by Ted Genoways
So on June 20 in Clarks, there was no protest, no clash, but the Patriot Riders and everyone in town had made sure that Brent would have what the local newspaper called “a red, white, and blue sendoff.” Hundreds of people, all of them with American flags, lined the brick streets. “Stooped World War II vets struggled to hold large flags aloft,” the newspaper reported. “Little Leaguers in uniform waved mini-flags and held hands over hearts; cheerleaders wore red, white and blue skirts. And many residents had run their front-yard flags only halfway up their poles, as they had every morning since the bad news traveled from faraway Al Bu Hardan, Iraq, to this town of about 375 people.” The Patriot Riders circled through town and, with American flags mounted to their rear seats, led the procession to St. Peter’s.
“It was crazy,” Meghan said. “The whole town packed in there. It was wall-to-wall.” She sat near the front, close to Brent’s flag-draped coffin. Marine guards stood at each corner of the sanctuary. All told, more than 500 people, the entire population of Clarks plus more from far away, packed into the sanctuary, balcony, basement and then out onto the front lawn of the church. They listened as Father Ken Vavrina told them the young Marine had lived a life that honored the flag and died trying to protect it. “There are some people, and thank God, who say, ‘What can I do to make life better for others?’ ” the priest said. “Lance Corporal Brent Zoucha was one of those young men.” Following the services, about a dozen of Brent’s fellow Marines carried the casket and led the procession out of the church.
The bells rang, and everyone poured out. The procession, led by veterans and Patriot Guard members, crept down West Amity, between the rows of flapping flags posted along the way. The line of motorcycles, trucks, and cars, flags mounted to the antennas and top racks and handlebars, inched down the crowded streets, past the fire station where the department had brought out the trucks and raised the ladders. Police blocked off Highway 30, allowing the procession to zigzag across the track, onto the blacktop, and then down the gravel road toward the country cemetery.
The wind whipped across the treeless green, the ropes of the flags snapping and making the poles ring. They said the Lord’s Prayer. The Marines fired off a 21-gun salute. A lone bugle corps musician played “Taps.” Two Marines folded the flag from Brent’s coffin and gave it to Rita. Then Brent’s coffin was lowered into the plot next to his father and everyone returned to their cars. The flags up and down the streets in town were lowered, folded, and put away. The COME HOME SAFE sign in Rita’s yard was taken down and carried to the garage, replaced by a permanent memorial with Brent’s official military portrait. When the semester started in Omaha, Meghan wasn’t there. She decided to take the trip to Ireland that she had postponed, and waited until January 2007 to start classes. When she did finally go off to Omaha, away from home and on her own at last, she didn’t find the sense of independence she had been looking forward to just months before. She felt lost and alone.
After her first semester, though, Meghan was determined not to go back to the farm for the summer. She took a job as a porter at an auto dealership in Omaha. “Just something to do,” she said. “A way to keep busy.” The shop manager thought she was great and kept offering to set her up with one of his former mechanics. Meghan kept putting him off, not sure she was ready and not wanting to explain. In August, just as classes were starting up again, Meghan confided to Rick that, more than a year after Brent’s death, she had consented to a blind date with the mechanic. She wasn’t sure yet what to think about dating him or anyone else, but all the girls in the office raved about how nice he was, and the guys in the shop praised his skill under the hood. Everyone agreed that he was a really hard worker.
Rick had been looking for help with that year’s harvest, so Meghan put him in touch with Kyle.
IN THE spring of 1895, when Harry Harrington took over farming Thomas Barber’s land, the family operation was already in serious trouble. Those 520 acres were considered some of the best ground in Nebraska, but severe droughts in 1893 and again in 1894, not only presented a hardship for the Harringtons but for the entire state and then the nation and eventually the world. Global failures of the wheat and corn harvests had posed a serious threat to the world’s food supply, touching off famine in Europe, Russia, and China. Matters worsened when nervous stockholders and commodities speculators started to pull their money from the free-falling crop market and put their cash into reliable gold. So many investors followed this course of action, however, that it caused a run on gold—and set off additional waves of panic. The silver market collapsed, putting Colorado miners out of work and creating a tent encampment along the South Platte River outside Denver that was nearly half the size of the city itself. Attempts to slash wages in large industrial cities led to violent strikes and crackdowns among the Homestead steelworkers in Pennsylvania and the Pullman workers in Chicago.
Though remembered now as the Bank Panic of 1893, the crisis of the 1890s was actually a global economic depression that lasted almost to the end of the decade and was the worst downturn in American history until the deepest trough of the Great Depression. In Nebraska, it may actually have been worse than the Dust Bowl years. Charles H. Morrill, a well-known Nebraska farmer and banker who lived through those times, later recalled that farmers were forced to market their entire grain crops and even sell their hay. Without anything to feed their livestock, farmers starved their animals or simply butchered them for food. “The entire state,” Morrill wrote in his memoir, “was almost in the grip of actual famine.” And when the harvest failed again in 1895, the effect was devastating. In small towns across the state, the shortage of gold, which was used to back paper currency bank by bank, led ordinary citizens to withdraw their savings all at once. “Values were greatly reduced, merchants and banks failed,” Morrill wrote. “Farmers could not pay interest on their mortgages; land could not be sold at any price; foreclosure of mortgages was the general order.”
