In the 1960’s when I was busy ranching on now I-540 south of the Hopper Tunnel — I said ranching, well, actually teaching school, auctioneering, selling real estate and trying to make a living — I met a millionaire from Sunset, Ark. Sunset is about ten miles east of Winslow in the middle of the Ozark National Forest. It consisted of a grade school part of the Greenland system, and the older kids were hauled up there for school. The area had no more than a church and several farmers scattered over that plateau with poultry houses.
Virgil Woods was a chicken-cattle man maybe 20 years my senior. I met him one day and we exchanged cordial words. I asked him how he was and he immediately told me fine because he was a millionaire. That kinda set me back that this short man in the overalls, who was kin to several people I knew, was that rich. Well you don’t bust out and ask a man how he made his money. I knew Virgil wasn’t a moonshiner and growing pot was not that fashionable back then among folks other than hippies. He sure didn’t have any oil wells, so I feared that his source of revenue would remain a mystery.
He laughed. “I can see that you don’t believe I’m that rich.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t know.”
“Well let me tell you, I have lots of friends, and if I saw them I could say loan me a dollar, I’m a little short today. And they would. Then I’d start on the rest of the folks and ask them for a dollar. Not much to ask for and I bet half of them would give me one, so considering all the people I’ll meet or see it won’t be any problem to become a millionaire. So I consider my financial situation like money in the bank. And see, I’m a millionaire.”
It wasn’t a bad way to think.
Virgil had a neat way to operate. He said he had little education, so if he needed something done he hired the man who knew how to fix it. And he said, 'then, I stay right with him. I hand him tools, I run, get his needs, anything he wants I hand it to him that way if I have him on by the hour I don’t waste my money.'
That was when folks like Virgil sawed their own lumber to build poultry houses. Neighbors came and helped raise the building out of the ground on a pad that cost two hundred dollars for a bull dozer to come in and level. They borrowed the money for sheet iron, brooder stoves, chick fountains, hog feeders and feed bins. The propane companies would plumb them for the gas business. Plastic pipe and a single stock to bury it, and you were ready for birds.
ASCS (Agriculture Stabilization and Conservation Service) paid for a pond to water them and folks hauled creek gravel to make the road accessible. Many of those loads were shoveled on a truck bed by hand and unloaded the same way.
And people like Virgil Woods despite his “millionaire” status turned in every check from the poultry company they made to pay off the bank loan. The ugly buzzard called “depression" they knew as children growing up, roosted in an oak tree nearby them. To be in debt for anything was a stigma.
My neighbor, who raised poultry and lived by me up here on Beaver Lake was another. He wouldn’t go to town and eat in a restaurant until he paid off his note. Why, what if his banker came in there and saw him splurging like that?
Life and the times have sure changed. Until next issue, don’t slip on the ice.
Western novelist Dusty Richards and his wife Pat live on Beaver Lake in northwest Arkansas. For more information about his books you can email Dusty by visiting www.ozarksfn.com and clicking on 'Contact Us' or call 1-866-532-1960.
