History Lesson 
The Sons of the Pioneers
It’s a big job, feeding America, but someone’s got to do it.
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By mid-September 1977, Earl’s soil was prepared. The nine John Deere 820 tractors took to the fields like motorized beetles. Earl, Shorty, Carl, the McGarraugh sons and Elmyra drove the beetles for three weeks, each pulling drill boxes full of wheat seed, a half-bushel per acre. “After planting, what I was looking for were clouds carrying rain. But what I saw were grasshoppers. You could look into the sun and see them flickering as they landed in the fields. They came in on wind drafts from a mild norther we had in early October. When I saw them, I knew the wheat was gone.”
Like most farmers, Earl McGarraugh hated insects much more than the government or the weather. He remembered how the fifties had begun not only dry but also with an invasion of greenbugs, tiny plant lice that suck the juice from stems of growing wheat. Farmers were desperate in 1950 to rid their plants of the greenbugs, and, knowing one ladybug would eat 3000 greenbugs in a day, they decided on help from these carnivorous insects. They contacted a man who had tracked the ladybugs to their winter home in northern Arizona and had gathered them in half-gallon tins. Ochiltree County farmers ordered 390 gallons at $7 a gallon. The ladybugs arrived at the airport in feed sacks filled with pine cones to prevent bug squashing. They worked fairly well, but in 1950, the total wheat harvest in the county was the lowest ever recorded-only 100,000 bushels. Grasshoppers had stripped the Panhandle Plains in 1874, 1893, and, in varying degrees of destruction, at least once each decade since then.
Ten to eighteen grasshoppers per square yard will graze as much pasture as one cow; some fields last September had fifty grasshoppers per square yard. Killing them is not easy. Scientists have frozen grasshopper eggs for twelve years, and they still hatched. In 1955, when huge grasshoppers rode into the county on air thermals form Kansas and Missouri, farmers sprayed their fields with 155,000 gallons of aldrin mixed with diesel oil. Aldrin is now banned, and effective spraying is impossible anyway if the wind exceeds ten miles per hour and the temperature is above eighty degrees. If every poison known to man where available and free, it wouldn’t matter. The wind in Ochiltree County always exceeds ten miles an hour.
Earl watched the grasshoppers advance from the bar ditches to the weeds around the edges of his fields and then to the just sprouted wheat. It was not a crawling mass like the scourge of 1893, but it was bad enough. Finally, the first frost arrived and killed most of the pests but not until they had ruined 1100 acres of wheat. Not three miles away from Earl’s devoured fields, a neighbor’s crop was hardly touched. Farming was not a profession for the paranoid. One thing Earl had learned since the dust storms of the thirties: no matter what happened, an insect invasion, months without rain, tornadoes, or hailstorms, there was nothing to do except get up the next morning, eat breakfast, kiss the wife, and get back after it. He had his 1100 acres replanted in fifteen days.
THE FIRST SOCIAL EVENT Don and Nancy Wagner attended after returning to Perryton in the spring of 1977 was the annual Miss and Little Miss Perryton Pageant. The Ochiltree County Chamber of Commerce and various town businesses sponsored this affair before the wheat harvest, perhaps in keeping with the ancient custom of honoring goddesses like the Greek Demeter or the Roman Ceres, who held sway over the harvests.
The spring of 1978 Don and Nancy missed the pageant. Don went to the fields every day and stayed late, watching the progress of his first wheat crop. He had survived the invasion of grasshoppers, but the fall and winter had been terribly dry. A snow in February had provided the only moisture. In December, to help make ends meet, he had rented out 39 acres of wheat pasture to his friend Charles Caison from Waka to graze 140 head of steers and heifers, charging $1.50 per hundredweight. That lasted until mid-March when it was time to pull the cattle off the land and get the wheat up.
Despite the lack of rain, his irrigated wheat looked spectacular. Don figured he could average almost 60 bushels an acre, about 13,000 bushels for ten months of work. At the going rate of $2.65 he could gross $34,450. In early March he had irrigated again for three weeks, which had brought up the wheat and the mustard weeds, the bad, as usual, with the good. He called Buster Hendrickson of Buster’s Aerial Dusters in Spearman, and Buster the Duster brought over his Pawnee Brave 300 and spewed the lethal chemical 2,4-D over 120 of his weed-infested acres at $2.75 an acre. By the first May, all Don Wagner needed was to irrigate one more time.
