After growing up penniless in the Azores and decades of punching
a clock at odd jobs, Joe Vargas is running cattle and living his
dream. Part 1 of a three-part series.
Joe Vargas is easy to read.
When he’s talking about his cattle, he’s prideful and open, a little boastful of all the hard work he’s put in and the success he’s earned.
When he has to talk about himself and his past, growing up penniless in the tiny Azore village of Faial, he’s suddenly a shy schoolboy again. He won’t make eye contact. He rubs his hands over his eyes and the back of his neck, up and down his arms, hugging himself, waiting for it to be over.
He tries to look stern, but his easy smile and soft blue eyes give him away. It embarrasses him to talk about his wife, Kathy, but when he looks at her it’s obvious he loves her, that he believes the first real good fortune in his life came when they met.
“The first place I ever saw her was at a branding. She was married and I was married at the time, but I admired her,” Vargas said recently, enjoying a rare restful moment in the Vargas’ Pacheco Pass home, and only after his wife was out of earshot. Without the security of his cowboy hat, he was rubbing his hands over his balding head, staring at his lap. “I said to myself, why wasn’t I lucky enough to be with her. She was the type of wife I wanted to have all of my life.”
And now, at 58, he has the wife – and the life – he wanted since he was a boy, when he tramped around Portugal broke and barefoot, the youngest of five children abandoned by their father. All his life, Vargas wanted to be a cowboy, and after decades of punching a clock and working odd jobs, he is running cattle in the San Joaquin Valley and the hills behind Gavilan College. Spending every day with the two loves of his life – his cows, and Kathy.
But first, he had to get off the island.
“I could tell you stories that will blow your mind,” he says, but keeps to a tried few, The story, for instance of how he left the Azores at 16 to live with family in Toronto, only to have his cousins leave town three days after he arrived.
Vargas didn’t speak English, but landed a job at an auto plant. A month later he had an accident at work and lost parts of two fingers on his left hand. He couldn’t work the assembly line anymore. For six months he supported himself digging up night crawlers on a golf course. Hunched over in the freezing dark, Vargas dug worms out of the soil until his stumps bled, a coffee can taped to one leg to store worms, a can taped to the other was filled with sawdust to keep his hands, if not warm, dry. For every 1,000 worms he caught, he got $5.
“It was terrible,” Vargas says of those first months,” “but in a way, it was also beautiful. My eyes couldn’t get big enough to see everything. I came out of the old country. There, it was like being in an eggshell. I would stop in the street for hours and watch the cars go by. In my village, people who could afford a bicycle were very rich.”
After a year In Canada, Vargas moved to Massachusetts to live with his brother, Norbert. But he was unhappy there, and so he came to San Jose to live with his mother’s sister, Amelia. That was in 1967. For the next 22 years, Vargas took whatever job he could get, and socked away whatever he could, praying that one day he’d become a cattle rancher.
He manufactured irrigation pipe in Milpitas and wine tanks at San Martin Winery and L & A Engineering in Gilroy. When the winery closed in 1989, he was ready to take a gamble.
That year, Vargas got his first herd of cattle, paying $1,100 each for 55 cows and running them on 500 rented acres in Red Bluff. He stayed there for two years, living in an 18-foot trailer with his first wife, Mary Lou. It was a terrible investment.
“I lost just about everyone of them,” Vargas said. “They came from Nevada and they weren’t used to the tics.”
Most of his herd died from anaplaz, a treatable but deadly disease that Vargas knew nothing about. It almost ruined him.
“I made a real bad deal,” he says. “That was enough to take a person down, but I’m still here. I had to pay to learn but the tougher it gets, the tougher I get.”
And in 1991, fresh off his disaster, Vargas took over the lease on 8,400 acres on Castro Valley Ranch, next to Gavilan College. Other ranchers bet he wouldn’t last but two years.
“When I started, prices were high and the market was terrible,” Vargas says. “I could barely make enough to pay my rent.”
In fact, he couldn’t pay his rent, not with his small herd. Vargas had to chop firewood to pay his bills. He was just one bad season from ruin. The cynical predictions of established ranchers were coming true. But Vargas was determined, so much so that he sacrificed his marriage to Mary Lou for his cows. After 25 years, the two were divorced.
“The cattle business is a very devoted business. There’s always something that needs to be done. There’s always a problem,” he said. “She couldn’t take the pressure.”
So Vargas did it himself, and survived. Then, in 1996, he started dating Kathy. They went into business together, and they thrived. Today, the couple runs about 660 pairs (mother and calf) on ranchland they rent in Gilroy, Lockford and Hollister. Kathy has made the fantasies Joe had as a little boy even better in reality.
“My dream was always cattle, but I couldn’t afford it for 25 years,” Vargas says. “It’s still a dream today. I love it because it’s a challenge everyday. It’s not easy. You’ve got to keep struggling. But I wouldn’t do anything different no matter how tough it gets.”