The situation was so dire that the denunciation of the gold standard by William Jennings Bryan at the Democratic convention in Chicago in July 1896, in what came to be known as the “Cross of Gold” speech, vaulted the former Nebraska congressman to national prominence and the top of both the Democratic and the Populist tickets for president that fall. Desperate farmers hoped that a western candidate would unseat entrenched, gold-hoarding powers; instead, Bryan lost to William McKinley, a “straddle bug” on the currency issue who was perceived to be in the pocket of moneyed East Coast elites and indifferent to farmers even as the harvest of 1896 marked yet another failure.
By then, the drought had grown so severe—even in water-rich parts of Nebraska, like York, Hamilton, and Polk counties—that trees a foot in diameter, planted as windbreaks after the locust plagues twenty years earlier, died all at once, and land prices fell to $15 per acre, even for properties with houses and barns. “Many farmers who were out of debt at the beginning of the dry years, and who had declared that ‘no mortgage would ever be put on their land’ were forced to mortgage to obtain food for their families,” Morrill wrote. “Nearly every family discussed daily the question of the impossibility of remaining in Nebraska and debated where it would be wise to go.”
Harry Harrington hung on through those years—but just barely. By 1902, the worst of the financial crisis was over, but the walls seem to have been crashing in on him. Harry and Lela now had four children: three daughters and a son, named Wayne. To hold onto Centennial Hill Farm, Harry sold the 260 acres he had inherited from his own father across the tracks from Benedict, located directly on the Kansas City & Omaha Railroad with a grain elevator right at the field’s edge. Some of the most desirable land in all the West, Harry sold the property for just $55 per acre. All these hard times and losses seem to have taken their toll. In those years, Harry is recorded to have admitted to an investigating police officer that he had purchased bootleg liquor from teenage brothers in Benedict and, in a separate incident, was brought before a police judge in Columbus for p
ublic intoxication and resisting arrest. Even as harvests slowly recovered and yields climbed, commodities prices dipped. It seemed that, whether it was a bumper crop or a bust year, the speculators profited and farmers like Harry suffered.
At the turn of the century, fed-up farmers who had long been loyal Republicans out of lingering gratitude to Abraham Lincoln for their land grants, now began flocking to the Populist Party and forming collectives such as the National Farmers Union. Under the banner of “Raise Less Corn, More Hell,” they sought to create their own market power by controlling production during peak periods and sharing knowledge and labor to boost yields during hard times. Among those leading the Populist movement just twenty miles down the road from Harry Harrington was my own great-grandfather, L. C. Genoways. He started a successful corn bank, from which he sold his prize-winning seeds to neighbors to improve their output, and he won election on the Democratic ticket as the assessor of Hamilton County, vowing to fight on behalf of farmers at the capitol and governor’s mansion in Lincoln.
In 1912, the State of Nebraska sought to boost sagging revenues by changing the way it taxed farmers, levying according to farm values as determined by the overall productivity of land in each county, rather than a flat fee according to acreage. L.C. gathered a delegation from central Nebraska and demanded an audience with the governor to protest. He spread out a map of the county on the governor’s desk and showed him the thousands of acres along the Platte River, including the 160 acres where his own family lived, which he said were good for nothing but grazing livestock. He complained that, if the governor’s planned tax increase were enacted, those acres would be valued and taxed at $78 per acre and similar land in York County would be taxed at $80 per acre—more than it could be sold for. But the state treasurer was unmoved. He asked L.C. at what rate the land in the area was returning across the board. “I do not know,” L.C. replied at first to the huffing disapproval of the governor’s staff. Finally, L.C. acknowledged that the central part of Nebraska, when taken as a whole, was returning 85 percent of its stated value. “You have the best farm land in the state,” the governor replied angrily, “and you ought to be willing to admit it.”
There are no surviving documents to explain why Thomas Barber finally sold his land in 1915 and moved away to California, leaving his daughter and her now six children without a land base, forcing the family to move to a rented farm near the town of Lushton. Maybe it was an inability to pay the stiff new taxes, or maybe it was conflict between Thomas and his son-in-law, or maybe it was just realizing how greatly farming had changed. Forty years earlier, Thomas had arrived with a horse-drawn mower and a threshing machine. Now, tractors were starting to replace horses, and hand labor was being replaced by gang plows, tandem disks, harrows, combines, and trucks. The new tractors made it possible for farmers to work large tracts of land, even if those plots were scattered across wider geographical areas, but they also required major capital investments, as much as $350, and were unreliable and expensive to fix.
