—Lancaster Farming, Saturday, January 12.1974
20
I
Ruth Brown
At Home in a Man’s
By Sally Bair
Feature Writer
Lancaster Stock Yards is
pretty much a man’s world,
but Mrs. Ruth Brown feels
right at home there.
She’s a weighmaster at the
Stock Yards, and has been
working around the Yards
for nearly 20 years. You can
teQ when she talks that
working with cattle comes as
naturally for her as baking a
cake for other women.
There are many benefits to
her job, the way she tells it,-
and one of the biggest is that
she gets to see her husband,
Robert, occasionally during
the day because he’s a
weighmaster there too.
In fact, Ruth’s whole in
volvement at the Stock
Yards began as a family
affair. Her husband worked
for the Reliable Truck
Company which was founded
by his father, George, in
1933. After his father’s death,
he continued to manage the
trucking company for his
mother. Loading cattle at 2
or 3 o-clock in the morning is
not exactly exciting business
to most people, and getting
reliable help was always a
problem, according to Ruth.
So she just began to pitch in.
“Sometimes,” she says, “I’d
get his drivers out of bed and
drive them to work. Oc
casionally when you called
them and thought they were
up, they still wouldn’t show.”
Since the cattle needed to
be trucked regardless of the
help available, she would
help- “gather-up-animals.
She recalls the day she
loaded 500 head of butcher
cattle alone. She makes it
sound easy, but it must take
some doing to round them up
and get them through the
myriad of passageways that
make up the Stock Yards and
onto the right trucks.
Ruth Brown is writing up the ticket on some newly
arrived animals at the Stock Yards.
When the trucking com
pany was sold in 1968 she
worked in the office for a
while, and then as a clerk at
the auction, and finally
became a weighmaster
during the past year. She
enjoys her job a lot, but
would like to be outside even
more. “I would like to help to
load again. They won’t let
me because they say they
don’t want me to get hurt.
But I won’t get hurt any
quicker than any man,” she
says with-a confident laugh.
When pressed, she said,
“I’ve had a couple of close
calls, but I’ve never been
hurt.” She then related how
she was being cornered by a
bull once and she figured if
she ran and fell he’d run
right over her. So she
decided to stand firm and he
wedged her against a fence.
She said, “I just kept looking
at him and pushing until
someone distracted him. It’s
good he didn’t have horns.”
A weighmaster, of course,
weighs cattle as needed and
writes up the tickets. But
Ruth also keeps- the weigh
area and scale yard clean.
When traffic is slow, as
happens often the course of a
day, she reads or prepares
the tickets for the next day’s
auction.
Mrs. Brown’s job may be a
little unusual, but so is her
attitude. She says, “I like to
work and be kept busy.” And
so, she doesn’t just do her
job, but she often does a little
extra. She pooh-poohs the
-idea that she is out of the
ordinary, but she can fix a
fence as easily as write her
name, and when she grabs a
shovel you can tell she knows
what she’s doing. As she
cleaned out the scale yard,
she pointed to a repaired slat
on the floor and said, “I did
fix the floor. I asked the
Scraping up the scale
yard is just part of Ruth’s
work every day as weigh
master at the Stock
Yards.
carpenters to do it, but they
never seemed to get around
to it, so I just did it.”
Around her home she’s
just as handy, admitting to
having painted the exterior
of their home. She also does
“electrical work and car
pentry because my husband
never has time - and it saves
a lot of money.”
Monday, Wednesday and
Fridays are auction days at
the Stock Yards and then
Ruth becomes a clerk and
dials the weight of the
animals to be posted for the
buyers. Ruth is one of the
few women present during
the spirited auctioning, and
is certainly one of the most
informed. She said, “On
auction days I work until I’m
finished,” adding that it
could be 6 or 7 in the evening.
Her days begin at the Yards
at 6:30 a.m., 5:30 a.m. on
Mondays. She admits she
doesn’t particularly like
getting up so early.
While Sundays may be her
day of rest, Ruth doesn’t stay
away from the Stock Yards.
One of the great joys in her
work is feeding the stray
cats, and of course they must
be fed on Sundays too. She
says there are “about 20 cats
I feed - I’ve' been feeding
them for years.” It’s no
small matter either, because
she says she buys about 5 to 6
pounds of cat food weekly
and about 3 to 4 quarts of
milk daily. The cats look well
fed and-contented!
Ruth shows a natural
affection for animals, and
not just those that pass
through the Stock Yards-she
had a few that stayed for a
while. It seems people gave
her animals - calves and
World
goats - to care for. At one
point she had collected a
herd of 20 goats which she
finally had to sell - twice. The
first purchaser, a York
Countian, wasn’t pleased
when the goats destroyed a
neighbor’s garden, so he
gave them back and she sold
them again. One of her goats
had triplets which she gave
away, and she talks fondly
about two goats called
“Chocolate” and “Vanilla,”
who “would follow you
anywhere if you had a bottle
in your band.”
