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There, he dons his white leather "Wyoming lace" (chaps), climbs on a horse and pitches in. Better than anyone else on the ranch, Bob knows when a steer is as fat as it will get and should be shipped, or when a cow has begun to fail as a calf-producer and should be slaughtered. He picks the calves to be saved for breeding, marks the ones to be sold. The shipping and branding is a year-round job, with fall the busiest time. Kleberg stays on a horse "because I can make more money on a horse." His slim, attractive wife, Helen, who often rides the range with him, usually adds: "Also, he'd rather be on a horse."
So would their only child, Helen, 20. Yellow-haired and attractive, "Helenita" can cut out a cow as fast as a vaquero, and spends all the time she can doing it. To her it's "like baseball every day."
At noon on the range, Bob Kleberg and the vaqueros sit down in a range shack, where a freshly killed calf has been barbecued, or gather at the chuck wagon for smoke-tanged frijoles, slabs of pork, biting hot wild peppers, bread baked in dutch ovens over wood coals, coffee and molasses (eaten with the meat).
The Master Breeder. By evening he is usually back in his ranch house at the Santa Gertrudis Ranch, the headquarters of the four divisions that make up the King Ranch. His house is no palace. Compared to the luxury of the swimming pool, the ten-car garage and the $350,000 towered and turreted main house of the Santa Gertrudis hacienda, the Kleberg's home is tiny (seven rooms). For privacy's sake they prefer it to the enormous main house, which they use as a guest house.
Before dinner, Bob Kleberg, slicked up in his whipcord pants but still wearing fancy high-heeled boots, likes to stride up & down the living room with a bourbon old-fashioned in his hand and give his expert opinion on everything from horses, cattle, politics, bourbon to how high the hawk flies. By means of a telephone on a 30-ft. extension, he is able to sandwich in long-distance business calls as he walks.
The 25-room main house is usually filled with guests (samples: Lord & Lady Halifax, Standard Oil's Eugene Holman, Nelson Rockefeller, Mrs. Will Rogers) or with business visitors. A steady stream of agronomists, geneticists, and breeders from all over the world come to see at first hand (and are fed and boarded with traditional Texan hospitality) the work of Master Cattleman and Breeder Kleberg.
The Master Breed. A geneticist once wrote of Kleberg: "He works in the medium of heredity with the steady hand and eye of a man at a lathe turning out a part of a machine." His first great feat was the breeding of the King Ranch's Santa Gertrudis cattle, the only new breed of U.S. cattle that has had any commercial value. Economic necessity mothered the new breed.
Back in 1917, the ranch's cattle—English Shorthorns and Herefords—were doing poorly. They sickened in the blazing Texas sun. Kleberg decided to try Brahman bulls, which thrive on grass feeding and India's killing heat. Other cattlemen shook their heads. Brahmans had not worked out too well for other breeders. But Kleberg bred the Brahmans and Shorthorns together till he evolved what he wanted, a cross-breed bull named Monkey.