Selling beef

I stopped in to see a friend of Dad’s and someone who bought computers off of me several years ago, John Dunbar of Merit Pump. We talked about a lot of things and shared several stories about Dad. He brought up a few good ones, but there was one in particular I thought I would share.

As many of you might know if for no other reason that this site, we had a farm and raised steers so there was a lot of beef. Many of the steers simply went to the sale barn but others were turned into finished beef which Dad would sell as a half, a quarter, and any other means of cutting it up. The one thing he would do is to go down through Wooster, hitting up all of his oilfield suppliers to buy burgers and ground beef. It was probably nice because he could hit a bunch of them right in a row at the one end of town. He would just load up the back of his truck and head to town.

John said that Dad would roll in and John was like, “well I guess I am buying some hamburgers today.” I remember stopping in at Merit Pump one time and one of the guys that was working there even asked when Dad was going to be back in with some burgers. So it must have been a regular thing.  I also think that when he went out he knew he was going to come back with an empty truck because his truck did not have a freezer in it and you cannot keep that meet out that long. 

So here is this oil and gas producer, with a farm, that is selling burgers out of the back of his truck. It reminds me of those guys I see down south selling peaches and peanuts out of the back of their pickups. Ok, maybe just the pickup and the product are similar, but still, no one else but someone like Dad would probably do something like that.

“Don’t forget where you came from,” he would always say. I thought I was the one who was going to be different and no doubt I am in a lot of ways, but I do find more and more that there is a lot in me that is just like him and that just comes from where you grow up and what you value. Plus I think it is damn cool when someone that was as successful as Dad was to also do shit like that.

Shawn