DICKSON, Okla. (September 2, 2010) - For decades, the Pages have been an established family in Dickson, Oklahoma – first as farmers, then as ranchers.
If there was one lesson Dillon Page learned from his father Hoyt, it was the value of a hard day’s work. In the early 70s, they farmed 400 acres of peanuts, another 400 acres of corn and 1,000 acres of wheat. It was just the two of them – there were no ranch hands in those days – and the typical work day started at 5:30 a.m. and didn’t end until well after dark.
There were a few years when Dillon, who had ridden bulls into his early 20’s, “started playing with” raising bucking bulls, but he quickly learned the workload that comes with it was more than he could handle.
“My dad, he never liked it,” Dillon explained, “and I decided one day it was time for me to quit doing that and go on with my farming, with the business, to make a living. I sold out. I quit.”
His only son H.D. was 2 years old at the time. Eleven years later, the youngster and a few of his pals decided they wanted to ride bulls. It wasn’t a hard decision for Dillon, who still had a passion for the sport, to purchase a few practice bulls for the boys. According to www.pagebulls.com, that set of bulls, which he purchased from Larry Kephart, can be traced to the original Charlie Plummer bloodlines.
“I don’t know,” said Dillon last month, pausing to look out over a pasture full of livestock, “I guess the same old passion that I had when I was younger came back, so I got him some bulls to get on. The next thing you know, we had 30 or 40 head of bulls, and I would say a lot of good bulls.”
It was 1985, and when it came to bucking bulls, the Page family were still virtual unknowns. But they had made a name for themselves in and around Carter County, and it didn’t take long for word to spread through the Arbuckle region of the state.
Still, even as the 80s came to an end, the Pages went about developing their bull program in relative anonymity.
That all changed in the Fall of 1990, when five legendary bull riders – Cody Lambert, Tuff Hedeman, Mark Cain, Adriano Moraes and Jim Sharp – asked if they could stop by the Page practice pen a week before heading to Las Vegas for the National Finals Rodeo.
“Every one of them came just to get tuned up for the NFR,” said Dillon. “I don’t even know how they knew we had some bulls to get on.”
It was Lane Frost, who had grown up about 82 miles east of the Pages, who had told his travel partners about Dillon’s pen. Frost had been tragically killed a year earlier, and it was Cain, who lived about an hour east of Dickson, who called to arrange for the practice session.
Lambert remembers H.D., K.J. Pletcher and Curt Lyons were bucking bulls and taking turns in the bucking chute.
“When we got our stuff out, Dillon got a different herd of bulls, and there would be 10 to 15 big bulls,” Lambert recalled. “We’d never seen them before, but we remembered them after that. They wound up on the pro circuit.”
“They rode some really good bulls and I threw some of them off,” added Dillon with a smirk. “It was good, and I still think about it quite a bit.”
‘They give everyone something to shoot for’
Dillon, 58, no longer farms peanuts, corn or wheat. Instead, he and H.D., 38, oversee one of the biggest bucking bull operations in the country. Between leased acreage and owned land they occupy 4,000 acres and own never less than 600 to 800 head of bucking bulls. From time to time, their herd can exceed 1,000 bulls, ranging in age from weanlings to 5-year-olds.
“They are top level,” said Delbert Nuse, who is part of the PBR production crew. He’s been working with H.D. helping to handle his cattle. “The way the ranch runs, the way the breeding program is, the kind of bulls they turn out every year, it’s hard to beat them.”
“They’re just way ahead of everybody else,” said Lambert, who serves as the PBR livestock director. “They give everyone something to shoot for.”
Jeff Robinson, a contemporary of the Pages, added, “I know that back in 2003, when I wanted to come to these deals, that’s whose program you wanted to emulate. … It’s the industry standard.”
Lambert said, “There are all kinds of bull men out there, but the very best are H.D. and Dillon, and the rest can learn a lot from watching them.”
Dillon said he’d like to think to what separates the Page ranch from the others is that he and his family “work harder than anyone else.” While that’s probably true, he and H.D. also have a natural knack for identifying bull talent.
H.D. is arguably the best at it.
“He can tell it way better than I ever could, and I used to think I was real good,” Dillon said. “It just comes natural to him. He can see it when no one else even knows it’s there. I do believe that. It’s just a God-given talent, I guess. Some people have certain talents and some don’t.”
“I think he’s one of the best bull men ever,” Robinson said. “I think all of us like to think we’re pretty good, especially the top three or four, but he’s as good a bull man as there ever has been.”
Lambert added, “They’re the best that’s ever been. There have been great bull men before them and there have been great bull men since they got here, but there are not any who have been better than them.”
That’s why Lambert wasn’t surprised to read that Cody Ohl, one of the greatest calf ropers of his era, is trying to emulate the Pages as he develops his own pen of bucking bulls.
In the article, Ohl talked about how he watches the Pages – particularly the way they handle their stock.
“This is one of the guys who knows more about winning than nearly anyone in the rodeo world,” Lambert explained, “and he’s interested in this bucking bull deal – he knows about competing and winning – and who does he watch?
“He’s seen guys who have done well at one thing or another, but when it comes to the bulls, he patterns his program after H.D. Page’s program.”
‘I love to win’
Dillon has turned over the bucking bull portion of D&H Cattle to his son to focus his own efforts on running the ranch, but he’s still every bit as competitive as he was 10, 20 and even 30 years ago.
“Winning is winning,” he said.
