BURWELL, Neb. — Mike Cox traded a spot on the Kansas City Chiefs roster for a career with AT&T. Then he traded AT&T for a Nebraska ranch.
“When I worked for the corporation for 28 years, everything was kind of magical,’’ Cox said. “It was hard to see, in real life, what your results were. It’s sometimes hard to get a grasp on what your impact actually was.
“But out here, if you put up a fence, you put up a fence. There isn’t somebody that comes up behind you and says you got some nice looking bales of hay, or you had a real good yield of corn. The satisfaction comes from yourself. No one else really cares.’’
Cox, 66, grew up in and around Ames, Iowa, and played football at Iowa State. He’s a relative newcomer to ranching in the North Loup River valley. He moved to the ranch after his Chicago AT&T bosses told him he was being transferred to New Jersey.
“They said we’ve got a better job for you,’’ Cox said. “I said I’ve got a better idea.’’
Mike ... had a lot of learning to do when he first come out here, but he’s been at it now more than fifteen years. He’s as good as any rancher been out here a lot longer.
Cox delights in telling stories about his rookie ranching foibles.
Late one spring day he was walking his fences to check their condition when the sun went down. He lost his bearings.
“I thought if I could just get to a hilltop, I could see where I was. Every time I got to a hilltop, there was another hilltop,’’ Cox said. “Finally, I was about five miles down the road and this older lady stopped to pick me up. She said, ‘Where you going?’ I said, ‘I’m going home, wherever that is.’’’
Cox’s excuse of searching for a lost heifer brought a knowing smile across his new neighbor’s face.
Cox has a son, a machinist in St. Louis, who came to help lay irrigation pipe one June.
“We laid about a mile of pipe and he said, ‘This sucks.’ I said, ‘I know it — and we’re about half done,’’’ Cox said.
Driving down a road afterward, the weary helper said he now understood why farmers drive 35 mph. “The only time you rest is when you go from one job to the next job,’’ he said.
Mike must be over sixty now, but he don’t hardly look like a man past his mid-forties. Don’t know what he looked like when he was wearing a coat and tie and riding that train into Chicago every morning, but today, ain’t a man looks more at home on a Nebraska ranch.
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