Veteran Bets That He Can Make Roza Acres Pay
By John Bigelow, Seattle Times
March 30, 1949Grandview, Yakima County, March 30 - Uncle Sam said: "I'll bet you 60 acres you can't make a living."
Twenty-two Second World War veterans looked at the steep, sandy, sage-brush-covered slopes, pocked with washouts, and shook their heads. "No bet."
Carl Skinner, a lean, youthful looking 33-year-old Utah man said he'd take a crack at it. That was a year ago. The drawing for the 28 homesteads in the Roza irrigation project was held in the spring of 1947. There were 1,248 names of weterans with farm experience in the fish bowl.
Skinner's name was chosen, but as an alternate and so far down the list he didn't think he had a chance. When others turned down this particular tract and it was offered to him a year after the original drawing, he couldn't resist.
"It's what I wanted," Skinner declared. Skinner has been in tough situations before. A radio operator in the Army Air Force for 32 months, Skinner flew 46 bombing raids against the Japanese - the Gilberts, Marshalls, Marianas, Bonan, Iwo Jima, Truk. He can't remember all the names now.
Three times he radioed to his base, "Coming in on a wing and a prayer." Those three B-24s were so badly shot up they were junked.
"I don't know if I'm smart or just stubborn," Skinner said, watching the wind whip clouds of sand off the land he cleared, yard by yard, with an old tractor and a home-made scraper.
"I got it cleared. Now it's blowing away. Some of my friends say I'd better get out while I've got some money left, but I think I can make a go of it. It was late before I got anything planted last year, but it came up good.
"I had eight acres in beans. I took 20 rows out and the next morning the rest were buried under a foot of snow. The corn shot up 12 to 14 feet - I never saw anything like it. I put ten acres in late spuds and barely got my money back.
"The land's pretty steep. Once, when I was irrigating, the water got away from me and in a couple of minutes it had dug out a gully big enough to hide in."
The sand drifts like snow against the trailer house which has been home for more than a year for Skinner, his wife and their daughter, Mary Kathleen, two and a half years old.
Like all Roze farms, they have electricity - but little else. An ice box and washing machine sit outside the crowded trailer. They haul their water in ten-gallon milk cans by truck, their only vehicle, from Grandview, two and one half miles away.
"I'm sure we don't use the national average in water consumption," said Mrs. Skinner, smiling. "I write to my parents in Delaware about all this and they can't get over it.
"Sometimes we get discouraged and think about going back to our little fruit farm south of Salt Lake City. But we'll stick for five years. Carl is so determined."
She dashed off in pursuit of Mary Kathleen.
"We have to watch the baby close," said Skinner, soberly. "I killed 15 rattlesnakes clearing that one slope. One day the baby got away from her mother and ran up through the field toward me. I liked to have died. If I'd known about the snakes I don't think I'd have taken this place."
Near the trailer a small frame house is half built.
"I had some cull spuds," Skinner explained. "When I dug a cellar and put a roof on it, I just kept building. It was winter and I had some time. It was hard getting windows in it. The wind made them bulge out like paper sacks."
Like many other G. I. homesteaders, Skinner is signed up with the Veterans Administration for on-the -farm training and receives a little less than $100 a month in subsistence. Once a week he and other veteran-farmers go to the Sunnyside High School for a two-hour class.
"We couldn't have stuck this long without that money," he said. He estimated that he has sunk $3,900 of his savings in the farm.
Through a gap in the hills, Skinner and his wife can look down at the fertile farms near Sunnyside where stiff-legged colts prance around well-kept fields and vineyards throw out spring shoots.
Skinner pointed to the crest of hill overlooking all that. Some day I'm going to build a brick home right up there." he declared.