The History Behind Cattlemen’s Steakhouse in OKC

welcome back history Foodies I'm here today just south of Oklahoma City in what's known as Stockyard City so join me today as we experience the history and enjoy the food at Cattlemen's Steakhouse hey everyone I am so excited for this episode I was so enamored with David Egan and his interview that I really wanted to make this into a two-part episode so this first part is going to focus in on the history of Stockyard City itself and of the restaurant and then come back for part two where we're going to delve into the food how things are made and show you all the amazing things you can get from their menu so really the history of the area started in the early 1900s when the Oklahoma City fathers at that time needed some sort of prosperity they needed jobs they needed work for the citizens of this newly created community that turned out to be Oklahoma City so they they had that was the Advent of the refrigerated rail cars at that time and so they thought that it might be centrally located in Oklahoma City for some cattle processing facilities to be located here that would be centrally located for distribution more evenly across the United States most of the packing houses were in Chicago a little bit St Louis a little bit of Kansas City but Oklahoma City was more in the central proximity of this of the country and so they went to Chicago and they they recruited two or three Packers at the time to come to Oklahoma City and they gave them all this land that is now Stockyards City Stockyard city is an area in the middle of Oklahoma City that is is essentially in the county which it's not Incorporated in the city so the stockyard City Stockyards itself is in the county but not part of Oklahoma City it's surrounded by Oklahoma City but it's it's a county land and so that provides some tax benefits to some businesses that are actually in the Stockyards itself but so what they did is they gave them all this land and this property around here and said that if you'll build your packing houses here and create all these jobs we'll give you all this land to have Stockyards which will furnish and feed your packing houses so we'll Supply you with the ranchers and everybody that will ensure a proper supply of cattle that you can process at your packing facilities there's railroad tracks all around here and you'll be able to load your cattle on processed cattle on refrigerator Rail and send them across the United States and your distribution will be better than it's ever been so anyway they did they came here we had four packing houses it was Morris armor Wilson and I can't remember the name of the other one but anyway they were all here they opened up they employed about 40 000 people because they worked pretty much 24 hours a day around the clock so you had a lot of employees that worked here that didn't have cars in the early 1900s and the 20s and 30s and 40s for that matter really after World War II that you know the industrialization created enough work and jobs where people could afford a car and cars were more affordable but in the meantime there was a train that ran an urban trolley that ran down here that went to the other areas of closer to downtown Oklahoma City where people lived at the time so it provided transportation for people to come to work so they would come to work they'd go through the Stockyards gate they would go to their packing houses wherever they were employed at the time and then when they got off work they would stop here this was their shopping mall this was where they did all their shopping they bought all the groceries here they bought all their Dry Goods here their clothes they're they had their doctor here the lawyer here they're counting here anybody the jewelry shops were here a lot of bars and restaurants of course with the the Stockyards comes a lot of cowboys because it takes a lot of people that actually will that are required to maintain herds of cattle in an orderly fashion Cowboys sometimes in those days were a little unruly a little Rowdy and uh that was probably the reason for a lot of bars in the area at the time and there was a lot of notorious Behavior at that time a couple four or five local Transit Hotel places where people could come and they were bringing cattle from three or four hours away back then you know it was a it was a day's drive to travel 100 miles if you lived in the panhandle of Oklahoma or somewhere down south so you'd bring your cattle up here and you might rent a room for the night spend the night and then go after you sell your cattle to the Stockyards might go home the next day so it's a perfect combination of a lot of a lot of commercial activity in this area the whole place was just full of all sorts of different types of businesses so and payment for the packing house to come down here they were given this commercial property around around here so they made their extra money by either selling or leasing land and buildings so this building was built in 1910 which is basically the opening of the Stockyards was in 1910 and most of the buildings in this block square area were either built in 1910 or 1911 or 12. so within about a two year period this whole thing just kind of grew up a lot of the buildings were three and four stories high there's not any left now that are more than two stories usually a fire or something would have created enough damage in one of the buildings where it was either raised or you know the top floor had to