by Ted Genoways
To sell area farmers on the idea of digging wells and installing pumps, Schrunk organized an “irrigation tour” of the most successful wells around York, culminating with a visit to the Centennial Hill Farm, where Wayne was then raising 250 acres of irrigated corn. “He uses two wells,” the Nebraska State Journal reported, “one pumped with a caterpillar diesel and one with propane. The one pumped by diesel puts out 2,000 gallons per minute.” After the well demonstration, the farmers gathered for “a ton and a half of watermelon and several hundred bottles of pop,” all enjoyed in the shade of Wayne’s new 15,000-bushel corn crib and 6,000-bushel small grain crib. He also showed off his newly constructed air-conditioned hog barn and a brand-new corn picker he had purchased for the upcoming harvest.
“Wayne was an innovator,” Rick told me one day as we drove from one property to another. “But, you know, it wasn’t too long before it cost him.”
KYLE HOPPED out of the Kawasaki Mule and hunched against the blowing snow. It was almost dark, and the clouds seemed to be gathering force, sending waves of heavy flakes swirling through the four-wheeler’s headlights. After a mostly dry early winter, central Nebraska was seeing its first real storm, and the wet snow was filling the furrows and covering corn stubble. Along the edges of one field where the cattle had been turned out to feed and then cordoned off with an electric fence, the prairie grass was so heavy with snow that it had lain down across the electric wire, tripping the circuit breaker. Kyle had come out to find the source of the problem and make sure none of the cows were out. Before driving the perimeter, he checked first to make sure that the solar panel and the car battery that ran the system were properly hooked up. It didn’t look like anything had been disconnected by snow or wind. Kyle slid one insulator down the rebar fence post until the electric wire was flush with the ground and climbed back behind the wheel of the Mule. He cleared the melting flakes from his glasses. “It is really starting to blow,” he said.
As Kyle drove the edge of the acreage, the darkness deepened until his headlights, bright with swirling snow, were the only light. Every now and then, he would stop the Mule, jump out again into the wind, bend back the broken stalks of prairie grass sagging onto the wire, and then slide back into the Mule. As we drove along one row of furrows, the bodies of the Angus cattle emerged faintly, the black of their snow-sifted bodies against the blacker sky. Some had white foreheads and noses. Mottled and pocked with patches of black, their faces reflected the beams of the headlights like the cratered face of the moon. When Kyle would step out into their midst, they would startle back into the darkness, watching warily as he checked the fence. At last, when he thought that every inch of the wire was cleared, Kyle drove back to the control box and reset the system. It instantly began to tick, the telltale sound of the pulsing electric fence. He smiled broadly: “Well, at least that’s one thing taken care of.”
Kyle was born in Mason City, Iowa, and adopted at birth. He lived in Indianola, Iowa, until he was four years old and then moved to Omaha. Kyle never knew his birth parents, and the parents who raised him never talked about them. That mystery became a kind of running joke with his friends. One, who was Hispanic, always kidded that Kyle’s love of Cholula sauce and tacos just proved that he was really Mexican. Another joked that he was too tall and beefy to be a Mexican. It was all meant in fun but left Kyle wondering, and it’s hard not to read his shyness, his quiet laugh, and gentle demeanor as a low-key way of trying to fit in. Kyle is so agreeable, so quick to pitch in, that Meghan’s description of his hot temper is almost impossible to imagine. “Oh, he’s just fooling you,” she said.
We were back at their house now, drinking cups of blazing hot coffee while the snow continued to fall and build. “Yeah, the very first stories I ever heard about him,” Meghan said, “before I even met him, were about what a hothead he was.” Kyle rolled his eyes and shook his head. He rubbed his legs, still warming up from the cold. “That was kind of a unique situation,” he said.
After his sophomore year of high school in Omaha, Kyle took a job at an auto dealership, just emptying trashcans and sweeping up at first. But the manager soon figured out that Kyle was good with his hands and started training him to be a mechanic. He showed such skill that his supervisor agreed to sponsor Kyle for the Chrysler-supported program in auto repair. If accepted, the dealership would pay half his tuition to the branch of Southeast Community College in Milford, just outside Omaha. He would get an associate degree of applied sciences, and if he made the dean’s list each semester, he would come back to the shop with a raise. Kyle made the dean’s list each of his first three semesters but narrowly missed it in his final semester before graduation.
