In college, Tom didn’t just ride to prove he was tough, or stupid...sometimes, cowboys’ mothers and wives can’t tell the difference... Tom rode well. He intended to win; because winning could take you to Madison Square Garden, and the Houston Fat Stock Show and Rodeo and to the bank. It was one way to buy your own ranch some day. After a 100 rodeos... that’s a lot of rodeoing folks... Tom decided that it was a good time to get out, since all his parts were still working.

Tom out of the chute on Crooked Tail Spot, rodeo 1968

And besides that, Kathy, his childhood sweetheart, decided to visit our folks. Now, most of the time, if a blonde fashion model is willing to marry a cowboy and all she asks is that he not get himself crippled up so that he couldn’t support her and the kids, he’ll go along with it. Today, their youngest son, John, is a senior football player and Kathy, like John's wife Linda is teaching. And in line with our family's love for music, is appropriately teaching music to a new generation. 

Kathy, James, Mike, Barbara	Tom majored in animal husbandry	John Taylor

Besides that, Rodeos happen on weekends, and you can’t go to church and rodeo too.

But Tom didn’t hang up his spurs. He kept raising cows and farming. And by 1982, all of it got him a job managing a 25,000 acre Texas ranch with as picturesque a place to live as any movie ever produced. He systematically went about improving the roads, drilled wells, bulldozed new tanks, built really good fence and managed the ranch pastures so well that he ruined it for arrowhead hunters. Never before had the ground been so well covered.

Tom, heading the Spring round up on the S&K 1981, Blanco Canyon, Texas

This couldn’t have been more fortuitous for his older brother who by then was seriously studying fossils. The ranch Tom and Kathy managed was a fossils collectors dream come true. There was everything from the bones of modern cows and horses to buffalo to dinosaurs, giant crocodiles and fossil wood and sea creatures.

One of the finds was a huge crocodile, a Phytosaur	Tom showed me this site

Tom and ‘Little John Taylor” discovered this fossil forest