Reprinted from the Altamont Enterprise – May 11^th, 2006

Altamont’s cowboy, at 78, produces a film about a disappearing life on the Florida range

By Melissa Hale-Spencer

ALTAMONT — Many Americans, when they think of Florida, think of beach vacations and trips to Disney World.

George Pratt knows a different Florida — its heartland, cattle country. Pratt has produced a bittersweet documentary, Cowboys of Florida, that captures the essence of a disappearing way of life.

“This is a culture that’s foreign even to the Floridians,” said Pratt. “They walked out of the theater in Boca Raton saying, ‘We never knew.’”

Director Victor Milt shot several hundred hours of film over the course of three years and edited that to its essence — 36 minutes.

The film features interviews with working cowboys, rodeo riders, and ranch owners interspersed with scenes of them at rest and in action.

Cowboys of Florida was selected from over 350 international submissions, as one of the 10 finalists in the documentary category for the Palm Beach International Film Festival, held April 20 through 28.

“I’m the oldest cowboy,” said Pratt, who is 78.

He is a man who once said crime didn’t happen in Altamont because he wouldn’t permit it.

Pratt retired as the village’s police chief in 1992 and has since spent a chunk of every year on Florida ranches, working as a cowboy.

Respecting history

Born in Schulyerville, N.Y., Pratt grew up with a sense of the importance of Saratoga County history.

“As kids, we used to chase through the rooms in General Philip Schuyler’s house,” he said. “Fortunately, we learned to respect local history in school.”

Pratt described two kids, maybe 12 and 13 years old, he recently watched at an Altamont eatery — one tuned into his iPod, the other engrossed in a hand-held video game.

“The son of a cowboy who rides with me is responsible for a thousand-pound animal; he maintains and cares for his horse. He does the same work I do,” said Pratt. “He’s the same age as those boys.

“If these two with their games are an example of our future,” he said, shaking his head in worry as his voice trailed off. “They’re divorced from reality,” he said.

Riding the range is real and so are the lessons learned there, Pratt said.

Part of the impetus for making the film was to educate Florida youth about their own heritage.

Pratt had talks with Howard Milton, the DeSoto County historian, a man in his eighties. He compared Milton to the late Arthur Gregg, Guilderland’s long-time and much respected historian. DeSoto County is not coastal; it is towards the gulf coast side of Florida, about midway down the peninsula.

It was Milton who put Pratt in touch with Victor Milt.

Milton said that it took two New Yorkers to tell this piece of Florida history, Pratt reported.

Milt and Pratt have donated the film to the DeSoto County School District.

“They are implementing a new program with their school. This will be part of an ongoing history lesson,” said Pratt.

Pratt is also donating a DVD to the Altamont Free Library so local residents can learn about life on the Florida range.

Pratt’s favorite comment from a viewer was the declaration that the film is “refreshing.”

“It’s refreshing,” Pratt said, “to watch something that’s not about sex or war or diversity problems.”

The film

“He’ll never get rich; he’s got all he needs; he knows how God’s world is run...” So go the lyrics to the song that frames Cowboys of Florida. “Workin’ real hard with his hands...He’s part of the sweet meadowland...”

The song was written and is sung by Mack Martin, a Florida realtor, who appears in the film, talking about the dramatic increase of land prices that are forcing out the ranchers.

The cowboys are shown “workin’ real hard” — spraying to kill blood-sucking flies on the backs of their cattle, herding the cattle on horseback with the help of dogs, castrating steers, training horses.

They are also shown riding on the range, drinking coffee around a campfire, and competing in a rodeo.

“I’ve got this scar right here,” says a rodeo bull-rider, taking off his Stetson, to reveal the long gash on the back of his head. “The bull stepped on my head,” he says matter-of-factly.”

“What state has the most cattle?” asks Katherine Harris, in another scene. She shot to national prominence in the midst of the Florida vote-counting controversy in the 2000 Presidential election, and now represents Florida in the United States Congress.

“It’s Florida!” she answers herself. “People always think it’s other locations.”

Harris goes on to gush, “My first crush as a little girl was on our foreman...I thought he was John Wayne.”

Pratt is among the cowboys portrayed in the film. He talks about how it’s stayed the same over the years — the rope hasn’t changed, the saddle hasn’t changed, the horse hasn’t changed.

He says you hear about ATV’s herding cattle and, sitting astride his horse, Pratt concludes, “That’s a crock — you ever see an ATV swim a river?”

Scenes with Dr. Barbara Carlton, whose family has owned a 150,000-acre ranch since the 1800’s, are interspersed throughout the film.