“So they didn’t give me the raise,” Kyle said. But what really bugged him, Kyle said, was that without the promotion, he didn’t have the standing to pick his repair jobs. Instead, the service writers would dictate which mechanics were assigned to particular jobs—who got the repairs that would pay well and be easy to complete, who got complicated repairs that would take time and expertise to complete but didn’t involve expensive parts so they made it hard to earn commissions or build toward bonuses. “They were giving me shit-work,” Kyle said. “And whenever I complained, the service manager kept telling me, ‘The other guys have families, and they need to support their families.’ And I was just like, ‘I got to fucking eat too, you know.’ ” Finally, one day in a fit of anger, Kyle threw a wrench through the service window, shattering the glass.
After that, Kyle wanted to get as far away as possible. He moved five hours west to Ogallala. A friend from Southeast was from there and helped Kyle land a job in the shop at Schmidt Motors. Not long after, Kyle’s old shop foreman Barry in Omaha called him up and said that there was this new girl working at the dealership. Kyle had to meet her. “No way,” Kyle said, adamant that he didn’t want to be set up. “I hate that shit.” The girl, of course, was Meghan, who had taken the job to stay busy after completing her first semester of college. Barry thought that Meghan would be perfect for Kyle. What he didn’t know was that Meghan’s last boyfriend had been killed in Iraq, and she was still grieving. Plus, the first story she had heard about Kyle was about how he’d smashed up the service department on his way out from quitting. “I was just like, ‘I do not want to meet up with this guy,” Meghan laughed.
But after Kyle moved back to Omaha, Barry invited the two to a group lunch at a sports bar, not telling either that they were being set up, just hoping they would hit it off. Meghan said when she heard Kyle was there, she steered clear of him. “I didn’t even fucking talk to him,” she said. More months passed. In the meantime, Meghan said that every mechanic in the shop was telling her how great Kyle was, even as they were also telling her more about that fiery temper and a tendency toward taking big risks. (A favorite story involved a dirt bike accident and Kyle having to be restrained by hospital staff while they stitched him up.) Finally, Barry couldn’t take it anymore.
Meghan had come into a pair of tickets for the River City Roundup, a giant rodeo held every year in Omaha, but she didn’t have anyone to go with her. She made the mistake of mentioning this to a coworker, who passed the word along to Barry. Barry took Meghan outside of the dealership. He looked her in the eye and said, “You’re going to invite Kyle to the rodeo.” He dialed Kyle’s phone number and gave Meghan the phone. When Kyle picked up, Meghan was so flustered that she just blurted out the invitation. “Hey, do you want to go to a rodeo?” she asked.
Meghan turned to me, her eyes wide with emphasis. “Dead fucking silence,” she said. “Just nothing from the other end. Like, a really long, awkward pause.”
Kyle said that he knew Barry was behind this, that he’d been working for months now to set him up with Meghan, and had been pushing so hard that Kyle was resisting out of sheer stubbornness. But now, put on the spot, he couldn’t think of an excuse. He mustered just a single word: “Sure.” Meghan howled now with laughter. “Real romantic, right?”
But t
hey went to the rodeo together, and they had a good time. After a few beers, they loosened up and started talking. At some point, Kyle mentioned that he was still looking for work, and Meghan said that her dad needed someone to help with harvest on their farm. Kyle talked to Rick and soon moved into the little white house on Centennial Hill. “I was just working for her dad, and Meghan was in Omaha. She wasn’t even out here.” At the end of harvest, Kyle got another temporary job, driving a plow and repairing trucks for a snow removal company in Omaha. A couple of times, Meghan rode along as Kyle was plowing driveways and private roads during snowstorms. But he said they were still more friends than anything else.