Within a decade of buying the Barber farm, the new owner, Sherman R. Severn, had set a new record for speed of harvest in the state of Nebraska. Working only with his son, Severn was able to harvest 160 acres of wheat and oats in just eight days. With yields in York County rebounding from the drought years and nearly doubling the state average, the Severns had brought in 800 bushels of grain, delivering them by truck to the elevator. In Thomas Barber’s day, it would have taken a team of men working sixteen-hour days nearly three weeks to match that feat. But buying new combines and tractors was still a risky business. In 1916, Wilmot Crozier, a farmer from Osceola in Polk County, bought a three-horsepower Ford 8-16 tractor, believing it had been manufactured by Henry Ford. Only after he discovered that the tractor didn’t have nearly the power it advertised and would only pull a single plow did he discover that the Ford Motor Company manufactured Fordson tractors, not Ford tractors.
Given these rapid changes, it seems telling that Wayne Harrington, upon turning eighteen, left the farm in Lushton, taking apprentice jobs in mechanic shops in David City and Polk before eventually heading to western Nebraska, where he learned to repair tractors. In 1919, the year he returned to York County, Wilmot Crozier partnered with State Senator Charles Warner in drafting the Nebraska Tractor Test Law. From that point forward, any manufacturer wishing to sell in the state would have to supply one of its tractors to the University of Nebraska for performance testing. The law did wonders for farmers’ willingness to invest in tractors. Sales soared, and Wayne opened a tractor repair garage in Lushton, where he worked on the new diesel-powered farm equipment. When his grandfather Thomas fell ill and eventually died in Long Beach in 1921, Wayne traveled to California and brought his body back to York County for a funeral at the Presbyterian Church. More than forty-five years after first arriving and buying land in Nebraska, Thomas Barber, in death, now owned no more ground in York County than a burial plot.
In 1928, Wayne married Eunice Kniss, a native of nearby Sutton, who had attended the University of Nebraska for a year, earning her teaching degree, before traveling to various one-room schoolhouses, finally arriving in Lushton. Wayne’s repair garage, by then, had grown into an implement and hardware dealership, a grocery store, a livery stable, and a Ford car agency. In 1933, Eunice gave birth to the couple’s only child, a son named Thomas. When Tom was seven, the family moved to Fairmont, at the intersection of Highways 81 and 6, nicknamed “The Crossroads of the World,” to have better access to major roadways. Along the highway, Wayne expanded his operations to include a lumberyard, a grain elevator, a motel, a café, another auto dealership and auto repair shop, and a successful trucking company bringing salt from the underground mines of Kansas to cattle ranchers in Nebraska.
For once, the family seemed to be thriving through hard times. While the rest of the country was gripped by the Great Depression and World War II, Wayne’s business continued to grow and prosper. If Wayne was a severe father and strict disciplinarian, Tom nevertheless grew up in a boy’s wonderland, drinking malts at the soda counter, hearing stories of the world from long-haul truckers, and learning all about heavy equipment from hard-drinking and chain-smoking mechanics. Among the farm kids of the Lushton school district, he was seen as rich. When his classmates voted to take a field trip to Lincoln in spring 1946, Wayne’s trucking company provided all of the buses, ferrying the children from the state capitol building to a tour of the city to the 4-H building of the State Fairgrounds for a matinee performance of the Shrine Circus, all buses emblazoned with custom paint jobs reading WAYNE W. HARRINGTON, TRUCKING.
On May 21, 1949, Wayne’s father Harry died in Fairmont, but that same year, Wayne had the opportunity to buy back the Centennial Hill Farm. To make it work, Wayne would have to sell all of his existing businesses. Eunice later remembered that he decided to do so “mostly out of sentiment for the old place,” but Jenni told me that she thought that Wayne felt pressured by his mother to reclaim what her father had lost decades before. Whatever the reason, Wayne entered into farming with a business-like attitude—acquiring not only the original farmstead but as much adjacent land as possible, picking up low-lying properties that had been used as basin land. From his work as an implement dealer, Wayne knew that companies like John Deere and International Harvester, which had grown by leaps and bounds on government contracts during the war, were now turning their attention to developing heavy equipment for farmwork. In particular, they had already developed pump systems capable of siphoning water from rain catchment ditches at the edges of farm fields, in order to use it for sprinkler irrigation.
Rather than have Tom help him on the farm, Wayne sent his son away to Shattuck Military Academy in Minnesota. “He was really hard on my dad,” Jenni told me. “You just feel like there wasn’t much of a connection between dad and son.” She said that once, many years later, she asked her father if he thought that Wayne had loved him. He thought about it carefully, she said, and finally answered that he thought tha
t his father had loved having a son who was such an accomplished athlete. But even that wasn’t simple; his father had encouraged him to go out for football, but Tom was tall and lanky and excelled at tennis and golf. He had dreams of skiing, which was not at all what his father had in mind. “You can’t say that he loved you?” Jenni pressed, but she said her father refused to answer.
With Tom now out of the house, Wayne went to Germany to a displaced persons camp and brought back a Latvian refugee named Arnold Jaunzemis and his family to run the farm. Wayne also caught wind of researchers from the University of Nebraska’s Department of Agricultural Engineering, led by Professor John F. Schrunk, who were digging test wells across the state in search of groundwater that was close enough to the surface that it could be pumped into catchments and used for irrigation. They discovered that the water table in eastern Nebraska was not only shallow but also that the Ogallala Aquifer in that area rapidly recharged with rains from the northern Sandhills and snowmelt from as far away as the Rockies.