From NHPR, this is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgie. Hey, sweeties. Come here. Doug Crandall is a farmer. They're a little excited. Sort of. They're having visitors. His farm in Douglasville, Georgia, it's more like a boarding house for rescued animals. Over the years, he's tended sheep, goats, cattle, raccoons. Everything that shows up, we're going to take care of. So we've had 12 rescue dogs. We've had a goose show up. We had a rooster show up that wasn't ours. Another reason this isn't a traditional farm is that they don't kill and eat any of these animals. They care for them until they die naturally, and then they bury them around the property. So we have several, I guess, pet cemeteries around the property. But that's nice to visit and remember and to be quite honest, it's a privilege to be able to provide homes and safe places for the animals that we just consider part of our family. As you might expect, there's not a lot of money in rescuing animals like this. And by profession, Doug is a writer. But there was a time when he was just 10 years old that Doug aspired to be a more traditional brand of farmer. I wanted to be a farmer deeply. I wanted to be a hog man like my father. But I knew pretty early on that you couldn't have these animals forever. Today on Outside In, producer Shayna Shealy has the story of a boy and his cow. It is a story about wonder, about grief, and how the very thing that was supposed to teach Doug how to be a farmer taught him something else entirely. I knew from 4-H meetings, from my family, from the community, that what won was muscle definition, physical prowess. No one was judging cattle's souls. Stay with us. The internet is coaching our kids. When boys hear that on repeat, it shapes how they see themselves. We can't leave it to those voices. We have to be louder. Together, with EE, we need to coach them, guide them, back them. Building our boys up every chance we get. Be yourself. Back your mates. Confidence comes from within. As proud partner of the England teams, EE has support and guidance to help build all our boys up on and off the pitch. Have you ever had the urge to sneak behind the cordoned off areas of a museum? Or roam the halls after closing time? The Smithsonian's flagship podcast, Side Door, will sneak you behind the scenes of the world's largest museum and research complex. Come learn about the ghosts that supposedly walk the museum halls after dark. How a train robbery gave rise to criminal forensics. Why leeches are actually the coolest thing ever. And how to get away with murder in the Arctic. Maybe. You'll discover stories of history, science, art, and culture you won't find in a display case. You can listen to Side Door wherever you get your podcasts. Or find us online at si.edu. From NHPR, this is Outside In. I'm Shaina Shealy. Maybe you have a memory from when you were a kid, the kind of thing that shapes a person that you think about for the rest of your life. This is one of those memories. I grew up in the first electrically lighted city in the world, Wabash, Indiana, on a pig farm. Doug Crandall is an author and a storyteller and a hobby farmer. Wabash County is also, I hate to brag, but the home of Crystal Gale. Doug grew up the second youngest of five kids. His parents were Dan and Doris. His siblings were Derek, Dina, Darren, and Dana. Doug was the black sheep, or maybe just the quiet sheep. I think I was a sensitive kid. I mean, I've gotten comfortable with the fact that I cried a lot as a kid. He was bullied a lot. Kids called him names because of his crooked teeth. I read a lot. I didn't like comics. I didn't like any of that kind of superhero stuff. I loved to keep a journal and checked out lots of books. We didn't have many books in our house. We had some encyclopedias that my aunt had given us. You know, we were too busy. Doug's parents were what he calls cash renders. They didn't own the farm they worked on every day or the equipment or the animals. They farmed in exchange for housing and a small percentage of the profits. To get by, they worked second jobs in fast food and factories. And so in some ways, you carry around a little bit of shame for that. It's as if, you know, somehow your family's not working hard enough. But they did work hard. Doug and his siblings were up before dawn nearly every morning, doing chores. When he was just seven years old, he cut two fingers off his right hand in an accident and had to have them sewn back on. And so I guess as a kid, I had a lot of responsibility. Doug especially was fond of the misfit animals, the rent pigs that would otherwise be euthanized. He convinced his father to let him take care of them. And I raised those little pigs. Some of them were blind. Some of them couldn't hear. Doug would feed and fawn over them and always his dad or his siblings would remind him. You're not to get close to them, treat them like pets. And that was always tension for me. I couldn't, I couldn't do that the way that my siblings or grandparents or parents could. This was a big deal because modest as their rented farm may have been, they were a farming family. Doug's older siblings were each learning to take care of bigger animals, not just rents. And on a foggy autumn morning in 1978, it was Doug's turn. His dad took him and his siblings to Reynolds Farm, a place that actually owned their animals. You know, you have the smell of damp hay and it's red painted barns, a silo that gleamed. The farm was absolutely gorgeous. Through the farmhouse windows, Doug could see trophies lining the shelves. Big purple ribbons, the purple ribbons were usually grand champion, reserve champions. So we knew they were a family that were competing and winning a lot in 4-H. Mr. Reynolds, champion cattle farmer, approached the family. I was talking a lot and my brother Darren especially often had a, technically just kind of put his hand on my shoulder, which meant I probably should quit talking. Our father didn't talk a lot. Mr. Reynolds introduced himself and walked Doug and his family through his pastures. They came up over a knoll and Mr. Reynolds stopped in front of a paddock of small calves. Mr. Reynolds stops and he said these are cattle that would make a great 4-H project. It was Doug's first year in 4-H, one of the largest youth groups in the U.S. with 6 million participants. I was around 4-H, you know, probably as an infant. Doug's mom, Doris, she led one of the groups for littler kids. My mother was the leader of the four leaf clovers. 