Connie Green has lived a unique and adventurous life that led the Neptune Beach resident to eventually owning and operating a cattle ranch in Colorado.
The Jacksonville native and her late husband Stanton Green were active people, and although many have dreams of retiring and taking it easy by focusing on a hobby or fishing every day, that was not in their nature.
“We did not retire; we just changed jobs,” Green said.
Connie met Stanton when they were in college, as he was at Tulane University and she attended H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, which was Tulane’s women’s college.
Stanton Green worked for years as chief of orthopedic surgery, primarily at St. Vincent’s in Jacksonville, before he retired.
“I think he had the ability to see down the line,” Green said. “He saw what was coming in, that the insurance companies would start to dictate how many patients you would see. If he wanted to spend 40 minutes with a patient, he would.”
However, orthopedic surgeon to rancher is not the first transition of jobs that one thinks of.
That was the same thought that first crossed Connie Green’s mind when her husband shared the idea with her.
“My first reaction was, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” Green said.
But as she thought more about it, orthopedic surgery and ranching did have more in common than she initially presumed, especially when it came to the commitment required to do both jobs.
“Ranching is 24/7,” Green said. “He (Stanton) was quite familiar with that 24/7 way of life as an orthopedic surgeon.”
She began making trips out west to look at ranches that were on the market and assess if the land was right for grazing cattle.
“As a cattle rancher, you pay by the sale of your calves, so the more you have, the more you can possibly make,” Green said.
After looking at ranches in several states, she found one about half an hour from Cedaredge, Colorado, that was a 25,000-acre grazing permit exclusive for their use along with a deed for 3,200 acres of private land.
The Greens did not go into their ranching venture without first doing their homework and researching what all it would take.
Part of the research included going to watch Tom Waldrop, who was one of Stanton Green’s patients, at his work as the head of the livestock market in Lake City.
“I would go and sit with him as they (cattle) were being sold, and he would point out what features to look at,” Green said. “It was an education, because I was essentially a city girl.”
They had 300-plus cattle and six horses, which came in handy and were used to help move the cattle.
“Every time a calf is born, even in the middle of the night, we were there tagging them,” Green said.
As with farming, the ebbs and flows of the weather were always in the back of their mind.
“You live and die by your water rights,” Green said. “If you don’t have grass (due to lack of water), you can’t feed your cows. If there was no snow for snow melt or rainwater, it became a problem.”
According to Green, the ranch’s livestock was fed 4,000 pounds of round-bale a day.
The Greens spent a decade on the ranch, including the last couple of years when Connie took over the primary role of running the ranch after Stanton had a heart attack and passed away.
Although Stanton’s death was unexpected, she knew that the two had put too much invested in the ranch to not see it through before finding the right time to move back home.
“I would have followed Stanton anywhere, and I did,” Green said. “It was a fabulous adventure.”
Green wrote a book about her ranching venture with Stanton, and when thinking of a title she harkened back to when she first heard of the idea.
The book is called “You’ve got to be kidding! From mending bones to mending fences; from social scene to saddleback.”
