Tim Wheeler is a Sequim High School graduate from the Class of 1958.
The longtime Sequim resident relates a story that, as he writes, “ultimately will appear in my memoir, if I ever complete it.”
“Back in the 1950s dairy farmers in Clallam County sold their bull calves to the local mink farmer who fed them to his mink. Like the ill-fated husbands of black widow spiders, those bull calves were a testament to the disadvantage of being born male.
One day the mink farmer came in his truck to pick up one of our newborn bull calves. My dad looked into the back of the pickup and spotted a little Jersey heifer among the bulls.
‘What’s she doing in there?’ my father asked.
‘Well, one of your neighbors put her in. He didn’t want her.’
‘I’ll trade you straight across — my bull calf for that heifer.’
The mink farmer chuckled. ‘Alright, maybe she will turn out to be a prize winner.’
The mink farmer unloaded the heifer from the pickup.
Daddy turned the little heifer over to my sisters, Susan and Honeybee, whose job was to care for the calves, feeding them, cleaning out their stalls. We had a mixed herd, Jerseys, Guernseys, Brown Swiss and Holstein. We sold our milk to Darigold, a milk producers’ cooperative in Seattle.
Honeybee and Susan would mix up the formula in a bucket fitted with an artificial teat. The heifers suckled the fake teat greedily.
We never knew whether it was a deficiency in the formula or some other explanation. Scours was endemic and the majority of the calves sickened and died. They were like pets to my sisters and they were devastated.
Susan and Honeybee named the calves. They chose a name for the Jersey heifer that reflected the ‘iffy’ circumstances of her arrival on our farm: ‘Maybe.’ As in, maybe she will make it to milk-producing age.
But then again, maybe she wouldn’t.
In the weeks and months that followed, Maybe thrived. She grew into a sleek, dark brown heifer with huge soulful eyes, the beauty that Jersey-lovers find so irresistible. Susan and Honeybee spoiled her, feeding her selected armloads of alfalfa, grain with a cup or two of molasses dripping from it like a chocolate sundae. She became their favorite pet.
When we were in the calf pen, feeding one of the other calves, Maybe would saunter up and nudge us with the top of her head as if to say, ‘My turn.’ Susan and Honeybee were members of 4-H and showed Maybe at the Irrigation Festival and the county fair. Once Maybe won a Blue Ribbon for ‘Type’ and a Red Ribbon for ‘Show.’
Maybe came of age, she was bred, gave birth to a calf of her own, freshened and became a milk producer. Still the big “M” hung over her: Maybe she will be a good milk producer, maybe not.
A few years later, the answer was in. In 1967, the Dairy Herd Improvement Association (DHIA) proclaimed “Maybe” the Butterfat Queen of Clallam County. Over six lactations, she produced 37,000 pounds of milk — over 12 tons. At 8.1 percent fat, she produced over a ton of butterfat, enough to supply the entire town of Sequim with all the ice cream we could eat.
Her photograph is on the front cover of the DHIA’s 1967 Annual Report, a dark, beautiful Jersey cow with a very large udder. Doubtless she was born with the blood of bovine royalty running in her veins. Yet her lineage, if known at all, is a secret held by the mink man.”
Everyone has a story and now they have a place to tell it. Verbatim is a first-person column that introduces you to your neighbors as they relate in their own words some of the difficult, humorous, moving or just plain fun moments in their lives. It’s all part of the Gazette’s commitment as your community newspaper. If you have a story for Verbatim, contact editor Michael Dashiell at editor@sequimgazette.com.