4-H now has science and civics programs for kids all over the country. But one of the things it's known for is its farming programs. For Doug. The whole idea of being in 4-H is to learn how much money you spend on feed, what that's going to look like in terms of that animal maturing. Doug had signed up to raise a calf for 10 months to take notes on protein and weight, to learn how to care for an animal and then to sell it like his dad. I felt nauseous and certainly a type of anxious joy to be able to do this thing. It was a rite of passage. At the end of those 10 months, Doug and his 4-H comrades would take their cattle to the county fair to show them off to a judge. That judge would rate the cattle on things like weight to fat ratio, hide, and stature. There's Grand Champion, Reserve Champion, Blue Ribbon or Red Ribbon, and then Yellow Ribbons were just participation. Doug's older brothers had done all this before. They'd purchased their own cabsteries, but they never won ribbons for their animals at the fair. So their animals had always been auctioned off after the show, bound for the slaughterhouse. But Doug, he was dead set on raising an animal he could keep, one he could care for beyond the 10-month 4-H experiment. Doug knew that ribbon-winning animals rarely got sent away, so all he needed was a ribbon winner. He was playing this all out in his head as Mr. Reynolds showed off the young calves he had to sell. The breed was a mix, Herford and Charley and some Angus. Doug scanned the animals, and one of them creamed his little head in Doug's direction. I wouldn't say that our eyes had locked or anything kind of goofy like that, but I recognized him, he recognized me. Those eyes are something that can kind of take your breath away. Doug couldn't look away from the calf. He was white with these orangish speckles. He had these fuzzy ears and a little bump on his forehead. That was awfully cute, and it had a swirl on it, kind of a cow lick, if you will. But the orange-speckled calf was a little ungainly. His front legs were shorter than his back ones. My brother Darren said, you know, he's not going to grow into his legs. He's not going to gain enough weight. His frame is too slight. But little Doug wouldn't hear it. The stumpy calf was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. He decided to call him speckles. Mr. Reynolds had stepped back. My dad had stepped back, and my father simply said it's his money and it's his decision. Doug had a bank book in his pocket. He wrote a check for $75, money he'd earned from chores, and he shook Mr. Reynolds' hand. The grip was strong, and I felt like a man. And I was rehearsing in my brain how he would grow into this grand champion. For the next week, Doug waited for speckles to be delivered. He patched aluminum buckets for the calf to eat from. He oiled an old halter. He built a cozy hideaway for the calf. I added more bales of straw to insulate the plywood that was around him. And then I made sure that there was a light bulb right above where he would be. When the Reynolds farm truck finally pulled up, it was dark. A farm hand opened the trailer. And I just saw these eyes a little bit in the dark. A little flash of a wet nose. And he stepped forward. I knew to make some clicking sounds, just a... And that was also the first time he kind of nudged me. The Reynolds had sent some feed with speckles. What we would call fancy feed. But Doug's family made their own feed to save money. So while speckles chewed away the last of the fancy stuff, Doug filled his trough with a house mix of corn and molasses. And he began eating and then was comfortable enough to close his eyes and start chewing cud. Doug laid his head next to speckles on the straw. And he drifted off. So I fell asleep next to speckles. And it was dreamy. That's the only way I can describe it. He was mine. It was real. And he was there with me. And then on, he spent his free time with speckles. Pampering him. Trimming hooves. Cleaning ears. Brushing the hide. Feeding him pretzels he'd stolen from his sisters. Toast. I loved feeding him toast. Doug parted his hair. Tried out different hairstyles on speckles. I was grooming his pole, this top of a cow's head that's kind of a special little cranium using the pomade that's really supposed to be used to make their back muscles look better by combing their fur up. And while grooming is something judges would look at at the county fair, a lot of Doug's care wasn't exactly standard for the 4-H program. Like Doug spoke to speckles constantly. In the evenings, Doug would read to speckles. Bios of Daniel Boone and Old Yeller and things like that. I had started reading Bridge to Terabithia and that book particularly sticks out in my mind and memory of speckles because we read it several times together. One afternoon, this was probably February, I can remember