Her soft spot for animals
shows, and her comment on
the recent 4-H Baby Beef
Round-Up was, “I couldn’t
raise those animals and sell
them.”
In her office at the Stock
Yards, she had built a pen
which occasionally houses
her two Cocker Spaniel
puppies who keep her
company during the day.
The puppies, Smokey and
Inky, are four months old
and clearly bring her great
pleasure. She gets tears in
her eyes as she talks about
the two dogs they replaced.
They both were named Inky
and one had been with the
_ Browns for 15 years and one
for 11 years.
When it was pointed out
that she is a true women’s
libber - before it became
fashionable to hold a man’s
job - Mrs. Brown scoffed and
said, “I don’t think anything
of it. I just do my job. I think
those women are crazy - why
- don’trthey minch their own
business? What some people
will do to be in the paper!”
She adds, “If they do their
work I don’t know how they
have time to picket.”
When asked about the
effect of the shortage of beef
on her work last summer she
said, “I don’t think there was
a shortage of beef. I don’t
think there’s a shortage of
gasoline either.” She did
say, however, that she thinks
the Stock Yards will not be
affected by any possible
rationing, noting that during
World War II they had plenty
of gas for their trucking
needs.
Some changes have taken
place in the years Ruth has
been around the Stock
Yards. Things have slowed
down for one thing. She said,
“Heavens no, there is not
nearly as much activity as
there once was. A lot of
cattle go directly to the
farms_ from the South;
without going through the
Stock Yards.” She added,
“There used to be a' lot
shipped by train, but not
anymore.”
The Stock Yards have a
“short leg” division which
Reading the scales accurately is what it’s all about for
Mrs. Ruth Brown.
includes hogs, sheep and
calves, and last summer
they even hosted 100 horses
from the New Holland
auction. The horses were
brought to the Stock Yards
during the height of the
controversy over horses
being sold for human con
sumption. These horses were
eventually sold to Italy, and
although their ultimate
destination was not dear,
Ruth said the buyers told her
they were not supposed to be
eaten.
For all her ability and
enjoyment of her job at the
Stock Yards, Ruth is not
even a farm girl. She says
she was bora and raised“in
the country" on the Old
Philadelphia Pike, but not on
a farm. Her family even
tually moved to Lancaster,
on Ranck Avenue, and it was
there that she met her
husband - who was the boy
next door. Another myth she
sets to rest is that of shaky
teenage marriages. The
Browns were married when
she was 16, and they’ve been
happily wed for 44 years.
Before she began hanging
around the Stock Yards with
her husband, Ruth worked
for C. S. Conrad, in interior
decorating. She put up the
rods and hung drapes,
commenting that in those
days you had to “string the
cord,” and custom cut the
rods. She had cleaned house
for Mrs. Conrad one day a
week for 15 years, and then
worked for Mr. Conrad for 15
years.
In then: few moments of
spare time, the Browns_
enjoy fishing and golfing, but
they don’t have time for
much of either any more,
according to Ruth. She said
they used to play 3 or 4
rounds in one day. Now they
travel to Newmanstown once
I
or twice a year to fish' for
trout.
Mrs. Brown is cheerfully
at home in her man’s world?
and it’s quite evident that the
men who work with her look
at her not as a woman, but
simply as a competent
weighmaster. About the man
she says, “They all treat me
nice. I haven’t any com
plaints in all the years I’ve
been here.”
Farm Women
Calendar
Wednedsday, January 16 _
IOTWT a.ni.-Fafm Women
Society 14 meeting at the
home of Mrs. Leon
Thomas, 217 Willow
Street Pike.
Thursday, January 17
Farm Women Societies 2 and
3 entertain guests at
Conestoga View.
Farm Women Society 31 visit
Conestoga View.
Saturday, January 19
1:30 p.m. - Farm Women
Society 3 meeting at the
home of Mrs. Earl
Stauffer, Ephrata RDI.
2:00 pun. - Farm Women
Society 8 meeting at the
home of Mrs. Martin
Musser, 327 S. Market
Ave., Mount Joy,
7:00 p.m. - Farm Women
Society 31 and husbands
meet at Strasburg
Bowling Alley.
Take Soil Samples Now
Avoid the February,
March,-and~Aprii' xushby
taking your soil samples
now, remind Extension
agronomists at The Penn
sylvania State University.
Soil samples can be taken
anytime the ground is not
frozen/