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“I had a couple different jobs. I worked in the gold mine in Lead and worked for a rancher picking up hay and sheep in Wyoming bringing them to the Belle Fouche sale barn.” His job at Homestake Mine took him 7,200 feet underground a time or two. “I was just a grunt, but I’m so glad I did it. I'd run the drill when somebody's partner was sick; or I'd have to go in and clean tracks to help make sure that the trains wouldn't get derailed.” He didn’t spend much time at Homestake, but did enjoy his time as a ranch hand in western South Dakota.
Bruce and Teri’s grandchildren, Rylund and Tinsley, children of their son, Bob, and his wife, Sharlene.
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THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF LIFE AND LAND PRICES
When he and his wife, Teri, decided to get married, he returned to Battle Creek and worked in the family real estate business. In the late 1970s, when land was selling high, his father and grandfather found their real estate company was losing a lot of business to auctions. Bruce helped the company fill the gap by training at the Worldwide College of Auctioneering in Mason City. Beyond conducting land auctions, he started doing livestock sales at the Sioux City Stockyards and expanded to other livestock barns in places such as Bassett, Neb., and Fort Pierre, S.D.
But those high land values of the late 1970s quickly plummeted in the 1980s. According to Bruce, “The auctions in the 1980s were tough. There was a lot of them. One year, we probably did 60 or 70 machinery and land auctions, people going out of business. It was just no fun.” He and Teri felt the same pain as some of their auction customers. Brocks started buying land when many people were selling – but land values just kept on dropping. “We went from having everything paid for to everything but the kids mortgaged. Our bank went broke and our loan rolled over to another bank who called in the loan.”
While they lost a farm in the ‘80s, the decade proved to be the
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