getting off the bus, it's cold and rainy. And by this time speckles either can hear the school bus, know it by the time of day, smell me, I don't know, but he would bawl, you know, he would moo. And this day I'd been picked on quite a bit. There was a kid who loved to call me snaggle tooth in front of everybody. He was an older kid and I was deeply scared of him. I mean, I do have to give him credit. He also started calling me Stonehenge mouth and at that time I didn't even know what Stonehenge was but I knew it wasn't a compliment. And so I'd been picked on pretty intensely and I get off the bus and I'm crying already and you know, have my park of hood up and all that. But I hear speckles call and his bawl and his moo and I couldn't get to him fast enough. Just buried my head in his firm. I love the way he smelled from the outdoors and the alfalfa. And I just cried and cried. One time Doug was reading to speckles when his father walked in through the barn door. He just kind of turned away and I knew and I'm sure my father knew on some level that I wasn't going to be able to do it and tolerate the emotional part of having to see it as a project and well, leading that creature to slaughter. But Doug did see it as a project, just one of a very different kind. He was adamant that with enough care, speckles could become a ribbon winner. That doting on him would help make him a champion and then he could stay with him forever. That somehow if I treated that time, you know, very in a very holy way, I could save him. More coming up after a break. Summer always changes how I get dressed. I want pieces that feel lighter and more breathable, things that are easy, right, but still feel put together. And that's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials that feel and look amazing. Think breathable linen and soft organic cotton, well made basics, but without the luxury markup. 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Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash outside in. Go to Shopify.com slash outside in. That's Shopify.com slash outside in. From NHPR, this is Outside In. I'm Shayna Shealy. Throughout the winter, Doug's special care of speckles, it started to pay off. Doug taught speckles to align his feet with a show stick. So you would take it, touch in between their hooves, which is sensitive, and they would pick that foot up and move it in the direction that you would apply the stick. Doug would practice over and over again. I would pretend in the paddock that I was going around the ring. You are to pause and look at the judge and look at the crowd. It's a whole kind of ritual. I could hear in my head the judge talking over the speaker, the intercom in the show ring, the judge slapping speckles rear end, this huge trophy and big purple ribbon. I just then began to believe that others would see him not for his hide or hind hawks or shanks and flanks, but they would see him as I saw him as this beautiful soul. After months of cuddling speckles to sleep, reading to him and training him, blooms appeared on the trees. The birds were chirping. Ice began to thaw. In early spring, there was a special 4-H meeting with a guest speaker, someone from Purdue University studying agriculture. Doug was paying close attention, trying to live up to the responsibility of his 4-H family legacy. This guy said, remember 4-Hers, these are not pets. I felt his eyes on me. I was feeling guilty for that and I often blushed. I remember having a hot red face. I knew that. I knew I wasn't to be reading to speckles and grooming him in the ways that I was grooming him. The guilt and the shame was always there, but there was a defiance as well. Suddenly, it was summer. School let out. Doug had six weeks until the competition. Now's the time to feed a higher protein ratio. Now's the time to begin thinking about your next calf. So it was fairly terrifying. I really became so focused, kind of in a frenetic way, to be honest, that I could keep him from being auctioned. A few days before the cattle show, Doug and his brothers loaded their steers into a grain truck and took them to the fairgrounds. Doug wore his favorite outfit, a thrift store shirt with pearl snaps, buttoned all the way to his throat. He sat next to speckles. And he was just nudging me. Nudging me more than he had before. So I had interpreted that as him trying to tell me it was okay. When they arrived at the fairgrounds, you have all the sounds of roosters crowing and cows mooing, the smells of the lion's club tent with pork fritters and french fries and all that kind of stuff. The first thing you do is you're in a long line of trucks and trailers and everybody's weighing in their steer. Most of those, my brothers were I think 1100 and 1000 pounds. But even with all the toast and pretzels, Doug had snuck to speckles. Speckles came in right about 650. My main feeling at that time is that something spectacular is going to happen. I'm still believing that it's all going to be okay. The morning of the cattle show. The event Doug had been preparing for all year. Doug skipped breakfast. He felt sick and he got into his dad's station wagon with his siblings. They pulled up to the fairgrounds before sunrise at about 5 a.m. And as we pulled into this gravel parking lot, this lone ball moo comes out and I know it's speckles. Doug spent all morning with speckles. He brushed his hide while his mom worked the ends of his tail into a ball with aquanet. Doug's mom gave speckles a few sips from a soda bottle. And so I remember that. I remember speckles burping. I'd never heard him burp before. He looked wonderful. And before he knew it, speckles and Doug were in the ring together