The Cow Creek Chronicles - A series

This is the fifth and final installment in a series of stories about the lives of a pioneering cattle family and the vast ranch they established.

Back at the ranch

Buddy Mills, Deroy Arnold and Alfred Norman return to Cow Creek Ranch after decades. Norman’s days on the ranch go back to the 1930s, when his father was foreman; Deroy’s, from 1957 to 1976; and Buddy’s, from 1970 to 1977. GREGORY ENNS

Cow Creek Chronicles writer Gregory Enns retraces his steps writing the story of loss and love and returns to the ranch where it all started

A few months before my father, Bob Enns, died in 1990, his younger brother, Eddie, was sitting with him on my dad’s front deck on South Indian River Drive in Fort Pierce. I was visiting from Sarasota and their conversation turned to mutual friends, Jo Ann and Tommy Sloan.

Jo Ann was one of my mom’s best friends — they were born on the same date and year, July 22, 1930 — and called themselves the birthday twins. Tommy had gone to school with Uncle Eddie at Fort Pierce High and was also a friend of my dad, who cowboyed and hunted at the Sloans’ Cow Creek Ranch on his days off as editor of the local News-Tribune.

“Bobby, if you ever tried to explain that whole situation with Tommy and Jo Ann to someone, you just couldn’t,” Uncle Eddie told my dad.

In the decades of knowing the Sloans — I had mostly known them through visits to the ranch — I knew their lives were out of the norm. They were the first people we knew as millionaires, unusual for Fort Pierce.

Then there was their domestic situation. Tommy lived with another woman, Diane Robertson, from the early 1970s until his death in 1996 while remaining married to Jo Ann.

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