Mr Lafferty said this effectively set up brothers Frank and Tom Jolly as the company directors. The street facing the yards still bares the Jolly name, and the suburb itself was named for Frank.
By 1974, Frankton was the second largest saleyards in New Zealand after Addington in Christchurch.
It was in 1977 that Mike O'Toole began his life-long involvement with the place.
"I was going to primary school at Saint Columba's when I was 10. I used to ride a pony and helped drive the cows."
Mike quickly found a way of making extra pocket money.
"There was this fella George Duck and he used to get me to ride the ponies in the sales. People used to say 'can we borrow Michael' because I looked so small you see. I used to get half a crown per ride. I would come away with pockets clinking."
When he wasn't making money on the ponies, Mike would sit on the back of a horse-drawn gig and collect discarded bottles as it herded cattle into town which he would trade in for cash. The most memorable auction for Mike was one interrupted by a tornado.
"We were inside selling dairy and someone came inside and said 'there's a hell of a storm out there'. I was 10 or 11 at the time and I didn't know what the hell was happening."
The tornado narrowly missed the saleyards but tore through some of the older wooden paddocks.
Cattle was mainly driven on foot, and Mike can remember taking them on main roads all the way to the freezing works in Horotiu.
"You could have 50 in the mob, the cars were never worried."
He remembers taking large flocks of sheep across the Fairfield Bridge to be housed in paddocks that once stood on the sand ridge.
"They would walk all the way up from Gisborne. There would be 1000 breeding ewes."
Mike left school and became a stock clerk, manually and meticulously recording every bull and prize heifer that came through. It was during this time that he found a cunning way to ensure him and his crew clocked off on time.
After a day of trading, gangs of men would find themselves waiting for railway shunters to bring their carriages on to the line.
"We would be sitting there till 10 o'clock at night. We got cunning to that. I don't know how long we got away with it, but we used to put one boy on his push bike and he would go up to the hotel to get two bottles of beer for half a crown a bottle.
"We would find the shunter and say 'we've got two trucks to load', and we would be at the front of the queue."
From stock clerk Mike progressed to auctioneer, a position he held for 40 years. In that time a number of cows escaped for a walk about town, but two stick out particularly vividly in Mike's mind.
"One ran out into Victoria St. It went into an arcade between a barber shop and a milk bar. We rode up and brought some cattle with us but it ducked into the arcade.
"There was a man in there with a mop and bucket and the bull charged him. He ducked behind the pillar and because it was so slippery the thing fell over - then it charged him again!"
The man escaped unscathed, but very frightened.
Another beast escaped and fled into a railway tunnel near Rukuhia.
Mike said the men did all they could to coax it out, but in the end it was a steam train that convinced the animal to leave.
"Mr Vercoe, the manager at the time, asked where the bull was and we said it was in pen 25. He looked at it and said that's not the bull and we said 'yes it is, it's the only bull in the saleyards that's been steam cleaned because the train has let the steam out to slow down'."
Mike finally finished selling seven years ago at the age of 70.
Lynn Collins began working at the saleyards in the late 50s as an auctioneer and only stopped selling 12 months ago. He had his own stories to tell about escaped cows.
"One chap backed up his truck poorly and the cow jumped out of his truck. It went right out to Hillcrest roundabout and then turned around. We ended up shooting it near the archery range out by the hospital."
Lynn said the yards had changes a lot.
"It basically used to be one cattle row with covering. The biggest change is the scales. An auctioneer used to have to judge a beast's weight by eye."
It was not just the scales that have gone digital. Lynn remembers a time when invoices were hand-written.
She said another big change was the railways. Where once they were the main means of transporting cattle to and from the yard, the function has now been overtaken by trucks.
When Lynn first started there were five large stock farms supplying the yard, but years of mergers and takeovers have left only two.
Some of the characters that stick out best in Lynn's memory were the butchers.
"In the early 50s and 60s there were about 50 butchers in Hamilton - 10 just on Victoria St. A lot of them were quite notorious fellas. Top butchers would outbid each other for bragging rights."
But the butchers paled next to some of the yard hands.
"We had to straighten them out a few times.
"They would just arrive without much stock knowledge and be gone the next week."
For Lynn the saleyard was a way of life, and he said he was always on the go.
"In a fortnight I would sell 9 out of 10 days.
"It's still a lucrative business but no where near as big as it used to be."
Lynn remembers the likes of Jack Jeffries, who would consider it nothing to have 2000 to 3000 cattle on the way up from Gisborne.
He said in its heyday, farmers would have come from as far as 80km away to attend the auctions, with some even arriving from the Bay of Plenty.
There were tragedies in the saleyards' history as well.
"We had one chap who got killed by a bull. There were one or two nasty accidents but you get that with livestock."
The yards have been particularly important in the development of Frankton.
"It used to be a case of the farmers and their wives would come in ... the husband would come here and the wife would go shopping."
So important was the trade for the city that the local papers would have designated stock reporters who would often appear to photograph a prize bull.
The yards have not just been reserved for cows and sheep either.
"They built a deer house when they reached their peak in the 80s. They've sold emus, angora goats, even ostriches.
"Everybody thought they were going to be the biggest thing but they never caught on," Lynn said.