started. So she’d start to get the check. Henry’d always say, ‘Oh, come on, Mama, give ‘em a little extra. They’re gonna need it.’ No, she wasn’t going to. ‘They could learn!’ she’d say. ‘That’s what they’re in school for, to learn how to manage their money.’ She was a business woman.
“So every time when you’d go outside, Henry’d be sitting at the windmill on that cement tank and he’d give you 20 dollars in cash. You know, that was a pretty good deal. He’d always give you some cash. He was just that kind of person.”
Although it was undeniably hard to see the Rogler Ranch sold at auction, Tom is optimistic about its future. “Before the sale I probably was more apprehensive than I am today. But I think the people that got it are going to take care of it.”
Tom’s son T.W. Burton and daughter-in-law Rachelle are among the new owners, purchasing a little over a section of the Ranch and securing its productivity for at least one more generation.
“Hopefully,” continued Tom, “I can stay friends with everybody that has got the land, so I can drive out on it and take a look at it. Always if I had a real rough day or things just piled up on you, I used to go right east of the Pioneer Bluffs, across the creek, and there’s a hill up there and you could see all the fields and you could see the countryside back to the west. I just thought that was the most peaceful place on earth.”