Page 58 - San Angelo

Conn grew up in the tiny panhandle town of Pampa, so she’s no stranger to the Western way of life. She had wandered eastward over the years, doing her undergrad studies at Texas A&M, and then later received a PhD in Biology at Louisiana State University. Conn settled with her husband, Dick, in Beaumont until Hurricanes Rita, Humberto, and Ike managed to do enough barn leveling, llama killing, and tree uprooting to make a return to the West an easy choice to make.

Now housed at the top of a windy rise near Christoval, Conn’s daily schedule revolves around milking, cheese-making and her grandson, Michael. “Your life kind of revolves around the goats. They just have to be milked. Leaving them is like going off and leaving your children,” she said after an exhausting evening milking. That devotion and resultant lifestyle was the inspiration for the name of her cheese making outft, El Camino de las Cabras, a Spanish translation of “The goat’s way,” also interpreted as “The goat way of life.”

Conn has registered and non-registered Nubians, LaManchas, Saanens, Boers, Alpines, Mohairs, and cross breeds. They all have names too, all sixty-something of them. At this very moment, Bluebonnet, Denali, San