Mildred Becker knows what I mean. She grew up near Van in East Texas and met the Panhandle rancher she would marry at the University of Texas in the late 1940s. When he took her home to Lipscomb County in the topmost tier of Panhandle counties, “I thought it was the end of the world,” she says, shaking her head and smiling at the memory. “I’d tell myself, ‘We both have degrees; we don’t have to stay here.’ But he didn’t want to leave. Now, my husband’s dead, my kids are all gone and I’m still here. What does that tell you?”

What it tells me, now that I know Lipscomb County, is that there’s a way of life in the Panhandle that Mrs. Becker eventually came to cherish and that I as a visitor have come to appreciate. If my dad was young and restless long ago, I was young and ignorant about the Panhandle. Now that I’ve been to Lipscomb, I recognize that.

Forty-nine people live in the unincorporated community of Lipscomb, county seat of Lipscomb County – 49 people and a flock of wild turkeys that amble from yard to yard and across the wide courthouse lawn. Canadian, 19 miles to the south is the nearest town; the nearest town of any size is Liberal, Kansas. Nestled among the.hackberry and cottonwood trees along Wolf Creek, amidst rolling plains creased by draws and canyons, Lipscomb makes you want to linger.

With Mildred Becker overseeing Lipscomb’s Wolf Creek Heritage Museum – which will be moving into a new building this spring – the area’s proud past is in good hands. It’s the future that’s problematic. In a little while, if things don’t change, memories and maybe turkeys are all that will be left of Lipscomb. Lost will be a community of hardy, colorful individuals with unique skills and knowledge and a way of life that’s as old as recorded history; lost will be a closeness and connection to the earth that fewer and fewer of us know anything about. It’s a way of life worth saving, but the question is how. It’s a question Lipscomb people are asking, too.

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Lipscomb is little different from its Lipscomb County neighbors, Higgins, Booker, Follett and Darrouzett, little different from most other rural communities throughout America’s heartland. Drought, dismal commodity prices and the lowest oil prices in more than a decade are only the most recent nails in the coffin being readied for family farming and ranching and for small country towns. Tax revenues fall, and schools and other services deteriorate. People see no choice but to leave.

Settlement on the land around Lipscomb is a fairly recent phenomenon. A hundred twenty five years ago, the Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho and Cheyenne thought they had a deal with Washington. They thought the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty guaranteed that the northern Texas Panhandle was a preserve where they could hunt buffalo without the white man’s interference. Buffalo hunters thought otherwise. When the allied tribes under Comanche Chief Quanah Parker tried to roust them out. the hunters cried uncle, and Uncle Sam’s cavalry came riding to their rescue. The army’s effort to prod the Indians back to Indian Territory across the Red River resulted in 14 battles during the fall and winter of 1874- 75, known collectively as the Red River War. The tribes were subdued. The buffalo hunters, left in peace to do their slaughtering, soon reduced the vast herds in the northern Panhandle to piles of bones bleaching in the summer sun. By 1880, the area was safe for settlers, and Lipscomb County had a population of 60 newcomers.

The ranchers came first, attracted to a vast country that was as well suited for grazing cattle as it had been for buffalo. Entrepreneurs and cattle barons saw an opportunity, and soon the Box T, the Seven K and the King ranches had staked out their places among the XIT, the 666, the Waggoner and other famous Panhandle spreads.

In the early 1900s, German wheat farmers who had settled two centuries earlier on the steppes of Russia began moving into the northern Panhandle. They farmed in Kansas first, where they homesteaded land, then moved into Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. “Laubhan, Redelsperger, Schneider, Appel – we still have a lot of Germans around here,” Mildred Becker points out. “They were the core of the farming community. They brought with them hard winter wheat that was ideal for the whole Midwest.”

Farming and ranching are still the primary activities in the Lipscomb area, but these days only the largest operations stand a chance of turning a profit. “It takes so damn much money to operate, it scares you to death,” says rancher Jim Bussard.

Bussard is 76. “I could retire if I ever get out of debt,” he says with a grin. That’s what he tells me on a sunny fall morning when he takes a break from working cattle. But what he also says, his wife Mona tells me, is that he’s never going to retire. “When I die, I’ll just fall off my horse,” he tells people.

With sky-blue eyes, a kindly, weather-ravaged face and a voice that’s an easygoing tenor twang, Bussard has been a rancher all his life. And except for the three years he was in the South Pacific during World War II, he’s lived around Lipscomb all his life. He and his son Lance and his son-in-law run between 10,000 and 12,000 acres, all of which they rent. I catch up with him one morning at a cattle pen near his house, where he and his son and a cowboy poet and saddle maker named J. W Beeson are unloading a truckload of black baldies. The Bussards have just bought the cattle from John Erickson, an area rancher who’s better known as the author of the Hank the Cowdog books. “We’ll feed them out,” Bussard says. “They’ll triple their weight. We’ll get ready to sell ’em next fall.”