“When March came around, I needed to find a permanent job, so I applied at Caterpillar.” The company hired him to work as a repairman at the dealership outside Omaha, charged with fixing breakdowns. It took almost a year, seeing each other for dinners and movies after his shifts at the dealership, before the two finally admitted to themselves that they were dating. When Meghan moved back to the farm after graduating from Metro, she said it only made sense for Kyle to come with her.
OF ALL the stories of Centennial Hill Farm, one stands out—a passed-down tale of super-human grit but with so few concrete details as to create a certain shroud of mystery. It was September 1951. Wayne Harrington was just beginning the corn harvest. Maybe he’d decided to get the corn out early. The weather was perfect, sitting squarely in the 70s with no rain for the whole month. Maybe he had hoped to get a jump on the market but then found the stalks still a little green. Those parts of the story are lost. But whatever the reason, he had barely begun on the field when the picker jammed. Wayne climbed down from the harvester and cleared away the mouth of the machine, but the jam was deeper inside. He reached in, dislodging the problem cob, and the teeth of the picker grabbed his fingers, his whole hand up to the wrist. He was mangled by the machine and caught. Worse than that, he was alone in the field and pinned. “He had a booming voice,” Jenni told me. He called out for help and was finally heard by the women from the Latvian family he had brought back from Europe two years before.
The women came running from the farmhouse. Following Wayne’s instructions, they retrieved his tools from the barn and took apart the gears of the picker. Wayne freed himself from the teeth of the cobber, wrapping his arm—with what, no one knows, his shirt or his coat—and then drove himself more than thirty miles to the hospital in York. But there was too much damage to save his hand. Two days later, doctors were forced to amputate. “People say it was really hard on him,” Jenni told me, “and that he was never the same. It took a lot out of him.”
That same fall, hoping to please his father, Tom enrolled in the University of Nebraska’s school of agriculture and went out for the Nebraska football team. Tom later told his kids how he’d gotten beat to hell trying to prove himself to the coaches but still failed to make the squad. There would be no trips to Memorial Stadium to boost Wayne’s spirits, no gridiron magic to take his mind off his loss. Tom did make the university tennis team, but his father never traveled to Lincoln to see any of his matches. Just a few months later, in February 1952, Wayne was out in a winter storm, delivering feed to his cattle, when his truck skidded off of icy Highway 81 and crashed into a tree. He suffered a fractured skull, a crushed rib cage, and multiple breaks in both legs. He held on for a few days at the hospital in York but finally died from his injuries.
“I’ve always wondered,” Jenni said. “Did he lose control of the truck, because he only had one hand? Or did he—” She didn’t finish her thought. But then I wondered, did Jenni question whether Wayne’s crash had been an accident? Was that buried somewhere in the subtext of the repeated tellings of the story? She didn’t go further. “I don’t know,” she said. “But that’s when my dad came back to run the farm.”
Tom had completed just one semester of ag training, had never lived on the farm, and didn’t have any practical farming experience. His mother took over running the books and managed all aspects of the business. Even after Tom had married his wife Karen and had four little girls, Jenni said that she remembered how her grandmother would spread her papers out across the kitchen table to make sure every line balanced. “We just thought, wow, she’s the queen of the family—and she was.” Some of her grandmother Eunice’s attention to detail arose from Tom’s freewheeling approach to farming. Because he wasn’t bound by any tradition, he was more forward-looking than many of his neighbors, but he was also taking risks and often guessing wrong. “He always liked to live on the edge,” Jenni told me. “So he always had cattle deals going south or found himself in the wrong position on the commodities market.”
But Wayne had bought the family land back at a lucky moment. In the 1950s, the irrigation projects Wayne had helped promote suddenly took off. For the first time, groundwater could be delivered to the fields by “flood irrigation,” a method of pumping into containment ponds and then releasing water through a system of wide, open furrows. And soon, Tom and others began installing the first irrigation sprinklers. The area would never again be at the mercy of droughts like they had seen in the 1890s and 1930s. When center-pivot irrigation was developed just up the road in Columbus, Tom was one of the first to buy in, so that, when blistering temperatures struck Nebraska in 1953, Tom’s farm, with its well-irrigated fields, saw record yields, and Centennial Hill quickly became some of the most valuable farm ground in the world.