be removed or something like that but there was a lot of activity flash forward to the 1960s and 1970s when people decided as the whole area around this area this was out in the country you know in 1910 but later on the city grew up around here so you can imagine if you're you bought a house three blocks from here or something well the smell of the Stockyards itself was a little strong the processing the rendering of fat and the the byproducts the whole process of processing cattle has its own special Aroma and so after a while people were kind of like you know I'm not really comfortable having that you know living by the Stockyards well you know maybe they didn't need to have to move so close but anyway whatever happened so the EPA started out and then there became a lot of rules and a lot of regulations and it got to the point where the Meat Packers made it very very difficult for them to operate within the middle of the city so one by one they all disappeared and most of them went way out into the into the country outside of like around Liberal Kansas and the panhandle of Oklahoma and Texas has three or four feedlots and a lot of the packing houses follow where the feedlot is and so because no one wants that inside their city they're usually way outside of town somewhere and that's where most of them are today [Music] so as that happened in the 1970s and 80s the area became began to change a lot significantly and it didn't happen just overnight but it happened gradually over a period of about 20 years whereas all these meat packing houses started Closing one after the other all the jobs went with them and so the commercial viability of the area became significantly diminished where they're just so when we came on the scene in 1989 1990 the area was almost kind of a ghost town there was a bank on the corner there was Cattleman's there was license cross street and one or two smaller insignificant size buildings or shops everything else was vacant so one of the things that we wanted to do when we got down here is to do whatever we could do to try to promote the area and bring back some sort of viability to the area and kind of you know engage people that enjoyed the the history of the Stockyards and the old west and try to get some business people down here that would want to embrace that and make that kind of part of their business plan and so we were successful and able to get the first urban Main Street program in the United States in Stockyard City so an urban Main Street most people are used to a Main Street program in small kind of Forgotten towns that got you know who's whose business climate changed when some of the big retailers moved in and all the little shops and businesses in downtown all closed down and kind of went out of business and everybody was sad the downtown wasn't what it used to be so the Main Street program was trying to bring that back and rely reignite it in Oklahoma City Oklahoma City didn't need a Main Street program but Stockyard city did so we were a city within a city and so an urban Main Street program is way different than a small town so a Small Town Main Street program everybody and their brother and their dog and their sister and their cousin is rooting for downtown to come back and they'll try to support any new business that comes downtown and they'll support the Main Street program in Stockyard City it's pretty much just those of us that are down here are the cheerleaders because most of the people from around the area you know unless they have some fondness for the area don't really care whether the area comes back or disappears or anything else unlike a small town where you have the whole city rooting for you know the Revival of the downtown location so we had a much smaller nucleus but working together as a group of business people we were able to convince the city to make a lot of improvements so the streetscapes have all been been redone and the lighting has all been redone we've got signs on the interstate that point to stockyard City exits we became very engaged with the convention and tourism industry the bureau in town both the state at the state level and also the city level to get people to come to make a stop as you're going through Oklahoma City or if you're spending the night to come to stockyard City and see what the history is all about obviously we want them to come to our restaurant but we also want them to come to the other shops and experience you know kind of the old west the way things used to be and there's some very unique stores down here that you can't find anywhere else so that was part of bringing the area back our history comes in when Mr Wade the gentleman that actually won the restaurant in a crap game in 1945 had never been in the restaurant business before and he had come back from World War II and he had had a um a theater in Dallas before he went away to the war and he left it entrusted to another gentleman while he went away to war when he came back the guy had sold everything out of there and all he had left was a shell of a building so being from Oklahoma he decided to sell his building down there moved back to Oklahoma his dad was somewhat of a notorious Gambler and kind of colorful character let's leave it at that and so their their circle of friends at that time were pretty heavy into bootlegging and gambling and some of those other nefarious roles so Mr Wade came up from Dallas and that's how he got involved in a dice game at a local hotel and so on