LIVING HISTORY
66
The Enns family celebrates Thanksgiving at Cow Creek.
Over the years, he also advanced from minibike to motocross
bike, all of which he would generously allow us to ride.
He became an accomplished cowboy, eventually working at
Cow Creek and then for 35 years at Williamson Cattle Co.,
where he was foreman for 20 of those years.
For the past five years, he has been the foreman at Triple S
Ranch next door to Cow Creek. Of all the people that I reconnected
with in doing the Cow Creek Chronicles series, he is
the one most closely following the lifestyle in which he was
raised and carries the torch for all of us, living the life of an
authentic Florida cowboy.
HOLIDAYS IN THE WOODS
I think my parents also looked forward to visiting the camp
because Curtis and Will’um, possessed of a look of merry
devilment in his eye, always seemed to bring a bottle of Early
Times out to mark the arrival of their rare visitors. In the days
before cell phones, the only way you knew whether they
were at the camp was to drive by, and it was rare that they
weren’t there on a Sunday. “Every holiday, Thanksgiving,
Christmas, we’d be out in the woods,’’ says Deroy.
Deroy, now 65, spanned multiple generations at Cow
Creek, so he was one of the first people I reached out to —
and reunited with — in reporting the story of Cow Creek. His
dad, Curtis, had worked under Frank Raulerson going back
to the late 1940s and along with his uncle, Will’um, knew
Jo Ann the longest and had great affection for her. Like her
grandfather, Frank, Jo Ann favored Cadillacs, and Will’um
once bought one of Jo Ann’s when she was ready for a new
one. “He sure was proud of that car,’’ Deroy says.
Besides Deroy and Kathy and Debra, I’ve also reconnected
with Buddy, Kent and Marty Mills, who lived at the ranch
from 1970 through 1977, when their dad was a cowboy there
and their mom was a cook; and Robin Robertson Longstreet
and Darren Robertson, who lived briefly at the ranch when
their dad started working there in 1969. Together, they have
helped me reconstruct those days at Cow Creek.
If my recollections of Cow Creek seem romanticized, it’s
because they are. Time and life have a way of sweetening the
past and I cannot remember a bad time that I ever had out at
Cow Creek.
They are all good memories, and thank you for taking this
journey back in time with me.
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