It’s been 40 years now since I attended the dispersal of an historic ranch where 1,000 fall calvers were sold. They were the most uniform set of cattle I’d ever seen right down to their attitude – every single one of them was an insane lunatic.

The cattle had made their home in big country where they might see a human twice a year: when their calves were branded and when their offspring were shipped. I had a feeling that many of the cows had escaped human contact even on those occasions.

The cows selling that day were large framed black cattle that I assumed had a high percentage of Angus in them but they were much framier than the Angus cattle of that period. At first, I thought they might be Angus Holstein crosses but there wasn’t a speck of white anywhere on the cows nor did the cows show any sign of ear.

I expected the sale to be a barn burner and figured I wouldn’t get anything bought but for some reason, the buyers were sitting on their hands. Obviously, they knew something I didn’t, but I just couldn’t stop myself and ended up with two full loads of the de-ranged bovines. I paid an average of $375 per cow and sold them to all my friends and neighbors for $550 and it was the worst trade I ever made.

I began to understand why the buyers were reluctant to bid when the crazy cows tore down my loading chute getting unloaded. Even my horse Gentleman was scared of the black monsters and with great difficulty we managed to get most of them parked in my used cow lot that bordered a major freeway. I was probably asking for trouble putting them in such close proximity to humanity because these were clearly not “town cows” and my fences were suspect, but it didn’t matter because my neighbors started calling right away asking if they were for sale. I told them I planned to keep them but with a little arm twisting, I might be coaxed into selling a few. I was out of inventory within two weeks, all sold to friends and neighbors.

Over the next year I heard that truckers refused to haul what the neighbors were now calling Pitts Cows. Vets wouldn’t preg check them, no one in their right mind would get in a sorting alley with them and cowboys sought employment elsewhere if they heard you had any Pitts Cows.

I was forced to keep a few of the Pitts Cows that had alluded capture and I can tell you from experience that their calves were as nutty as their mothers were. One of the local ranchers was even inspired by his Pitts Cows to develop something he called the Waspy-ometer (rhymes with thermometer) and on his scale from one to 10, he scored his Pitts Cows an 11.

Then I made the biggest mistake in my life. I wrote a column about the Pitts Cows and how every former friend now called any cow that was a little loco a Pitts Cow and at every branding I went to I had to listen to them complain about their Pitts Cows, whether they came from me or not. The term Pitts Cows became synonymous with crazy cattle. Thirty years after I sold the cows, I was in Nebraska when a rancher came up to me to tell me that he had some Pitts Cows halfway across the country from me.

Even though my neighbors complained about them, they refused to cull their Pitts Cows because they lived forever and invariably brought the biggest calves to the branding pen, outweighing the other calves by 50 pounds. The cattle were so good they even retained any heifer calves with a Pitts Cow in their pedigree as replacements. I was a regular Tom Lasater (Beefmasters) or Robert Kleberg Jr. (Santa Gertrudis) in that I had created my own breed and this would be my lasting legacy.

That’s why I have instructed my wife that when I croak I want my body to be burned up and put in a shoebox because if I had a headstone it would read, “Here lies Lee Pitts, inspiration for the Waspy-ometer and originator of the infamous Pitts Cow strain of cattle.”