with other steer. Doug held speckles up by a leash, his hands up close under speckles' chin. Slow motion, which also sounds a little bit cliche, but things had slowed down. And that part is just a blur of white lights. The judge is, you know, a big man, Bolo Tai, really surveying you and the animal. After a while, the judge began to line up the cattle. I had started to feel in my chest and in my stomach a sob coming on. I was at the end of the configuration. There was just one or two other steers at the end, and that mean we were not even going to place. We would just have the participatory yellow ribbon. And I was just thinking, well, if I just take off running, he'll follow me and we'll just burst through that gate, go into the midway, make it out into the town, and then head on for Canada. Things started to kind of mute, and you start going through this winding kind of obstacle course through shoots to where there are two semi-trucks waiting. One, air conditioned, and the other one splattered, and that's the cattle that are going to go directly to the slaughterhouse. I just felt like I was going to throw up. I had my arm around speckles and wasn't leading him. There was no reason to lead him. I was trying to get some hugs in. As you get closer to the two semi-trucks that are waiting, and they have these shoots that are moving to the ground so that the cattle just walk up them. By then I'm fully balling. It really wasn't until I saw his halter slid off, and I could feel his fur as I grabbed at it and he was gone. I got the shoot and into the livestock trailer that I really, truly realized I'd failed, that I hadn't saved him. A few weeks later, Doug got a letter in the mail. It was a check for $187. I hated the check. I hated the envelope that it came in, and I hated that we had to use speckles to make ends meet for school clothes and school supplies. I knew from 4-H meetings, from my family, from the community, that what won was muscle definition, physical prowess. No one was judging cattle's souls. I suppose what was new to me was that there were going to be things, I suppose, other humans and other animals that I knew that I, no matter what, I was going to be able to save. And I guess that was the heaviest part. In the years after speckles trip to the auction house, Doug graduated high school. He was the first in his family to go to college, and he went on to get an MFA in writing from Queen's University. He never did become a hog farmer like his dad. He's a full-time writer and disability advocate. But looking back, he's grateful for his time in the 4-H program, for getting to spend those 10 months with speckles. The gift I think speckles gave me most was being totally present in all aspects, open, vulnerable. That's what it's about. You can't experience all of the joy and happiness and humor or just the mundane parts of life if you're avoiding what can be painful. A few years ago, Doug traveled back to Indiana to teach at a writing conference. Doug and his wife Nancy decided to visit. As they walked, there was a little boy, maybe about 11 or 12. Doug's wife Nancy decided to say hello. The boy just looked at her. And then he said, we don't name them. This week was reported and produced by Shayna Shealy. It was mixed and edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby. Our staff includes Marina Hanky, Felix Spoon, Jessica Hunt, and Justine Paradis. Special thanks to Nancy Lopez at Snap Judgment for editorial guidance on this story. In addition to caring for animals on his farm in Douglasville, you can find his stories about grief and growing up on a farm at Sun Magazine and in his new book, Equipment for the Darkness. Rebecca LaVoy is NHPR's director of on-demand audio, music by Blue Dot Sessions, outside in Issa Production of New Hampshire Public Radio. Have you ever wondered why Reese Witherspoon founded Hello Sunshine, or where Kevin O'Leary got his start? Or even how Alex Earle became the most accessible founder to someone who may not even consider this space? Enter the Founder Mindset, the new podcast from Harvard Business School Foundry hosted by me, Reza Satchu. As a leading educator in entrepreneurship, I've built multiple high-profile companies and mentored thousands of students and founders through the realities of starting and scaling ventures. And with the Founder Mindset, I'm sharing those lessons with you by sitting down with world-class entrepreneurs, including Witherspoon, O'Leary, and Earle, plus Tim Ferriss, and to break down exactly how they commit, decide, and build for impact. These aren't surface-level interviews. Each episode, I challenge my guests to revisit their toughest moments, their boldest decisions, and the mindset that carried them through. Follow the Founder Mindset wherever you get your podcasts. From artificial intelligence to the gig economy to global volatility, the economy is changing at a dizzying pace. The future of the future of work podcast, the chart-topping and critically-acclaimed podcast from Harvard Business School hosted by me, Bill Kerr, and by managing the future of work project co-chair, Joe Fuller. The show explores technology trends, demographic changes, the rise, the care economy, and many other forces transforming the landscape of work. We'll highlight the insights of business leaders, technologists, and experts like business roundtables, Kristen Silberg on corporate workforce strategy, and Khan Academy Founder Sal Khan on AI, Education, and the Future of Work. With more than 2.5 million downloads and close to 300 episodes, there is something for everyone. Follow HBS, Managing the Future of Work, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now.