A gray-haired woman, she sits by her stone fireplace and says the Carlton legacy is “to hold onto the land.”

Carlton speaks fondly of her girlhood horse, named Charlie Horse.

“I lived and breathed to ride that horse,” she says. “He was my best friend. It was a sad day when I had to go to college and leave him...”

In a later scene, she says, “You’ve got to love the land in order to endure the hardships.”

In her final scene, she reveals the Carltons are on the verge of selling to developers. “We’ve reached our maximum potential,” she says.

The land that sold for 25 cents an acre during the Depression, in the year 2000 sold for $2,000 an acre, and currently is selling for 10 times that. A realtor in the film reports on land in Sarasota County that is selling for $500,000 an acre.

“It’s hard to let go...,” says Carlton.

“In the arena”

“I hate to see it end,” said Pratt of the cowboys’ way of life.

It doesn’t bode well for the future of America, he said, pointing to a favorite quote, part of a packet on Arcadia — the words were spoken in 1910 by Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Rider who became President:

“It is not the critic that counts: Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust, sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming....”

For Pratt, the cowboy’s life embodies a personal credo of overcoming hardship and participating in the arena of life.

Pratt’s early life was not an easy one. “My father was dead. My mother raised us,” he said of himself and his two siblings.

“I worked on a farm and, when I turned 14, I worked nights, from three to 11, at a wallpaper mill,” he said.

He joined the State Guard at age 15, Pratt said, and then, in 1944, he joined the Navy; he served in the Navy until 1953.

Pratt tells students who gather at Altamont’s Home Front Café to learn about World War II, “Our country can’t afford fools and cowards.”

Pratt looks back on his long life with satisfaction.

“Back when I was a kid, everybody wanted to be a cop, a private eye, a cowboy, or a fireman. I was lucky,” said Pratt. “I got to be them all.”

After he left the Navy, Pratt became an investigator for an insurance company, where he made good money. When his first wife died, he re-evaluated his life, he said. He was serving as an Altamont Village trustee at the time, he said, and the long-time police chief, Howard Diehl, was getting ready to retire.

“I had no dependents,” he said. “I went to Bill Aylward who was the mayor at the time and asked about the job.” Pratt was told he’d have to go to school again. He did.

“I accepted the job at a much-reduced income — $8,000 or $9,000.” he recalled. He also volunteered as a fireman.

Pratt worked as Altamont’s police chief until 1992, when he retired and traveled to Florida.

“I wound up in a trailer park in Arcadia,” he said. “I ran into a man who was a cowboy all his life.”

From then on, Pratt was hooked.

“My wife said I went from playing cops and robbers to playing cowboys and Indians,” Pratt said with a hearty laugh.

Back in the saddle

Pratt is in Florida four months of each year, from January to April.

“It’s a way of life that’s hard and dangerous,” he says.

Asked why he likes it, Pratt pauses a long time, and then answers, “A friend of mine said, if I got along with humans the way I get along with horses, I’d be a good person.”

One scene in Cowboys in Florida was filmed in January when the temperature was 25 degrees Fahrenheit.

“We were waiting for the sun to come up to load the truck,” said Pratt this week, recalling the scene.

One of the cowboys had a broken leg.

“You don’t work, you don’t eat,” the hobbled cowboy says on the film, explaining why he is on the job despite his injury.

Pratt, on camera, says, “It’s the only place I know of you can do 50 cents worth of work and get $8,000 worth of bullshit at the same time. That’s a good ratio.”

The cowboy, who is on crutches, manages to get on his horse.

“Did you notice nobody helped him?” asked Pratt this week. “That’s not bad.”

He described an experience of his own to illustrate the point. There’s a saying among Florida cowboys: “Don’t ride where the blue flowers grow,” said Pratt. That’s because the flowers grow where the ground is soft.

Pratt accidentally got into such a quagmire. “My horse went down,” he recalled. Pratt rolled to the side, out of sight of another cowboy who saw his horse down and his hat floating on the swamp water.

“He thought it was the end of me,” said Pratt. “I managed to get out of the weeds....They probably would have left the horse there. I beat him with his halter to make him hump.”

Once the horse was up, the foreman asked, “You all right?”

“I said, ‘Yeh,’” recalled Pratt. “He said, ‘Get your ass back up in your saddle. We’ve got to finish this job.’”

Pratt concluded that he likes such camaraderie.

As he talked, he held out his hand to show a splinted finger. “The last day I rode,” he said, “my horse pitched me off. That’s why I have a broken finger.” He also has a cracked rib and a pulled muscle in his back.

“You get back on your horse,” he said.