Although members of the next generation of Bussards are still ranching, it’s hard for young people to get started and to make a go of it, unless they inherit sizable sections of land. And with inheritance laws the way they are, even a ranch that’s given to you can be an iffy proposition. Lipscomb County Judge Willis Smith knows how hard it is. The 54-year-old judge grew up in nearby Higgins on a ranch that was part of the · original Box T. His family sold off the last of that land in November.Asa young man, Smith went off to Texas Tech, got a degree in marketing, served with the military in Southeast Asia and, when he came back, got a job with Motorola. His employer allowed him to sample city life in Dallas, Los Angeles and Denver before he and his wife moved back to Higgins in 19 7 8. Smith got an early bitter taste of ranching’s vagaries that first year back when his herd of 500 steers fell prey to rustlers. “They were worth between ten and fifteen thousand dollars,” he says. “Some years, that’s your profit.”

Smith still raises cattle, but it’s his county position – he’s been county judge since 1987 – that feeds the family. “The reason I was so hesitant about jumping into agriculture,” he says, as we sit in his sunny second-floor office in the courthouse, “was all my life I’d heard my dad and granddad talk about debt and drought. I was afraid. You look at these kids graduating, like my son, who’s 17. I don’t know if I’d want to tell him he ought to come out here and raise some cattle. It’s a good life, but you’re not independent the way you used to be. I’m sure it’s the same with farmers.”

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It’s the same for Lyndon Imke, a North Plains Electric Co-op board member who has been a wheat farmer for most of his 66 years. On his place near Follett, not far from where the Texas Panhandle tucks into its Oklahoma counterpart, Imke and his wife Joann tend to 2,600 acres of grass and farmland, 900 in wheat and 400 in milo. “The last two years are the best two years I’ve ever had, and I’ve been at it 40- something years,” he says. “It was the second best milo crop I ever had. But it was the least amount of money I’ve made in years. I couldn’t raise enough bushels to make any money. It’s the cost of stuff that makes it hard. I know city people are tired of hearing that, but city people are drawing more money than they were five years ago. We’re not.”

As we talk, Imke is unloading wheat seed, a new variety for Texas called 2137. He tosses aside his bucket, wipes his forehead with his shirt sleeve and looks out over the rolling, terraced acreage beyond the barn. “I probably have a million-dollar operation here, and I won’t clear $15,000 a year,” he says.

Costly equipment. Low margins. Uncertain markets. Why keep at it, I ask. Imke grins. “I like to play in the dirt,” he says, “and I’m proud of my black cattle. When I see a baby calf and when I see a good crop and when we have a good day, it’s enough to make me appreciate this life we have.”

I think about what Lee Schultz had told me a couple of days earlier. “This is next-year country,” she had said. “It’ll always be better next year.”

At 81, Schultz is a handsome woman with striking white hair and elegant features. The Schultz family, known throughout the area for its hardware store in nearby Shattuck, Okla., are large landholders. They’ve been farming and ranching in Lipscomb County for three generations, and Lee Schultz’s grandson Creed would like to make it a fourth. But even though he’s studying agriculture in college, it’s going to be hard for him to come back and take over the family operation. “We’re in as bad or worse shape as they were in the Great Depression,” Lee Schultz says.

Grain prices are at their lowest levels in more than 10 years, even without adjusting for inflation. “We’re getting $2.13 for a bushel of wheat, $2.37 for mile,” Schultz’s friend Joy Roberts tells me. “Machinery is clear out of this world. I mean the cost of a combine these days is bumping $200,000. Cattle prices are way down, too. It’s pretty tough.”

Roberts and Schultz are both widows and have been friends for years. (Roberts’ husband Jack worked for Schultz’s husband Vernon.) Roberts tells me about one season years ago when she and her husband and the Shultzes were waiting for the exact moment to cut the wheat. As the weekend approached, it was just about ready. “We could probably have started cutting,” Roberts recalls, “but we decided to go to Raton for the horse races instead. We figured it would be exactly right when we got back. Well, we came back, and there was no wheat. That field was just flattened from a hail storm.” The two women shake their heads and laugh these many years later. “We gambled on the horses and lost our wheat crop,” Roberts says.

In a way, of course, every year is a gamble that even a prudent manager can lose through no fault of his own.

INSERT

‘When I see a baby calf and when I see a good crop … it’s enough to make me appreciate this life we have.’
Lyndon Imke, North Plains EC Board Member

“A friend of mine, he’s retirement age,” Mildred Becker says. “He worked hard, got up at 5:30 every morning; he’s a good farmer, and he’s losing his farm. And since he was self-employed, he doesn’t have retirement.”