Christmas Eve in 1945 he did the most stupid thing that anybody in the world could ever do is take his life savings and on the roll of the dice potentially gamble away everything that he had to win a restaurant that he knew nothing about and the poor guy lost he won the bet he won the restaurant but but he lost because he'd never been in the restaurant business before so the next day he comes walking in here and at that time it was just the cafe side on the original part of the restaurant there probably say sat 40 or 50 people and he sat there at the stool on the counter and wondered what in the world he got himself into and uh proceeded to figure it out for the next 45 years so for 45 years he grew the restaurant one step at a time as each of these buildings in the area became available he would buy the next piece and the next piece and the next piece so you know our part is where the coffee shop goes through the front dining room the parking lot the building next door and so he worked very very hard for all those years when he was about finished in the late 80s he decided it was time for him to hang up his boots and and head on out to pasture and knowing him through the Restaurant Association Nick Stubbs myself went and visited with him and were able to come to terms and it was a good deal for him and it was a good deal for us we looked pretty smart today because the business is very viable we weren't really that smart back then because it was a huge gamble the restaurant was really not in good shape at the time the business was very very poor um but we had been working on a steakhouse concept before 1990 and we envisioned a steakhouse brand in Oklahoma City because the oil boom kind of the oil bust pretty well ran almost everybody that had been in business out of business from the early 80s to the late 80s so we had a classic old great great restaurant steakhouse in Oklahoma City by the name of Glenn's Hickory Inn that started in 1953 that died during the oil bust um and that was a real loss there were a couple other restaurants that had done the same thing so we saw a void and a need for a a brand that somebody would think of when they think of steak we want them to think of XYZ restaurant in 1989 if you asked 10 people where to get a good steak in Oklahoma City you'd probably would have gotten 10 different answers we our vision was there's one answer and we want that one answer to be whatever our restaurant's going to be and so as we were working on this concept for a new steakhouse is when Mr Wade approached us and said hey look I think I'm done why don't you guys come and talk to me about taking over Cattlemen's we said thanks but no thanks and we thought about it we thought about it we thought well it is Stockyards that kind of says beef it is Cattleman's that kind of says beef so it's doing a lot of things that we wanted to do and create that was already here so we rolled the dice in a sense and gave it a shot so we took over in May of 1990. and have been operating it ever since and things have been fun they're exciting um honestly when you take over an old place that's not in very good condition at the time it's it's really hard to win people back over because guests that eat at an old restaurant for many many years is really hard to run them off because they're just endeared to that place because they have memories of their family and special occasions that they had there but over a period of time there were some some things that made people just not want to come back anymore so our job was to perfect the operation get really good at serving great steaks giving good service having a more professional approach to running a business and hopefully over a period of time people would fall back in love with us one at a time at a time at a time and so we started marketing and advertising campaign after we got our act together about a year into after taking over and um that would have been in 1991 in 1992 President George Bush came here and ate dinner during a campaign stop headlines in the paper so this sleepy little restaurant that everybody had forgot about is now the headlines of the paper of the president standing in front of the restaurant you know after having a big old steak dinner and a couple martinis which took all those people that had wandered or thought whether the restaurant was still any good or not or I'd eaten there a long time ago and it wasn't very good the last time or two that I ate there well if it's good enough for the president so that was one of the first catalysts that really helped kind of start building Back The credibility of the restaurant and you know one thing after another after another just coming in every day and trying to provide really great service to our guests take care of our employees where they want to come back to work again the next day and creating a great environment for beef this is the restaurant now fortunately when you asked 10 people in Oklahoma City where's a good place to get steak nine out of ten are probably going to name our restaurant there's other great steakhouses in Oklahoma City but we're probably most known as the the premier place today in and day out get a great steak at a fair price and there you have it the history side join me back next week where we're going to find out how to make a great steak

Channel: History Ate Here

Views: 47,414

Keywords: Steak, Historical Restaurant, Stockyards

Id: 0kADVp-TBX0

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 18 2022