Where Every Wednesday Is a Bull Market

About 45 minutes east of downtown L.A. and a few miles south of the San Bernardino Freeway, you can smell the air change. It may have changed a minute or two before, but at the junction of Euclid Avenue and Riverside Drive near Chino, as you wait to turn left at the light, the smells of the barnyard--hay, grass and fertilizer--have unmistakenly overtaken the scents of the city.

It is late morning here at the Maclin Open Air Market and Livestock Auction, a Southern California landmark for more than 50 years.

Today, a Wednesday, only cattle are sold. Cattle people are a different breed, we are told. And one can sense that the air not only smells different here, its vibrations are different, too. A chorale of mooing cattle sends a soothing mantra over the land.

A black Angus rubs tenderly against a Holstein. They stare at each other with, well, cow eyes. Such eyes, so dark and large and luminous. Their gentle gaze invites a human hand, but the cattle back away in fear.

“All right they’re 17 by the head, gentlemen,” auctioneer Pete McCormick calls, giving the number of cattle in the group to be auctioned. “400, 410, 10, 20, 440, 440, 460, 490 . . . sold for 490.”

The printed word can not capture the music of the auctioneer, nor his velocity. His voice is the fiddler at a square dance, the call of “swing your partner” to “Turkey in the Straw.”

“All right, I need 370, 80, 90, all right 390, now 4, 4, 410, now 10 now 410, 420, ah 420, all green cattle boys, 420, 30, 430, 440 . . . ah 430, sold, 430.”

A cattleman in a spotless cream-colored straw Resistol cowboy hat--a thin black ribbon around the crown--points to the steer being auctioned: “This one doesn’t have too much beef.”

What is it?

“An Angus, Angus and something,” he says. “Everything is crossbred. I’ve seen this one so often I know his first name. I’ve seen him for months. See his leg? It’s not right, been infected,” says the cattleman who buys and sells here every week.

So what’s he good for?

“Meat. But I don’t want to feed him and he’s not cheap enough to kill,” says Heine Hettinga, the man in the Resistol hat. A cattleman with 16,000 head of his own, give or take a few, he came to this country with his family in 1949 from Holland. In his 20s he started in the cattle business at the bottom, trimming hoofs and castrating bulls. Today, at 45, he’s a self-made millionaire, say his friends at the auction.

“He’s a cull,” Hettinga says of the imperfect steer, “culled out of a bunch of cattle.”

“I’m 48, 9, 50, I’m 2, 52, 3, now 4, 54 . . . sold 54,” calls the auctioneer.

Hettinga points to a brown steer. “That’s what you call chicken bones. See the fine bones on the legs? Won’t grow big.

“See them, they’re from Mexico. See the clip on the ear? That’s how you can tell,” he says.

Two brothers, Aziz and Dayani Alemzay, born in Afghanistan, stand near Hettinga. They are buying cattle for the first time. He advises them. “We’re looking for something about 400 or 500 pounds,” Aziz says, at about 55 cents a pound.

Hettinga assesses number 1,124, now being auctioned. “That bull is all meat,” he tells the brothers, and bids for him.

“We are Muslims,” Aziz says, explaining his reasons for buying the beef while it’s still moving. “It’s much better to buy and have it killed here. We know from beginning to end what has been done to it.”

“Lookey here, boys,” calls McCormick, the auctioneer. His tongue does its rapid fiddle, “I’m 42, 3, 3, 4, 44, 45 . . . 48, sold 48. Gomez.” Hettinga yells to the men in the stands, “It’s going to Gomez and the garbage heap.” They laugh.

Joe Gomez makes a business of “hauling (garbage) off and feeding it to the cattle rather than hauling it to the dump,” Hettinga says. “Everybody feeds some kind of byproducts.” But Gomez “has garbage trucks and actually picks it up. He’s a junkie by trade,” Hettinga jokes.

Gomez taught him the business, he says. “We’ll sit here and fight, then go out and drink.”

Gomez jumps up; he has been sitting high in the stands: “That don’t weigh no 1,000 pounds.” He disputes the scale. The auctioneer has the steer weighed again.

“Joe, it’s a thousand pounds,” the auctioneer says.

“All right,” Gomez says, looking unconvinced.

It’s mid-afternoon and the wind is kicking up. The livestock foreman, Steve Harbison, is standing outside his office with the wind whistling in his ears. He has a face reminiscent of Gene Autry in his youth and a steady, gentle voice.

“You bet cattle people are different,” says the 34-year-old south Texas native. There are so many things they have to consider, says Harbison, who ran a ranch in Texas before it “fell apart due to economic hard times” in the state two years ago.

“They have to look at the quality of animals, the prices, the markets, whether or not to send them to the market or straight to the feed lot. Whether or not to hold them, because the weather is such a big factor in the cattle business. You’re dealing with animals. . . . People put ‘em in feed lots and feed ‘em grain; some feed garbage. Other people, if at all possible, like to leave ‘em on the grass, which is natural. But how can you leave ‘em on the grass when you have all these condominiums going up?” He points to the encroaching buildings just across the road.

Says the cowman: “You can either make money in cattle or lose big. Farming and ranching have Las Vegas whipped a hundred to one when it comes to gambling. And that’s what these people deal with.”

At Mack and Mabel’s, the auction’s on-site bar and restaurant, Hettinga orders a chocolate milk.

“I’ll introduce you to Joe,” he says.

Joe Gomez is 65, and deeply tanned with a sanguine undertone to his skin as well as his manner.

“The cattle business,” Gomez says heartily, “is the foundation and the gold of the country. If you ain’t got cattle, you ain’t got nothing.”

“Give her the pigeon story, Joe,” Hettinga yells.

“I used to work for a French lady in Rosemead. She had a small packing plant.” This was 59 years ago, at least, Gomez says. He was about 6 at the time. He made 25 cents a day “or, I could take a pair of pigeons. I used to live right down the street from her. I used to take the pigeons home instead of the 25 cents, and the next day they would fly right back to her. I was totally out,” he says, bursting out laughing. “That was a damn fool business. And I did it not one time, but many times. I didn’t learn.”

At 9 he got wise and bought his first cow for 75 cents. He’s made a nice living for himself since. His four sons are “partly” in the business with him, he says.

In what capacity?

“The taking capacity,” he says. The men at his table laugh with him. “They don’t put in any money, they only take the money.”

It is near sunset, close to and yet so far from the city. The unsold cattle are feeding under a sky tinged with lavender and filled with clouds silhouetted by the gold of the fading sun. The air is chill.

Gomez pulls up slowly in his truck. “You like to look at cows? I like sunrise and nightfall with my cattle the best.”

Through the window of his truck the landscape is framed; it captures a fence across the darkening sky. He worries, he says, that his sons do not love the cattle as he does. They work, but their feeling for it is not the same as his.

“You have to love this,” he says looking at the cattle. “And what is there not to love? When I look at my cattle I see a garden, my roses and gardenias and camellias and orchids. That is my paradise.”

He pulls away, his truck wheels issuing a low rumble, the calming mantra of the cattle vibrating in the wind.