Lyndon Imke tells a similar story. A neighboring wheat farmer died a few years back, and his grandson took over the farm. “He was a decent farmer, had all the equipment he needed to farm, but he couldn’t make a go of it,” Imke says. “The bank sold him out last spring. With taxes the way they are, if you don’t make a crop, you’re in trouble.”

For some farmers and ranchers, oil and gas royalties mean the difference between staying on the land and packing up and moving to Pampa or Amarillo or Oklahoma City, wherever there’s a job that’s not beholden to the weather and the world commodities market. “You’ll hear people say that what makes a good farmer is that ol’ black nurse cow pumping oil,” says Georgia Couch, a lifelong Lipscomb resident.

“I suppose if you’re a landowner and have royalty payments, that could be about the only thing that keeps you going,” says wheat farmer Imke. “I know with us, our little royalty will pay our living expenses, and if we make a crop, then we’ll do all right.”

“Most young men around here work in the oil business,” Mildred Becker points out. “If we didn’t have the oil industry in this county, we’d be in really, really bad shape. The taxes keep our schools and county going.”

But as Judge Smith will tell you, oil and gas will not be the salvation of Lipscomb County. Prices are just too unpredictable. “Our tax base dropped about 2 6 percent last year,” he pointed out, “from $350 million to $270 million. Over at Spearman, it dropped 3 5 percent. The main thing was the price of oil.”

Oil and gas royalties, however welcome when the check’s in the mailbox, won’t keep people on the land. What’s more likely to happen is what’s already happening throughout the Panhandle, throughout the nation: corporate farms and corporate ranches, wedding agriculture to economy of scale, will buy up more and· more land, leaving boarded up farm houses, tumbledown barns and empty towns as the legacy of family operations. In Lipscomb County, Oklahoma-based Braum’s Dairy is buying up huge amounts of farm and ranch land to grow the alfalfa that feeds the cows that give the milk to make Braum’s Ice Cream. “Somebody told me, ‘All Mr. Braum wants is the land across the fence from him,”‘ Smith remarks. “Well, it’s just a matter of time before he owns it all.”

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The prospect of that happening worries the judge. “With absentee landowners,” he points out, “you’ve got people who’ve got the money to do agriculture, but you don’t have people who are involved in agriculture. I’m sure we’ve gained some tax base from Braum’s moving in here, but a lot of their equipment is not-taxable, because it’s all farm equipment. And it’s not just here that it’s happening. My wife’s from Nebraska. You drive up through Kansas, Nebraska, throughout the Midwest, and all these little towns have maybe a Kwik-Stop and a feed store and some little co-op, and that’s it. It’s sad.”

Fortunately, Lipscomb has something else. Across the road from the courthouse and next door to a two-room art gallery is a wooden, open-air dance platform. In the three years since it was constructed, the dance platform and the Saturday-night dances and dinners that take place there have attracted more people to Lipscomb than anything else in recent memory. The dance platform is the brainchild of Debby Opdyk and Jan Luna, two women who may hold the key to Lipscomb’s survival.

On a Tuesday afternoon in October, I wander through the picture-crowded front rooms of Naturally Yours, the Opdyke-Luna art gallery, into a kitchen in back, where I find two women making noodles from scratch, enough noodles to feed a couple of hundred people. Rolling out dough is a small, compact woman with short dark hair, a strand of it braided into a rat tail that hangs down to her waist. Debby Opdyk smiles a friendly chipmunk smile and holds out a floured hand. As she passes the flattened, floured dough to her friend Mary Gunn, a retired Lipscomb County tax collector, she talks about how she ended up in Lipscomb. She has to raise her voice to make herself heard over the squeaky hand-powered noodle maker Mary is using.

Forty-eight-year-old Opdyke grew up in Ohio, was a gospel singer for several years, and with her husband grew wheat for 1 0 years on a farm outside Shattuck. After she and her husband divorced, she ran the farm herself for six years and met Jan Luna, an ex-Marine who was living in Barstow, Calif, and working as a electronics technician. In 1994, the two women put together a Christmas store in an abandoned grain elevator in Shattuck. The effort was such a success, they decided to do it again, but they needed a better building. Debby had been to Lipscomb and remembered how pleasant the place was.

“When we’d tell people, they’d say, ‘Well, Lipscomb died a long time ago,'” OpdykE recalls. They moved
to Lipscomb anyway and set up shop in the old Bank of Lipscomb building. Built in 1908, it still has the original pressed-tin ceiling and the bank vault. Along with opening their art gallery and a nearby frame shop, they gradually came to realize that what they hoped to do was nurture a way of life that was veering toward extinction. They wanted to bring people together again as a community.

