Joe Berger By Justin Felisko
Chad Berger walked into the Kist Livestock Auction Stockyard in Mandan, North Dakota, shortly before 9 a.m. on Monday and glanced toward the ceiling. The reigning PBR Stock Contractor of the Year then let a small smile crack his saddened face. Berger began to reminisce about all the times he and his brother Fred would crawl and run throughout the Stockyard’s catwalks as their father Joe was in the process of buying cattle in the late 1960s. There is still an adrenaline rush and sense of excitement for Chad when he thinks about the joy that would overcome him when his dad and grandfather, Tim, would give him and his brother a show stick and let the two boys parade around the back pens as if they were the bosses of the Berger cattle operation.
proud of him for still waking up before the sun on Monday morning, putting on his cowboy boots and heading to work. “If the sale started at six in the morning, you better be there,” Chad recalled his father always telling him before letting out a laugh. “He said, ‘You are there for the first one, and you dang sure better be there for the last one.’” The Stockyard is family for Berger. Fred Kist Sr., who leased the Morton County Fairgrounds in 1942 to begin a tiny livestock auction, became good friends with Tim Berger, Chad’s grandfather. Their two sons, Joe Berger and Freddy Kist Jr., became best friends, and Joe would name his son Fred after him.
The Kist Livestock Auction always floods Berger’s mind with priceless memories.
Chad Berger and Jerry Kist, Freddy’s son, are the same age and grew up as best friends in Mandan.
“It is good, but it is pretty hard to be here today as well,” Chad said on Monday morning. “My grandpa worked here as a foreman until he died. My dad as a little kid started working here, and by seventh grade he was pretty much full-time. My dad grew up in this sale barn, and then so did me and my brother. This sale barn has so many memories for me and my dad.”
“This sale barn has more meaning than any sale barn I go to,” Chad said.
Joe Berger sadly passed away on Dec. 25. He was 84 years old. Joe is of the most successful cattlemen and stock contractors to ever come out of North Dakota. The Mandan, North Dakota, native became especially known to PBR fans for raising Little Yellow Jacket, the PBR’s first three-time World Champion Bull in the 2000s. The legendary cowboy’s path to success, though, began on the floors of the Stockyard, where his son was set to buy some cattle on Monday. As a kid, Joe Berger was fighting to help his family earn a living in the immediate years following the Great Depression, long before he was greeting PBR bull riders with a firm handshake, mentoring a range of successful cowboys and bull riders of various generations and raising some of the best bucking bulls in the world. “My dad made his dreams come true,” Chad said. “They didn’t fall into his lap. He had a passion for what he wanted to do, and that is what he did. He was born in the 1930s, went through the Great Depression, and he and my mom grew up in one of the toughest times you could possibly grow up in. My dad came from nothing, and that is how he instilled work ethic in all of us. He just worked so hard. “In the sale barn here, he would ride horses in for people for a buck a head. He would clean them up. Trim them up. He would get the halters off horses and sell them for 50 cents. He was aggressive. He didn’t want to be poor his whole life. He tasted that. He didn’t want any more of that.” No one would have blamed Chad for taking a few days off following his father’s passing last Friday, but he also knew his dad would be
It is also a daily reminder to Chad of how his father was a manmade, rags-to-riches story. What Joe Berger may have missed out on achieving with a high school diploma, he instead replaced with hard work, cowboy grit and an endless determination to provide for his family in the face of adversity. Joe refused to let having only an eighth-grade diploma hold him back. “He was a hell of a guy,” Chad said. “He made a living educating himself. He never went to school. My dad learned how to add and subtract, and he bought millions of cattle in his lifetime.” Chad was 11 years old when he saw his father’s hard work in 1973. Joe had just purchased his first-ever ranch and could not contain his emotions. Father and son sat on a hill on the family’s new property, and Joe began to cry. “My dad was a pretty tough guy. I am the sobber when it comes to us,” Chad said. “I cry at everything. But I will never forget that day when I asked him what was wrong. “My dad responded, ‘I would give everything to be able to take my dad out here and show him this ranch.’” Tim Berger, who had helped instill in Joe the same characteristics that he would pass on to his children, had passed away six years earlier. Chad wouldn’t see his dad cry in front of him again for another 28 years until Little Yellow Jacket was named the Bull of the Finals at the 2001 PBR World Finals. “I was sitting next to him in the grandstands at the Thomas and Mack, and they announced Little Yellow Jacket was Bull of the
Humps-Horns.com · 16 · February 2021
