990368 End Nears For Omaha Stockyards

Chicago Tribune - The steers are quiet as the snow falls, blanketing the stockyards in a soft white covering. It is an eerie scene, cold and muted, steam rising like ghosts from the animals. On this Monday, there are almost 600 cattle here ready for slaughter, but soon the yards will be empty.

Looking down from 29th Street, which rises over the Omaha stockyards, the signs of what this place once was stretch out below. To the west, a crazy quilt pattern of hundreds of pens in disrepair lies vacant.

Once the yards stretched all the way to 36th Street, full of bellowing cattle and bleating sheep. Now, the vast sheep barn on the southwest side of the yards is closed. To the northwest, the hay barns are shuttered. On the east side, most of the pens are barren all the way to the railroad tracks.

The end of the road has come for Omaha's stockyards, once the fierce rival of Chicago's Union Stockyards (which closed in July 1971), and for a time, from the mid-1950s through the early '70s, the largest livestock center in the world.

This place--where the country met the city and agriculture and commerce intersected and flourished--is slated to be turned into an industrial park by the City of Omaha, which purchased the property last year.

The livestock operations have until the end of December to get out. Even if they resettle in the nearby countryside, as hoped, the yards will be smaller, a shadow of their former self.

"It is the end of an era, the end of the last great forces that built and developed this entire part of the country," said Jeffrey Spencer, director of library archives for the Historical Society of Douglas County, where Omaha is located.

Now, like many other Midwestern and Western cities, Omaha sees its future in telemarketing, high-tech service industries and light manufacturing, businesses that have no link to the land, the geography of the place, he said.

For nearly 75 years, from the late 1890s to the early 1970s, the stockyards and the meatpacking plants that came to surround them were the engine that drove Omaha's economy, putting this city on the map.

Built by a Wyoming cattle baron and a syndicate of Omaha businessmen, they became a crucial link in the chain that connected the farms and ranches of the Great Plains and the West with the thriving markets of the Midwest and the East.

Immigrants flooded in to South Omaha from Eastern Europe, Germany, Italy and Greece, creating tightly knit communities with their own social clubs and churches.

The men worked from before dawn to after nightfall in the slaughterhouses and processing plants, thankless labor, much of it, hard and grueling, to build a life for themselves and their families. When the boys got to high school age, they joined their fathers.

"It was like a little Chicago," said William Pratt, a professor of history at the University of Nebraska.

In its heyday, cattlemen from more than 20 states were drawn to Omaha's livestock market, where buyers and sellers haggled over prices and terms of sale, sealing deals with nothing more than a handshake.

Dick Jensen, 63, who began working at the yards 49 years ago, remembers when his Uncle Vince went to work for a cowboy named Iowa Jack and started writing the terms of each sale on a piece of paper. "Iowa Jack said to my uncle, `What are you doing, boy? If you can't remember this, you can't work for me.' It was a point of pride, doing it all in your head."

Mornings, Jensen and his dad would tromp a couple of miles through the dark streets to the yards, where they would sort the cattle, feed them, water them, and get ready for the day. His grandfathers and uncles on both sides traded there.

"Every day was different," Jensen said, twisting his blue Omaha Market cap in his hands. "The cattle were different. The buyers were different. You didn't know what the market would be. It was exciting. I'd get out of bed and my adrenaline would be running. It was all I ever wanted to do."

Rick VanAckeren started at the yards in 1958, three years after Omaha overtook Chicago's stockyards as the busiest in the world. The record of the most cattle sold in a single day in the Omaha market had been set in October 1955, when 42,817 cattle passed through the yards.

"It was huge, just unbelievable. The trucks would be lined up for miles delivering animals. The packing plants were monstrosities. This area never slept," said VanAckeren, whose grandfather and father also worked at the yards, running a commission business, beginning in 1931.

Like other commission agents (who represented farmers) and order buyers (who bought and sold livestock on order), VanAckeren's dad and granddad enjoyed being independent businessmen in a large bustling community, almost an island to itself, with its own restaurant, bar, banks, beauty shops, dry cleaners, doctors' offices, social club, choir and other services.

While the rest of Omaha looked down at South Omaha, at the smells and sweat and grime of the meat industry there, SOBS (South Omaha Boys) were proud, often defiantly so.

Asked how he feels about what's happening, VanAckeren, a strong and vigorous white-haired man, said: "I wished they would have closed this market down 10 years ago, when it was still thriving. This is like living with cancer; it lingers and lingers, it's a long slow death. To me, it's sadder than I can say."

Carl Hatcher, operations manager for Omaha Livestock Market, which runs the yards, leans back in his leather chair and looks grim as he talks about the market forces that have cut into the stockyards' business. In the late 1960s, the old South Omaha packing plants, burdened by outdated facilities and labor problems, began to close. New upstarts such as IBP, now the largest meat processor in the country, moved their plants out into the country, where small towns offered economic incentives and cheap non-unionized labor was available.

The new, modern plants were closer to the farmers, and packers convinced many of them to sell direct, bypassing the middlemen who worked in the great terminal livestock markets such as Chicago, Kansas City and Omaha. It costs $8.20 per head to sell cattle through the Omaha market today; ranchers who sell direct can avoid that fee, as well as transportation costs.

But there's a hitch: the packers buy mostly from large producers, especially huge cattle feedlots that raise thousands of animals at a time. For smaller farmers, the only functioning livestock markets left are the large terminal operations--in Omaha, Sioux City, Iowa, St. Joseph, Mo., and Sioux Falls, S.D.-- and more specialized markets such as Oklahoma City, as well as the small auction barns that dot the countryside.

"We still concentrate enough animals here that we can attract buyers and run a real market," Hatcher said, adding that the Omaha market remains profitable. "Smaller farmers, especially, need the services we provide."

Terry Thoms, 44, who raises hogs and cattle 35 miles south of Omaha, has been coming to the stockyards since he was in diapers. "It's pretty hard for a guy like me to get a good price selling direct. There will be no place to go when this closes down," he said, snow melting off his red beard as he sat inside the 11-story Livestock Exchange building that towers over the yards.

For Thoms, the yards were a place to make connections with the world outside his farm.

"You'd sit around and compare notes, visit with the other farmers, kind of get to know what's going on. You get to know a lot of different people from different areas. You'll lose all those connections now," he said.

For Hatcher, who started as a yard boy hauling hay and shoveling manure out of the pens in 1955, the strongest memories are of the hard times, when people came together and made the best of a bad situation. In this, he's like the other old-timers from the yards who remember the gut-wrenching, backbreaking times, and miss them, along with the young men they were then.

In particular, Hatcher remembers a Friday in January 1975, when a blizzard came in, forcing the yards to cancel an auction of 1,500 cattle. Those who didn't get home early in the afternoon were stranded in the Italianate livestock exchange building, and many stayed up all night drinking and partying. The cattle stood with snow on their backs.

The drifts were so high and workers, who hadn't been able to get home, spent hours shoveling alleyways to clear a path for food and water to be brought in. By Sunday, with the place still a mess, 6,000 more head of cattle and another 7,000 hogs were on their way in from the countryside.

It was chaos and Hatcher's eyes gleam as he describes it. But on this Monday, by early afternoon, the busiest day of the week, there is no action. The yards are silent. The men are going home.

Hatcher hopes he can tell them in a few weeks where the stockyards will be moving to, that some vestige of the operations will go on. But the deal isn't signed yet. And he still isn't sure what will become of the Omaha stockyards when all this is over.

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