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ROCKY MOUNTAIN
meat cartel, told me many years later: "They were worried and concerned about 
your father's aggressiveness in Wyoming.1"* Marvin Dinner was a member of the 
synagogue and the men's club where many of the personalities of the meat cartel 
in the metropolitan area of Denver went to compare notes.


MY FIRST SUCCESS
Chapter 3 My First Success


 


Citations
1.  Letter from Stephen Krut, Executive Director of American Association
of Meat Purveyors, addressed to NBC News, September 20, 1983.
2.  Conversation with Rudy "Butch" Stanko at Gering, Nebraska in October
23,1983.
3.  Ibid.
4.     Conversation with Rudy "Butch" Stanko at the Centennial Livestock
Auction, October, 1981.


"The youth who can solve the money question will do more for the world than all 
the professional soldiers of history." Henry Ford, Sr. Dearborn
Independent, 1920.
Gordon is a small town of 2500 people in the middle of the Sandhills of Western 
Nebraska. Prior to our leasing the meat packing plant in 1970, it had been the 
ruin of three other meat packers in the previous five years. Boyer Provision, 
the last of the owners, had lost $250,000 in a short time; and Vern Boyer, the 
president of Boyer Provision, was anxious to get out of the plant. The plant had 
been labeled a loser, and in order to entice us, he hadto give it to us for 
almost nothing. The Chief, my dad, was the only party interested in the idle 
plant, or the "dead horse"; but in terms of the volume of money needed to 
operate a meat packing plant, our family was considered broke. Being a meat 
packing man, Boyer knew we would need all of our accumulated funds for working 
capital. He agreed to lease us the plant for twenty years for a mere $ 1.50 per 
head slaughtered, which even included the utilities.
But the Chief and I were so hard pressed for working capital that we couldn't 
even come up with the $50,000 to open the plant. The bank in Gordon demanded 
this sum before they would supply an additional $250,000 working capital, which 
was the absolute minimum required to finance the inventory and accounts 
receivable of a small meat packing company. My parents had only $20,000 in the 
bank after the financial failure of the Rocky Mountain Packing Company, so we 
had to raise the $30,000 from somewhere.
This proved to be difficult. All of the Chiefs friends and loyal supporters had 
invested in Wyoming Beef Packers, the company that was now operating in the 
Rocky Mountain Packing building and was run by the state of Wyoming and its 
development corporation. The company demoted the Chief at its inception and, 
consequently, was having more financial