At the 2024 annual Red Meat Club dinner to be held on Jan. 11, 2024, the Crow family will be honored with the prestigious Friend of the National Western award. With over 100 years of service to the industry spanning three generations, the Crows have been stalwarts of the industry, including Dick Crow starting the Red Meat Club in the mid-1970s with the help of longtime Safeway meat buyer, Cecil Hellbusch.
The Crow family is best known for their publication, Western Livestock Journal (WLJ), which the patriarch of the family, Nelson R. Crow, started in 1922. In 1968, management of WLJ was passed down to his son, Dick, and in the early 1990s, Nelson’s grandson, Pete, took over the reins.
Nelson started his career as a USDA market reporter in the St. Joseph Stockyards in St. Joseph, MO, which at the time was the hub for hog marketing and processing. He was then transferred to the world’s largest stockyard and meat producer, Chicago’s Union Stock Yards, with his last stop as a USDA market news reporter taking him to San Francisco’s terminal stockyards. His timing was right, as a group of railroad companies was opening the last of the nation’s great stockyards in Los Angeles, CA, in 1922. In need of a paper for market news reporting, as well as other industry and general news, the Los Angeles Union Stock Yards loaned Nelson $5,000 to start WLJ.
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Producers, commission companies and packers relied on these papers for price discovery, not only in their own market, but also in other major markets around the country. This was especially important in Los Angeles, which had 17 packers, instead of the few major packers—Wilson, Armour, Swift and Cudahy—that dominated most terminal stockyards of the era. Nelson was quick to expand the business to include a dairy magazine and a Western crops publication.
His son, Dick, started his career after World War II on the dairy magazine. Dick then took over the publication in 1968, which was also when Nelson died. Nelson was on the first board of directors at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, OK, where his hat is on display in the board room.
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Seeing the terminal stockyards starting to decline in the 1950s, WLJ had already established a branch office in Denver, CO. The Crows had correctly foreseen the demise of the stockyard system with the LA stockyards closing in the 1960s, and one by one the others followed suit. In 1971, the company consolidated into one office in Denver, and at one time, Crow Publications occupied the entire fourth floor of the Livestock Exchange Building at the National Western Center in Denver.
The next generation, Pete, joined the company in 1982, starting as a fieldman in the Southwest. He then moved to Denver to take on other publishing duties and learned the business the hard way. Pete remarked, “When I took over the business in the early 1990s it wasn’t very profitable, until we moved to desktop publishing and computerized the business. The computers saved the entire publishing industry. One of my goals was to get WLJ to 100 years old, which I did.”
When asked what has kept WLJ relevant and profitable, Pete is quick to point out that it’s a combination of hiring the right people, keeping on top of the markets and having excellent original editorial content. Both Pete and his dad, as well as two other WLJ staff members, have been awarded the Beef Improvement Federation’s Ambassador Award for reporting on and promoting performance testing. The same occurred with the Livestock Publications Council (LPC), with Dick and Pete among four WLJ members to receive the Headliner Award over the years.
The Crow family has launched a lot of people in their livestock careers—Forrest Bassford, Jerry York, Jim Gies, Jerry Gliko, E.C. Larkin, as well as Stanley Stout, Dwayne Deitz, Delvin Heldermon, Don Doris—most all of whom have been inducted into the Cattle Marketing Hall of Fame.
In 2004, Pete entered and won the LPC awards contest for best regular column, and he also received the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s (NCBA) Excellence in Agricultural Journalism Award. Pete has also taken a number of principled stands on hot-button issues he thought were important to the future of the industry, knowing it could cost him some circulation. That sums up the Crow family: doing what they felt was right for the industry for over 100 years.
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The Jan. 11 dinner welcomes everyone to attend and enjoy their famous prime rib dinner. There will be a speaker, Mandy Carr Johnson, NCBA senior scientific director. Happy hour starts at 5:30 p.m. with dinner at 6:30 p.m. at the National Western Club. Tickets are $60 per person and can be ordered by calling the National Western Stock Show (NWSS) office at 303-295-6124. Attendance is limited to 220 people and tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis. — NWSS
