Rancher Is a Throwback to the Days of True Grit : Aliso Canyon: A. E. (Bud) Sloan’s 5,000 acres burned in recent wildfires. But the hardy 77-year-old, one of a dwindling breed, is a survivor.

A. E. (Bud) Sloan, 77, had spent his whole life fighting and swearing by the virtues of hard work, cowboy grit and his own Irish stock.

So big old Bud, a heavyweight once tough enough to be touted as one of boxing’s great white hopes, didn’t like it much last month when a bad back put him in the hospital just before the wildfires came swirling over the hill from Wheeler Canyon.

That left the firefighting to Bud’s wife, 85-year-old Elsie Mae; his veterinarian son, Bud Jr., and three fire engines from San Luis Obispo County.

Except for the house and the barns, the whole ranch burned anyway--all 5,000 acres of it. That gave Bud and Elsie the dubious distinction of having more property charred in Ventura County’s four wildfires than any other local landowner.

“I’m still laid up here like a dog,” Sloan said last week from his Aliso Canyon ranch, “so I’ll be around if you want to come on up and shoot the bull.”

Bud Sloan is one of a dwindling breed of longtime Ventura County ranchers who have stayed on their land even as development companies and investment groups have bought out their neighbors.

“There’s quite a few of them left,” said Rob Frost, president of the Ventura County Cattlemen’s Assn.

For example, there’s Bob King in Piru Canyon, Ed Boyle in Tapo Canyon, and Jack Willet, Gus Walker, and Toots and Gracian Jauregui in Wheeler Canyon, he said.

“But I’d say Bud Sloan is one of a kind,” said Frost, 51, who bought his first calf from Sloan 35 years ago. “Bud goes back to the days when they had iron men working on iron machines. And if I had a problem or needed advice, I could call him day or night. He’s just that kind of guy.”

When Santa Paula rancher Robert Pinkerton considers Sloan’s character, “it’s like going back to the days of the Old West, when a man’s word was his bond.”

“If he’s a friend, he’s the best friend you could have,” said friend Norman Frost, 76, of Camarillo. “But you never want to get him riled. He might just pick you up and shake you for a while.”

Bud Jr. said his father thinks of himself as a throwback to a better, more honest time.

“I think Pop always saw himself as the strong, good guy against the bad guys, the character John Wayne always played,” the son said.

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Bud Sloan’s place is up Aliso Canyon off Foothill Road, between Ventura and Santa Paula. And as you drive four miles north to the canyon’s end, decades peel away. The subdivided citrus groves and fine new houses are replaced by rugged hillsides and a twisting country road.

After twice crossing a creek on narrow steel bridges Sloan put in himself, there’s Bud and Elsie’s old mission-style stucco house.

It’s a simple, single-story place with a long porch where the Sloans sometimes sit, watching the hummingbirds sip sugar water from dangling red feeders, and noting the hills’ change of color from the brilliant greens of winter and spring to the browns of summer and fall.

Now the hills are mostly black since the 21,500-acre Steckel fire roared through Oct. 27. The smoke and fire blended to the color of swirling butterscotch, Bud Jr. said, before leaping past the structures and climbing the hills toward Sulphur Mountain Road.

As the fire approached, Elsie was on the phone with Bud in the hospital, letting him know if the house was threatened.

“I phoned him about every 15 minutes,” she said.

“When you got something you worked your whole damned life for, it makes you think,” Bud said. “But I feel this is Irish heaven back here. We get a little rain and, in three weeks, it’ll be Irish green again.”

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The Sloans may be land rich--they own about 25,000 acres on three ranches in Ventura and Mendocino counties--but it would be hard to tell. There are no frills at their Aliso Canyon ranch house.

Walls are covered with Western scenes, a stagecoach in charcoal, a wagon train in oil, a portrait of John Wayne--and, on the pantry door, a nearly life-size poster of the cowboy movie star in his 1940s prime.

“He was a true American, that big guy,” Bud Sloan said.

But if John Wayne was Hollywood’s image of the straight-talking cowboy, Bud Sloan is the real thing. He rode bulls in rodeos in his youth and wrestled steers from horseback well into old age.

He’s the tough guy with a big heart and a powerful dislike for liars.

To Bud, life should be simple. His wife’s nickname is Butch, his son’s is Buckshot and his 49-year-old daughter, Kathleen, is Jug, Porkchop or often “my little girl.”

He doesn’t smoke and hasn’t drunk alcohol since he tore up a coffee shop after a waitress slipped him some sloe gin when he was 17.

