The Schwertner Legacy
AGRICULTURE
IF YOU ATE TODAY, THANK A FARMER. IF YOU ATE BEEF, THANK JIM SCHWERTNER.
Ann Marie Kennon
T
replicating his methods and inviting him to manage their auctions. At this point, however, son Jim was still more fascinated with aviation; “I was just overly accustomed to cattle and I preferred the sounds, smells, and everything else of the jets and airplanes to those of cows.”
What many people don’t know is how closely that success is tied to aviation, and how Eugene and Jim Schwertner’s addictions to jet fuel helped build Capitol Land & Livestock Co., the largest cattle brokering business in the United States, trading 300-400,000 cattle per year.
FAMILY BUSINESS
rading more than 25 million head of cattle since 1946 is the kind of success any cattleman would envy. Indeed, the kind of success the Schwertner family has had is something to aspire to in any industry.
THE FOUNTAINHEAD Eugene Schwertner was born and raised in Schwertner and his father sent him to Texas A&M to be an engineer. Jim says, “He thought his dad meant ‘on trains’, but he did study civil engineering. In his senior year, Pearl Harbor was attacked and he was invited to join the SeeBees. As a front-line fighter, he was convinced A&M kept him alive. The war department was recruiting farm boys with no training in leadership or logistics, but he had trained for that in the Corps of Cadets; he knew what to do to survive.” When Eugene came home from the war, he just wanted to stay home and, fortunately, his father had begun organizing and trading livestock at public auctions to get away from the corruption he saw in the cattle business. By the mid-1950s, Eugene’s reputation for honesty resulted in many small towns
Eugene began purchasing land and auctions from Terrell to Belton to Lockhart and east to Caldwell. “My dad was a bigger gambler than me,” Jim says. “My mom, Gloria, was his bookkeeper, and with a mattress in the back of the car, we were like a band of gypsies visiting eight auctions per week. Aside from that, his message was that I would always need a way to keep track of my money. With my mom as his accountant, and checkbooks in cardboard boxes, in every audit, they were right, down to the penny.” Under his father’s guidance, Jim understood the critical need to know where the business and the finances stood every day, every minute. He said, “I didn’t realize that wasn’t normal. I did realize that our business is very volatile and if you do not watch your margins, you won’t make it.”
Jim Schwertner was trained to run a profit-and-loss business every day of his life. ISSUE 2 | WILCO BUSINESS REVIEW
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