History Lesson 
The Sons of the Pioneers
It’s a big job, feeding America, but someone’s got to do it.
(Page 6 of 7)
What tensions exist in a place like Perryton rarely ever erupt. The whole town was shocked this summer when police shot and killed a Mexican American burglary suspect. No policeman had ever killed anyone in Perryton before. Those were the sort of things that happened in other places. Even though a local jury exonerated the officers, the affair will not soon be forgotten, even though the town has resumed its customary sleepiness.
There’s two stores, two whores, and
a blacksmith shop
The best deer and the coldest beer
in Texas,
One Main Street where all friends
meet
Where every man’s a king and no
One wears a crown
That’s Perryton, Texas, my town.
While the blacksmith shop has gone, that old verse, meant for almost any West Texas town, speaks to Perryton’s Main Street. Everyone is welcome to drag Main. The official southern perimeter is Allsup’s convenience store, 1.2 miles south of the northern boundary, which is the Santa Fe Railroad tracks and the Equity Co-op grain elevator. The baddest Trans Ams, Can Ams, Cobra IIs, and Silverados make their turnaround in Allsup’s parking lot, then head north, past the Dixie Dog Drive In, up Main Street, dodging the lumbering, geared-down, possum-bellied cattle trucks that almost scrape Main, past their pit stop, the Wheatheart Shopping Center parking lot.
Main Street draggers leaving the pit stop move past the courthouse (“Erected 1928 AD”); past Perryton Motor Company Chevrolet (displaying in its showroom window the favorite vehicle of the dragger emeritus, a classic white 1955 Chevy Bel Air with red and white interior); past the Ellis Theatre (where each night before the regular feature the audience stands to the “Star-Spangled Banner” and then watches a film clip of American history); past Plainview Hardware (with its World War II mural urging you to “Keep ‘Em Flying—Buy Victory Bonds-Stamps!”) to the final turnaround near the Treasure Island Coin Shop and just before the grain elevator and railroad tracks.
North of the tracks Main reverts to the highway, which leads past the centrum of Perryton’s vertebra on the far north edge of town; the Dutch Inn, so named because the Holland family own it. In this busy restaurant and coffee shop, early risers in overalls and hard hats or the more popular plastic one-size-fits-all baseball caps (locally known as “gimme” hats) gather to air weather tales, crop troubles, escapades, and Jimmy Carter gripes.
But Main Street officially ends at the 195-foot Equity Co-op grain elevator, which lords and looms over Perryton like a castle on the Rhine. Physically and spiritually it dominates the town as a cathedral does a Mexican village. It is Perryton’s gleaming white Polaris, its beacon, its cairn. In years of plenty, it is the rallying cry, the drumbeat, the triumphant weather vane, reveille. In years of failure, it is taps, a fool’s cap, the mark of Cain. In every year, it is a monumental confirmation and a boding reminder of how they began and why they are all there.
Earl McGarraugh has never been on to polly-wolly-doodle all day. Between the May deluge and the June harvest he and his sons Melvin and Eddie, along with the hired hands, Shorty and Carl, worked over the bobtail trucks and tractors, saving the combine maintenance until last because Earl hated messing with the big Case wheat cutters. Case planned to discontinue these particular models, and some folks predicted Earl would be up a creek without a paddle, unable to get parts. But Cliff McGarraugh, his cousin, knew better. “Shoot, Earl will cover the whole United States finding what he needs. He won’t take a loss on those combines. He’s quite an Earl.”
After many years of hard work, Earl has won the Ochiltree County Farmer of the Year in 1977, the highest tribute his friends and neighbors awarded a man in agriculture. Earl kept his silver tray hidden away in a kitchen cabinet, but he was proud of the recognition. He would show you the tray at the drop of his hat.
Elmyra McGarraugh sat in her living room about dusk one evening and talked lovingly about the man she had been married to for 43 years. “Earl’s only luxury sits out there in the garage, new as the day he bought it. We were driving in Arkansas on a vacation and he spotted a Lincoln Continental, white top with orange bottom. He had been telling me for years how nice they looked, classy without showing off. We stopped and he wrote the man a check. He drives it about three times a year. My car is the real story. It’s a Cutlass, Oldsmobile, I think, that has been driven 135,000 miles, survived my four sons, and has never been in the shop except for the usual tinkering, spark plugs and things.” Elmyra looked very pleased with herself.