“I don’t know the word I’m looking for … it’s just, it’s an ego thing maybe. You do this to be a winner – no matter who you are.”
Since the PBR formed, the Pages have been hauling bulls to PBR events from one coast to the other. They’ve also had a great deal of success at numerous ABBI Futurity and Classic events.
And with a pen that over the years has featured the likes of Mossy Oak Mudslinger, Crossfire Hurricane, Western Wishes and the late Hotel California, it’s no surprise that the father-son team was named Stock Contractor of the Year for six years running, beginning in 2001.
“I love to win,” Dillon said. “Everybody that knows me knows I do.
“What makes me feel better about winning is knowing that I don’t ask anybody for anything. If I’m better than someone else, it’s great to win. If I’m not, I don’t want to win, and I’m not saying some of those guys are that way either.”
“They know they don’t have to compromise their values to be successful,” said Lambert, who added that the Pages are among the few contractors he takes at their word when it comes to evaluating bulls. “They’re really all the good things about the cowboy code.”
Farming, ranching and being a cowboy is a way of life for the Pages.
“I love this,” Dillon said. “It started out as a hobby and it was fun. Now it’s a job and it’s still fun. There aren’t very many people who can go through life that can say that they honestly got to do, most of their life, something they enjoy to make a living.”
H.D. agreed, adding, “I guess we’re just pretty fortunate, or I guess you could say we’re blessed to be able to do something that we enjoy doing for a living.”
“As great a job as they do with their bulls and their livestock, the fact that they’re humble and honorable is the most important thing to me,” Lambert explained. “Everyone can see from the results that their bulls have won more than anybody – their bulls are the best. … The more you’re around them the more you appreciate their honor. The more you appreciate them.”
“You really can’t base all your success on winning,” H.D. said. “In my mind, I can base a lot of my success on how hard our bulls buck every week-in and week-out. I don’t need somebody to tell me, ‘Here’s a blue ribbon.’
“If you base how good you feel about your weekend on what kind of ribbon you took home, more times than not you’re going to go home with your tail tucked between your legs.”
Robinson added, “Both of them want to be the best. I mean, that’s a common ground – both of them want to succeed in the bull business. They may have different ways of getting there, but that’s both their goals.”
‘We butt heads pretty regularly’
Since he was a child, H.D. wanted to be a cowboy, and throughout his entire adult life he’s worked within a mile of his father every day.
However, he added, “If anything is a negative in our relationship … we don’t hardly ever sit down and talk about things that don’t have anything to with work.”
In spite of being cut from the same cloth Dillon and H.D. are different – very different.
Like clockwork, Dillon starts working every day at 5:30 in the morning. H.D.’s workday typically begins somewhere between 9 and 10 a.m., but often doesn’t end until nearly midnight. The ranch hands and others who work with the Pages describe H.D. as being “more laidback” than his dad.
Being on different schedules isn’t such a big deal, but the “laidback” part can cause friction.
“If you get around me and him both, you get to see that me and him don’t get along every minute,” Dillon said. “I say that and I really don’t mean it that way. We argue and holler at each other and when we’re through, well, everything’s fine again.”
“We butt heads pretty regularly,” admitted H.D. “That just comes with it, but I love him to death and I respect him more than I respect anybody else on earth. He’s got a work ethic, and always has had, that’s second to none. I respect him for that. I respect him for the sacrifices he’s made for me and all my family.”
For Lambert, it’s less about the differences and more about what he sees in both of them. “Deep down they have the same core values,” he said.
“They are totally different personalities, and that’s probably why their operation works so well, because Dillon is so good at the ranching and H.D. has a calming effect on his animals on the road.”
H.D. joked, “He’s got a little more farmer in him than I do.
“I don’t know how to exactly pinpoint it. There sure are things he does better than I do and some things I can get around better than he can, so we complement each other in that way. There are things that need to be done and you just kind of pick sides and go do it.”
“We don’t want to be somebody we’re not,” said Dillon, “but I think both of us love what we do. We both have different ideas, but that’s because we’re two different individuals.”
‘It amazes me’
While driving across land his family’s owned for six generations, Dillon stared off into a pasture.
“It amazes me,” he offered, “and it’s mindboggling what we’ve been able to accomplish.”
Recently, the elder Page said that he’s “going to stay home,” but don’t confuse his idea of staying home with anything close to retirement.
He doesn’t intend to sit and watch others live their lives. He’s a doer, as they say. Instead it just means that H.D. will be on his own on the road at PBR events, while Dillon oversees the ranch.
Dillon’s relentlessness isn’t lost on his son.
“I get wrapped up in what I’m doing in my work – I hear that from my wife – and I know I do,” H.D. said, “and I need to take more time with the family and more time to sit down and talk with my dad. And I am guilty of that—getting caught up in what I’m doing.”
But in spite of his relative youth, H.D. knows he’s already set in his ways.
Call it a pattern, or call it a Page thing, but H.D. is every bit as much of a workaholic as Dillon.
“It’s not much different on my end,” he said. “We don’t do much different than we’ve ever done, and we should probably do some things different.”
His sister Johna works with him and their father, but her twin Shawna lives about 60 miles away. She’s not involved with any sort of ranching. In fact, according Dillon, she never showed an interest in being involved in the family business.
H.D., on the other hand, can’t even feign disinterest.
“I think it’s what drives everybody in this business: winning,” he said.
“I just wanted it and still haven’t accomplished all of it,” said Dillon, who still seems to be driven as much by the pursuit as he is by the success. “I hope I never accomplish it all.”