With the help of new chemical fertilizers and pesticides, high-quality hybrids, and his ever-expanding irrigation system, Tom was soon appearing in local newspaper ads announcing top yields for the county. At the same time, his family was growing and prospering. Tom and Karen had four daughters—Abbi, Terri, Jenni, and Heidi. And he set about using his newfound wealth to build a modern farmhouse for the six of them.
Tom hired Dewey Dearing, a well-known architectural firm in Colorado Springs, to build the new house, patterned after the ski lodges that Tom admired in the Rockies. Everything about the place was eccentric. Tom requested a sofa suspended from the high ceiling by a heavy chain, so it would swing. He had the floors made of stone and covered the walls with thick carpet, so dense that guests had a hard time finding the light switches. “You ought to see them try turning on the lights,” Tom told the Omaha World-Herald when they sent out a reporter to write a story about this unusual farmhouse. Tom even personally designed built-in bookcases with slanted shelves on the idea that this would eliminate the need for bookends. Of course, it damaged books and made those at the bottom of the incline almost impossible to budge from their place. “I goofed,” Tom told the reporter with a shrug.
Jenni winced, remembering the photograph that accompanied the article—a picture of her, about age four, next to her mother in the swinging sofa. The picture was reproduced using the new Colorphoto process, which allowed four-color reproduction but with a rather limited palette. “It was an orange sweater with a plaid skirt—that kind of matched the couch,” Jenni said. “I just about disappeared!” This was the dichotomy of their childhood: daily chores tending the chickens and cattle, with evenings spent in a house that stretched the limits of sixties style. But Jenni said it never seemed incongruous to her or her sisters; they knew that their neighbors considered them oddballs, but she said that all of the girls identified with their father and his progressive mother.
Jenni’s sister Abbi remembered going to visit their grandmother Eunice at her new home in Omaha, where she had gotten deep into social activism through the Methodist church. “She always loaded us in the car, and we would venture into the city to see firsthand what she had been working on. We visited a black radio station she helped start. We would drive out to Boy’s Town to see what they had going on.” Their relationship with their father was more difficult, especially as they grew older and more rebellious. When he made them drive the tractor at planting or harvest, they would don their bathing suits to work on their tans, just in protest. “We drove him nuts a lot of the time,” Jenni said, bu
t she also said that her father often seemed to be looking for a fight.
Once when the girls were in high school and the state was in the midst of a drought that was devastating a neighbor’s milo crop, Tom dug a culvert across the county road and laid a pipe to divert water from his catchment pond to the parched field. When someone complained, the county sheriff ordered the pipe removed. As soon as the crew was gone, Tom put it back. The county responded by issuing a restraining order. Tom, in turn, submitted a formal request for a temporary permit “to cross their goddamn road.” The York County Board of Commissioners met to consider the matter and ultimately denied the request 3 to 2. “Tom Harrington’s a pretty good fellow,” one of the commissioners said after the meeting. “You can’t help but like him in many ways.” But, he added with a smirk, “he’s rather headstrong.” Tom responded by threatening to file a lawsuit. He conceded that he probably had no case but told the Lincoln Evening Journal that he was in search of an attorney who was willing to sue the county “for damage to the milo and for being stupid.”
A few years later, Tom attempted to organize a county-wide holdout of property tax payments in protest of a state tax reappraisal, which set the value of top irrigated land in York County about 20 percent higher than values in surrounding counties. “There are a lot of people who are taking it in the shorts over property taxes,” Harrington told the Omaha World-Herald. “Most farmers will be paying $10 or $12 per acre in taxes on their irrigated land.” About fifty landowners flirted with Tom’s idea of an organized tax boycott, but the possibility finally fell through over concerns that a lack of tax dollars might shutter public schools in the county or even force the seizure of property in order to collect those payments. Tom, thinking they were all cowards, vowed never to talk to any of these neighbors ever again.