“I grew up in the back of a sale barn right here in
Groesbeck,” he says, speaking from his home in that town just a few miles away from Buffalo. My grand-
DeCordova and Burt Richards, then owner of the The last thing we want to do is sell one too cheap.
father and a man by the name of Franklin Jackson built the fi rst sale barn in Groesbeck. My father and his 2 sisters took it over in 1962. They ran it until 1972 then they sold out and my dad went to work for Hitch Enterprise in Oklahoma.” DeCordova fi nished high school in Oklahoma and
then attended college at Panhandle State University on livestock judging and rodeo scholarships. He moved back to Groesbeck after college and “started a little order buying company. I hoped I’d own a sale barn one day,” he says.
74 The Cattleman July 2014
sale barn became close friends and deCordova spent just about every Saturday at the Buffalo sale buy- ing cattle “for forever now, it seems like. I told Burt if he ever got ready to sell I’d be interested. I didn’t realize Burt was going to wait until I
was almost 50 before he decided to sell.” But in 2006, the barn changed hands and the deCordovas bought it, with partner Tommy Burns. After 3 years, Burns left the partnership. “I probably wouldn’t have done this if I didn’t have
the 2 sons that I have. They have just been a tremen- dous amount of help to me. I know I can leave and do what I need to do and I don’t have to worry about it because they’ll take care of it. They take care of the people,” deCordova says. Another factor in his success, he says, has been hav-
thecattlemanmagazine.com
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