More than 30 years ago, and well into his 40s, with a wife and six young children at home to feed, Eugene P. Pallardy lost his livelihood when the Chicago stockyards shut down.
With 25 years of experience as a cattle buyer and no skills to immediately fall back on, the Kentucky native raised on Chicago’s South Side tried a new career as a clerk in the money rooms of Chicago-area horse tracks–jobs that over the years gave him employment and provided enough income to help send all of his children to college.
A resident of Willowbrook for 25 years, Mr. Pallardy, 79, died Monday at his home after a yearlong battle with cancer.
“He was devastated when the stockyards finally closed,” said his wife of 47 years, Marilyn. “It was so sad because he really enjoyed what he did, and he honestly never saw it coming.”
During the peak times of World War I, 15 million animals a year moved through Chicago’s stockyards–almost 9 million pounds of meat a day–with stock pens stretching as far as the eye could see.
But times changed when refrigerated trucks and the interstate highway system made the old railroad-based stockyards obsolete.
A graduate of St. Leo’s High School in Chicago and a World War II Coast Guard veteran, Mr. Pallardy first worked at the stockyards as an order taker for an East Coast company. Soon after, he and an associate went into business for themselves. Several years later, he was hired as a buyer for a Chicago company, Hoffman and Hutchinson.
Mr. Pallardy loved everything about the stockyards.
“He loved the smell, the early hours, the people, the cows and the chaos everywhere,” said his son Paul, who remembered trips to the stockyards as a teenager when he would watch his father weigh cattle and herd steers into freight cars at the end of the day.
“Just by eyeballing a cow, my dad could tell you its weight, whether it was corn-fed and even the quality of its meat,” his son said.
When the stockyards closed, it was through friends and contacts that Mr. Pallardy was able to find work at area racetracks.
“It wasn’t the stockyards, but it was steady work and a means to an end,” Paul Pallardy said. “It helped provide for his family and it afforded us all educations. In the end, it kept our family happy and fed, and that’s what mattered most to him.”
Other survivors include two more sons, Eugene and Richard; three daughters, Marilyn Murphy, Madelyn Heaton and Marie Gallagher; five brothers, Charles, John, Joseph, Lee and Robert; and 28 grandchildren.
Mass will be said at 10 a.m. Saturday at Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church, 701 Plainfield Rd., Darien.