He dislikes meetings. Guys just hang around with a drink in their hands. “I don’t fit into that stuff.”

He doesn’t go to church.

“Just like I told the preacher who said I should come. I told him I was closer to the Old Man than he was. I told him that many a time I’d said a prayer on the top of one of the hills on a horse. You don’t have to go to church to pray.”

For a long time, Bud and Elsie’s one distraction away from ranch and family was Western dancing.

“I used to like to dance, but we can’t do that any more,” Bud said, relaxing the best he could in an old leather chair, a cushion against his aching back.

“That was our only vice,” Elsie added.

They met at an American Legion dance in Saugus on March 17, 1939, Bud recalled.

“It was St. Patrick’s Day,” she said.

“It was a lucky day for the Irish,” he said.

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Bud’s left wrist is perpetually rounded on top, evidence of the beatings he gave and the poundings the wrist took in the ring. The carpal bones have been broken so many times from the force of Bud’s punch that they have fused into one, Bud Jr. explained.

Bud, who was 6-foot-4 and weighed 210 pounds when he worked at Wirt Ross’ Culver City stable in the 1930s, says he fought about 20 times and won nearly all by knockout. He says he lost twice--once after being drugged before a fight and once to 310-pound Blimp Williams in Sloan’s last fight in 1941.

He was billed as Haystack Bud Sloan and renowned for his “ice tongs punch,” where he would open a fight by charging an opponent and slamming him almost simultaneously on both sides of the head with punches.

As late as 1940, he was on the cover of Knockout magazine, which pictured him standing over a crumpled opponent in its “knockout of the year.”

“This high-powered guy at Madison Square Garden said I was the greatest white hope in the world because I could take a hell of a punch and I could deliver one,” Bud recalled.

He beat one contender and an all-service military champion, but he never got a shot at the title. Champion Joe Louis’ handlers suggested a fight, Sloan said, but they wanted Bud to wear heavier gloves than the champ--an unacceptable condition.

“People said I was a good pug,” Bud said. “They liked me because I was a big old country kid.”

But by 1941, when he married Elsie Mae, Bud had saved only $6,500, and the young couple decided that it was time to get on with their lives.

“It wasn’t the danger,” Elsie said of boxing. “He wasn’t afraid of anything.”

For two years, Sloan worked double shifts as an oil field roughneck. Then he bought a bulldozer and sold his time for $25 an hour.

That got the couple onto a 2,000-acre ranch near Castaic, which they parlayed into a purchase of the 2,333-acre Bar S Ranch in Piru in 1947 and finally swapped for 18,500 acres along the Eel River in Mendocino County in 1956. “The guy owed $350,000 and we took it over and paid it off,” Sloan said. They bought their Aliso Canyon acreage in 1973.

Bud also ran an auction in Piru and drove long-haul trucks interstate for his brother.

Through it all, he raised cattle, up to 1,500 head up north and about 300 down here. He crossed the large, lean, white Chiana cattle from Italy with black Angus. That mix meant more lean beef and an extra $50 per calf, Bud said.

“We just kept buying property,” Elsie said. “We made our money work for us.”

“We kept horse tradin’, that’s it, and worked like hell to do it,” Bud said.

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Bud broke his back in 1988 when he parked his four-wheel-drive vehicle and it rolled down an incline, right over him. It’s never quite mended. By 1990, Bud Jr. had sold his veterinary practice in Santa Paula to become his father’s full-time partner.

The son--now 44--said he came back to ranching partly to get closer to the land.

“Especially in Ventura County, we’re kind of at the end of the line. We’re a lost breed,” Bud Jr. said. “To me, the ranch and the land are very important.”

Then there’s his dad.

“I see what Dad gave for 52 years. And maybe I can do the same and make it a little bit better,” Bud Jr. said. “The guy worked a lot and he was tough.”

Bud Jr. tells two stories about his father’s true grit.

As a 12-year-old, Bud Jr. first saw his dad--out of the ring for 20 years--throw a punch in anger.

Late at night, a large drunk in a pickup truck stormed up to the Sloans’ auction barn in Piru, causing a ruckus and bringing the Sloans out of their house.

The men exchanged words and Bud Sr. “hit him with a left jab. He ricocheted off the telephone booth and he was flat out.” The drunk woke up and cussed Sloan again.

“Dad hit him with another left hand and sent him flying. They dragged him away,” Bud Jr. said. “That kind of thing sticks in your mind when you’re a kid. He was so awesome.”