But before he could turn on the pumps the most astonishing display of weather in anyone’s memory occurred. In 48 hours, beginning May 3, Ochiltree County received freezing temperatures, two inches of snow, a tornado, heavy rain, and hail. Three weeks later one of the violent Great Plains thunderstorms brought devastating hail followed by 21 days of rain. Eleven inches, more than half the county’s annual rainfall, fell from the sky, temporarily breaking the drought.
Overnight the buffalo wallows became lakes, and there were many unusual sights and sounds on the plains: the chorus of hundreds of frogs echoing across the fields; toads and turtles creating traffic jams on the highways; mallards floating across the wheat fields; and brown caps on the lakes as the incessant wind whipped the muddy water. The incongruous ponds sat for weeks on the land like water spilled on a tabletop.
Promptly at seven o’clock on a cool June night after the May rains, Don Simpson, Chamber of Commerce president, welcomed the audience to the Perryton High School auditorium. The curtain opened and revealed all 21 pageant contestants lined across the stage. The pianist sounded the opening chords of “You Light Up My Life.” The girls not only sang the lyrics but also provided them in sign language. For the second verse, the lights dimmed again, and the 21 girls reached to the floor and picked up something. Your life was suddenly lit up with darting beams of light, as the girls continued the hand signs with flashlights. While singing, they covered their flashlights left to right, then uncovered them right to left in a visual Rockette high-kick-style sequence. It was all done perfectly, not a stray beam or flashlights click. The ensemble finished to furious applause.
President Simpson gallantly presided over the beauty pageant: the self-introductions of contestants (“Hi, I’m Kim Pierce and I’m sponsored by James and Homer Clark Dirt Contractors”); swimsuit competition; awarding of the Little Miss Perryton crown to Katina Brock (five years old; measurements: 25-22-26; favorite TV commercial: Chow Chow Kitty; favorite game: Doll Baby Roll Over); the older girls’ formal gown strut; the asking of the important question (“What do you consider to be an ideal woman?”); and finally, announcing the winner, Paige Ann Winkler (ambition: fashion merchandising; favorite hobby: showing off her quarter horse mare, Roan Petoha).
Friends of Paige Ann Winkler who had not see the attractive high school graduate win the Miss Perryton title could no doubt be found participating in the favorite pastime of all small-town young people: dragging Main. George Morgan Perry insisted that the railroad men lay out a wide Main Street for his new town, and he got one, ninety feet wide and unimpeded by the usual Texas courthouse Square, or anything else, for that matter, until Main crossed the Santa Fe tracks on the north.
What becomes Main Street in Perryton begins seven miles south at the Y, where Highway 70, coming north from Pampa, converges with Highway 83, rolling up northwest from Canadian. After joining, it is not so much a highway as a fourteen-mile runway that doesn’t bend until Oklahoma. At night the distant lights of Perryton look like a railroad train stretched across the horizon. Passing through town, the road continues straight north to the state line. If finally curves where the smooth Texas highway with ample shoulders becomes a narrow, cracked asphalt roadbed, and the beer sold at the joints flanking the bumpy road is 3.2 per cent alcohol. That’s Oklahoma.
Main Street divides Perryton (population: 8200) socially, economically, and practically. Like many West Texas towns, the west side is the most prosperous, as if the more well-to-do pioneers got as close to the sunset as possible before halting their wagons and building homes. On sleepy Sunday afternoons west of Main, young men manicure lawns in front of well-kept houses, and women tend blooming flower beds, while the family old-timers doze in porch swings, sleepily watching grandchildren skid bicycles on the driveway gravel.
East of Main is the chief section of lower-income housing (the other being north of the railroad tracks), where the poorer pioneers stopped and stayed. Instead of lawns, the houses more often than not have rusting cars with flat tires and expired license plates parked near a torn screen door and tire swings hung from trees pushed by barefoot shirtless kids with unafraid expressions. On the west side are located the town’s establishment churches—First United Methodist, First Baptist, First Christian—while on the east side are the fundamentalist sects-Pentecostal, Primitive Baptist, Church of God—hard-shell believers surrounding themselves with what a famous theologian once called “character armor.”
Also on Perryton’s east side is the industrial district, home of the local petroleum service companies, such as Dowell, Ford Tool, and Halliburton Oil Well Services. In the terrible drought-seared year of 1955, oil was discovered in the southwest sector of the county south of Farnsworth. In the fall of 1955, when wheat seeds died soon after planting, Ochiltree County was the hottest play in the Panhandle. By the end of 1956, major oil companies and independents were servicing ninety producing wells across the county. Although most of the large drilling outfits have left the area, petroleum-related companies have stayed in Ochiltree County; indeed, the oil industry pays more county taxes than agriculture.
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