As the grain kernels hardened and harvest grew closer, Earl McGarraugh wasn’t thinking of Lincoln Continentals and luxury. He was worried about finding combine drivers and grain haulers. Earl and Elmyra paid fair and square wages, $25 a day net, room and board in the bunkhouse, and Earl paid Social Security. Still, the petroleum service companies paid better, and young men didn’t stop by as much as they used to, so he had four unmanned combines and several trucks sitting in the front yard awaiting drivers.
Along with higher prices, the biggest change in farming in Earl’s lifetime has been the development of more sophisticated machinery. “I barely remember the old steam-powered threshers we used to have before combines,” Earl said. “A crew of men called ‘pitchers’ forked wheat onto a conveyer belt that carried the grain to a threshing machine. The chaff and straw blew into one pile, the clean grain into the wagons on the other side. The crew designated one man the ‘swamper.’ He had to get up before dawn, fire up the boiler, and spend the rest of the day hauling coal and water for the machine. Nobody much wanted to be the swamper, I’ll tell you that.”
In the 1920s, the combine quickly replaced the reaper, threshing machine, and binder. The early McCormick reaper, invented in the early 1830s, was a two-wheeled horse-drawn affair that pushed a series of scissorlike blades against the grain to clip it close to the ground. A rotating paddle wheel swept the stalks against the blades and back onto a platform as the machine moved forward. The modern combine does just that, it combines the five ancient steps of harvesting wheat into one machine: (1) it cuts, which replaces the sickle, scythe, and cradle; (2) it feeds, which eliminates hauling the cut or bunched wheat stalks; (3) it threshes, which means no more flailing or other handwork to separate grain from hull; (4) it separates, which eliminates tedious discarding of stalks by hand and (5) it cleans, which ends winnowing. Instead of the 46 hours it took to harvest one acre of wheat in the 1920s, it now takes about thirty minutes. But regardless of the marvelous machinery, the improved seed varieties, and the benefits of irrigation, farmers had begun the harvest year of 1978 in big trouble.
The previous year had been the worst since the Depression. All across America farmers were leaving the land in record numbers, 450,000 of them in 1977, a 5.4 per cent drop in the agricultural population. One and a half million have quit the fields since 1970. From the time Earl McGarraugh watched steam threshers arrive on the Santa Fe Railroad almost sixty years ago, the country had changed from rural to predominantly urban. Now only 3.6 per cent of the population, or 7.8 million Americans, live in rural areas. The specter of the Dust Bowl has also returned. Wind damage in the Great Plains in 1977 was the fifth worst since federal records began in 1935. Wind erosion for a six-month period of 1976-77 affected 2.1 million acres of Texas land, compared with 1.5 million acres the year before, the worst wind damage in twenty years.
Thirty-five years ago one Ochiltree County farmer could produce enough food for himself and nine others. Now he can feed himself and fifty others. Despite this splendid performance, farm prices are down 5 per cent since 1974 and costs are up 23 per cent. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) figures showed that for the year ending February 1978 there were 5000 foreclosures among the nations 2.7 million working farms, as compared to 3600 for the previous year.
One reason for the gloomy forecast is that for the first time, labor costs involved in food production and processing will exceed the farmer’s share. The USDA has predicted that in 1978 the farmer will get about $56 billion, while it will take $58 billion in labor costs for processing. Another way of putting it is that the average family spent $1945 last year for food grown on U.S. farms, $50 more than the same items cost in 1976. The farmer’s share dropped $4 to $745. The difference went to processors, and supermarket employees (hourly wages of checkers, for example, are increasing 8.4 per cent yearly). Labor costs last year came to 36 per cent of the food bill, 5 per cent more than the farmer’s cost.
For the wheat farmer, the situation is particularly severe, Middlemen (commodities speculator, miller, baker, grocer) take 77 per cent of every dollar spent on grain. From a 36 cent loaf of bread, the wheat farmer gets 2.5 cents. Since 1973 the wheat farmer’s cost of production has risen almost 50 per cent. Four years ago he was spending an average of $2.50 to produce one bushel that sold for $5. Now he is spending $3.50 to produce one bushel that was selling at an average of $2.65 in the harvest month of June. He has also been left out of the boom in farm property. The average value of most U.S. farmland rose 17 per cent in 1976 and 9 percent last year. But, because the price of wheat has not covered the cost of growing it in the past few years, wheat cropland values have suffered. Nebraska was the only state in the country showing a decrease the past year in land values. Kansas, the nation’s leading wheat producer, has only a one per cent gain.
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