One Nation, Under God

George Lamb, R and G Quality Feeds Owner, to turn 90 on Valentine's Day

George talks about his time growing up and working in Phillips County

If you have visited R & G Quality Feeds in the past 30 years, chances are that you have seen George Lamb, one of the company's owners, busily entering figures, by hand, into his ledger book. George has worked many hours during his 90 years – and still puts in 10-hours a day, six days a week – but he admitted last week that he is not as spry as he once was.

"At this point, Ric (his oldest son) manages everything and I am the official coffee maker," George said with a wink and a nod.

These days there are plenty of Lambs working at R & G as George's great grandson; Gerome (a 2014 Malta High School graduate) has joined the company fulltime, a proud hiring for George.

"It makes me pretty proud of all my family," he said.

Back on February 14, 1925, George was born outside of Saco. When the Lamb's neighbors found out about George's birth, they said, "spring is coming early this year because they are already lambing up north."

George attended his first three years of elementary school at the "old Country School" before his mother, Liz, got a job in Saco and George tagged along, continuing his schooling town up until the eighth grade. Instead of going on to high school, George spent the next years of his life working the family farm with his father, Elmer, before pushing off to find his way in the world.

It was in 1941, at the age of 16, that George first left Phillips County for any stretch of time. His first job away from home took him to Whitefish, Mont., where he worked for the Great Northern Railway repairing train cars and servicing passenger trains for three years during the winter and returning home each spring to continue to help on the family farm.

In 1945, George was drafted into the Army. He first attended boot camp in Texas before being shipped to the Philippines. He spent a year there before WWII ended and, then deployed to Korea.

"I was in the infantry and then they sent me overseas," George said. "We went to the Philippines the tail end of 1945 and then we were sent to Korea for a year."

He was discharged from the Army following his stay in Korea and he was able to return home, to Saco.

"I was pretty happy to be home," George recalls. "I got married before I went to the Army so I was really happy to get home to my wife and family."

Before heading to basic training in Texas, George married Stella Rice, of Big Sandy, Mont., in January of 1945.

"When I met her, it was kind of an accident," said George. "She also worked on the railroad. We just celebrated 70-years of marriage last January."

Stella, now 88, is a stay-at-home wife these days, but spent 30 years as the school cook in Saco.

"She is a great cook, you can tell by the looks of that," George said as he pointed down to his belly.

Though George was happy to be home with his bride, finding a job in Phillips County following the war proved to be troublesome. George said he took as many part-time jobs as he could find in the spring 1946 – including working in a lumberyard and a filling station – and in the winter months he went back to work for Great Northern, but this time a little closer to home.

"There used to be an engine that ran through Turner and I worked during the winter tending the engine," George said. "There used to be a roundhouse there in Saco at the time and I kept the steam up in the engine overnight and on weekends."

The temporary work and work for the GN kept up until 1949 when George changed jobs and started working in construction. He took a job at Morrison Knudsen Gravel Plant near Cole running a yuk (rock hauling truck) and a crusher. When the gravel pit closed, George then went on to Glasgow and continued to work construction and operating heavy equipment near the Air Force Base, a job that lasted almost 10 years.

"I loved working construction," George said, "but it got to the point where doing construction just kept me away from home too often. Both of those jobs offered me other positions, but in order to take them I would have had to move out of Phillips County and I didn't want to do that. I was born and raised here, had a family here, and this is where I have always wanted to be. "

George and Stella have three children. Ric, the oldest, works alongside George at R & G Quality Feeds. The second child, Susan (McQuillan), is now a retired schoolteacher in eastern Montana. The baby of the family, Bruce, is a physical therapist currently working in Havre.

So that he could stay in Phillips County, and with his family, George took a position at Saco Dehy Inc. in the summer of 1959 and found a home with the company, working there for the next 26 years.

"They were a brand new company at the time," George said. "There was a big demand for dehydrated alfalfa at the time. There was a Peavy plant in Glasgow, but that was the only place you could get pellets in Phillips County unless you had them shipped in."

George was the plant operator in Saco before becoming a manager two years later.

"They asked me if I could take over until they got somebody else," George recalls. "Well, they never got anybody else until I left."

A new opportunity surfaced in 1985. Up until that year, George had always worked for someone else. When the owners of Malta's Phillco Feeds (founded in 1960) came up for sale during the summer of 1985 and the Lambs took over ownership and changed the name to R & G Quality Feeds.

"Ric was working at the Dehy at that time too so he had knowledge of the feed business," George said. "He came down here to run this business and I joined him that year in October."

George said somewhere in the 90's, Ric became one of three R & G stockholders (joining George and Stella.)

For the last 30 years, George has worked from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., six days a week at R&G. He said he has no plans of not working at the business anytime soon.

"As long as my health keeps up, and my wife's health keeps up, I can't think of a better place to be than here," said George.

Three years ago, George and Stella moved from Saco to Malta so that George could be closer to R & G Feeds. The couple still owns a 240-acre farm in Saco that they lease out. George said that the feed business has been growing rapidly over the past handful of years as the company has started making specialty feeds for clients. R & G serves customers across eastern Montana (and sometimes as far away as Helena,) but George says it is the local farmers who have allowed him to have so much success over the years.

"The local people have been 100-percent helping us out for years," he said. "People in Phillips County mean the world to us."

Besides the three children that George and Stella have raised, the couple also has 10 grandchildren (eight boys and two girls) as well as "a whole scad" of great-children.

In his time as a resident of this county, he said he has seen many things change, most for the good, but remembers the days when he and his friends would get a team or horses (before he bought his first Model T) and a wagon to head out for a picnic.

"The Model T didn't always start, but the horses did," he remembers. "Everything is so much faster these days."

R & G Quality Feeds currently employs nine members and George said that he would be hard-pressed to find a more dedicated team of people to have by his side day in and day out.

"This is a great crew of people," he said. "They are dependable and hardworking. It is tough to find good help, so we are very fortunate. Sometimes this isn't the most pleasant place to work, especially in the winter, but the people we have working here go about their business without complaining."

When looking back on his 90 years, George said that being honest is one of the most important things he has learned in his life.

"If you are going to work with somebody, you want to know that you can trust them," he said. "It's just like being in service. If you have to go out with a group of guys on a march, you have to be able to know that you can trust them."

"When people come in, even if I don't wait on them, they greet me and say hello," George said. "That makes me feel good."

George said he isn't sure what makes a marriage last for 70 years besides choosing to marry "a real good woman."

"When I was overseas, she wrote me regularly and that meant a lot to me," George said. "She's just been wonderful as long as I have known her. I am a very lucky man."

 

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