Allen is SnoCo Dairy Shrine honoree

Anyone who was in Stanwood FFA or belonged to a local 4-H club in the decades between 1963 and 2006, knows the name of Glen Allen. For 43 years he was manager of the Marysville Livestock Auction Barn.

Not only popular with students in agriculture, Glen can count farmers of several generations as friends. Becoming acquainted with them when he visited their farms, Glen conducted farm sales too numerous to count.

In addition, the Marysville hosted many benefit auctions. Events of 4-H and FFA activities were hosted by the auction yard but most notable was the annual Puget Sound Jr. Livestock Show and sale at its Midway location along Old Highway 99. Sadly, the auction barn closed in September of 2006.

Now 86, Glen has been inducted into the Snohomish County Dairy Shrine, announced during the Snohomish County Dairy Princess/ Ambassador banquet April 17. He was presented a silver pitcher from Pat Manning on behalf of the Shrine Committee, and gave a short acceptance talk in which he expressed appreciation for having known and served so many farmers and young people for so many years.

Glen was born loving working with cattle and farming. Growing up in the Snohomish/Fobes Hill area during the Depression, he and his father had a bull service while Glen was in high school. Everyone living in the country then had a few animals and gardens large enough to feed big families. Glen did whatever farm work there was to be done: milking cows, haying in the summer, etc.

Two years after the barn auction opened in 1961, a manager position opened. Glen got the job that was to be his for the next 43 years. Not only his, but his wife Helen’s too, whom he married in 1947.

Although the auction barn closed on Glen’s 83rd birthday, he and his family still enjoy seeing people they have grown to know over the years. They keep busy with a small herd of Angus cattle and working in their garden.

Glen could not have envisioned making friends over an eight-county-wide area when he was a youngster growing up on a few acres and tending milk cows, pigs and chickens during the Depression. Nor can he even now measure the benefits of assisting the hundreds of 4-H Club and FFA members that passed through the auction barn under his guiding hand.

But if friendships and memories were prize ribbons, Glen Allen would need a huge wall upon which to hang them.