Fred Allbee managed the Goodan Ranch in Sycamore Canyon for more than 50 years, and was still catching cattle rustlers into the 1970s.

Allbee, a strong civic booster, was Poway's first “honorary mayor.”

Ernest “Fred” Allbee was born in 1896 in Nebraska, according to a biography written by a family member found in the archives of the Poway Historical and Memorial Society.

He held a variety of jobs, most frequently as a nurse at hospitals in Colorado and California before accepting the ranch caretaker job in 1940.

When Fred and Lydia Allbee and their daughter, Bonnie, arrived in Poway that year, Rancho Ruidoso covered some 9,000 acres in Sycamore Canyon. Allbee's responsibilities ranged from tending to herds of horses and cattle to plowing fields of oats and constructing buildings, including at least one windmill.

Rancho Ruidoso was owned by May and Roger Goodan of Los Angeles. May Goodan was a member of the Chandler family, which owned the Los Angeles Times.

“With a hundred head of cattle and many horses, their ranch became a haven for friends and family on weekends and summer vacations,” wrote Carol Crafts and Kathy C. Young in a 2002 field guide to the ranch, now part of the Goodan Ranch/Sycamore Canyon Open Space Preserve.

Crafts is president of the Friends of Goodan Ranch, which helps run the preserve along with San Diego County, Poway and Santee, and the state Fish and Game Department.

Crafts said that all the ranch work mostly was done by Allbee, with help from Goodan family members. Lydia Allbee died in 1958. Bonnie had married and moved away some years before, and Fred continued living and working alone on the ranch.

The Poway area was still cattle country in 1974 when Fred spotted a pickup parked near the ranch fence. A slaughtered cow lay in the back of the truck.

“There was just the head and the hide,” Allbee told the Escondido Times-Advocate. “But I identified the brand and called the state brand inspector.”

He then contacted the Sheriff's Department.

The cow had been stolen from a ranch near Santa Ysabel. The rustler was arrested, and Allbee received a $250 reward from the San Diego County Cattlemen's Association.

By 1986, the Goodans had sold off much of the ranch's acreage.

“Now it's down to 320 acres, and I've got six head of cattle,” Allbee told the Poway News-Chieftain in June 1986 on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

The article included a photo of Allbee driving a tractor and stated that he was still growing oats and doing other ranch work.

The article also described a birthday party for Allbee that drew more than 150 people to the Kountry Kafe, where he was a regular customer.

Over the years, Allbee became active in Poway civic and social life.

“In 1949, he was heavily involved in reopening the Poway Community Church,” noted the News-Chieftain in 1986.

Allbee supported the Poway Chamber of Commerce and the Poway Historical and Memorial Society. In the 1970s, he was elected Poway's first “honorary mayor.”

The Goodans, who always had an excellent relationship with Allbee, sold the remaining ranch land in the late 1980s, but honored his wish to remain on the property by writing him into the escrow, so he literally “went with the property,” as he was fond of saying.

His right to remain on the property was respected by the ranch's last corporate owner and by the joint government entities that took control of the ranch as a preserve a few years later.

David Martinez, district parks manager for the San Diego County Department of Parks and Recreation, was the first county employee to live on the ranch after the takeover.

Martinez confirmed that the county signed up Allbee as “a lifelong volunteer.”

Health problems related to his advanced age required Allbee to leave the ranch in 1991, and he went to live with his daughter at her home in Santa Maria. It was there that he died in 1998; he was 101.

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