In 1995 , they held a street dance. “It was a lot of fun,” Opdyke says, “but we still loved the idea of a platform dance.” As Opdyke explains it, western towns years ago would lay out loose boards on the ground and organize Saturday-night dances. Local rancher and furniture maker Doug Ricketts designed the platform, and dozens of volunteers helped build it. “For the benches around the platform, we sold seats every three feet for a hundred dollars,” Opdyke says. “People came and branded them, and we sold them all. We also sold an old car we had to get money for the bands.”

The first few events in 1996 were, at best, semi-successful, as Opdyke and Luna experimented with ideas – a flamenco dancer one Saturday night, a classical guitarist another, even a mirror ball on one occasion. One dance attracted a total of 12 people. And then they discovered Frankie McWhorter, a Panhandle legend who lives in Lipscomb and is a fiddle-playing fool.

McWhorter, a little knot of a man with a smile that lights up his weathered face, has been a working cowboy for most of his seventy years. He’s still cowboying, despite breaking assorted bones and puncturing a lung last year when a horse fell on him. “What were you thinking when you realized your horse was going down and you’d be under him?” I asked him one afternoon. He grinned and took a drag on his ever present cigarette. “I was thinking to myself,” he drawled, “‘this is gonna smart.”‘

Frankie’s been a fiddle player for just about as long as he’s been a cowboy. He grew up around Memphis and started his musical career in the early 1950s with the Miller Bros., a popular western-swing band sponsored by a Wichita Falls furniture store. “There were nine of us in the band,” he says, in his deep, tobacco cured voice. “I remember this one time we were in Puerto Rico, and a woman came up and asked me if we was all brothers. I told her, actually we’re half brothers – same mother, different dads.”

PAGE 12

After the Miller Bros., Frankie caught on with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and then drifted back home to Memphis, where he went back to breaking horses and working in a gas station. A friend named Spud Hawkins brought him to Lipscomb. “I said, ‘This is where I want to be, right here,”‘ he tells Jim Bussard and me as we sit and talk on the dance platform in the late afternoon. “The people, the turkeys all over the place, plus I could drink the water. I was used to that ol’ gyp water down around Memphis, and the Lipscomb water clinched the deal.”

His fiddle-playing clinched the deal for Jan and Debby. “The first night Frankie played, we had a hundred people,” Debby recalls. “They were so excited. And these people still know how to dance. The two-step, the schottische – they can dance!”

But before they dance, they eat. “The first year we catered,” Debby says, “but that didn’t fly, so Jan and I started trying to do it. It was quite a process. The first meal we cooked was for six people, and it took two hours.”

Now, Jan has perfected her cowboy cobbler, and they’ve learned to use Dutch ovens – as many as 2 7 at one time – and with a lot of volunteer help, they’ve served as many as 280 people at one time. (They’ve had as many as 500 at the dance.) They try to use produce from the area – sand plums, cherries, peaches, apricots, wurst and sauerkraut, noodles – and they use local recipes. “It’s a life style,” Debby says. “It does not look good on a cost-effective sheet.”

The experience has to be authentic, Debby says. “Out here, you can see the difference between fad and ritual. Fad doesn’t come with the wisdom of ritual, and in these communities are rituals that need to be paid attention to. We have to recognize the value of a community’s rituals before the community disappears.”

Across town – which in Lipscomb means three blocks away – artist Janie Hathoot is also attracting visitors. She and her husband Joe, who runs a big feed lot outside Canadian, have restored an old two-story farmhouse and barn and transformed them into a beautiful art gallery, bed-and-breakfast and artist’s studio called the Yellow House Studio and Gallery. Artists teach week-long classes in the airy studio, and Janie organizes weekend wine-and-cheese receptions and dinners. There’s a bit of overlap between visitors to the Yellow House and those who come for the Saturday night dances, although more of Hathoot’s visitors are “city folks” from Amarillo.

Almost everyone I talked to in Lipscomb is pleased that people are coming back. A few, however, expressed concern, including Virginia Scott, a retired nurse. She and her husband Ed, who works as an x-ray technician in nearby Shattuck, moved to Lipscomb from Houston a few years ago. “Everybody likes life to be easier, with a WalMart right here and everything, but if we had that it wouldn’t be Lipscomb,” she tells me one morning while volunteering at the museum. “Right now, we have the right formula. The tourists come one day a month, then go away. Santa Fe, Taos – the artists move in, the masses follow and then they no longer have what brought them there. We don’t want to become a Taos or a Santa Fe.”

As we talk, I glance out the window of the old school that houses the museum. Although we’re in the center of town, not a person, not a structure – not even a turkey – is in sight. Lipscomb, it seems, has a ways to go before it becomes a Taos or Santa Fe. And yet, Virginia Scott has a point. When a town loses its original reasons for being, it stands to lose something vital. Enticing visitors and catering to their whims may keep a town alive, perhaps to prosper as never before, but it’s not the town it once was.

On a Saturday evening in October, a day that began gray and blustery has turned off clear and brisk. It’s the last dance of the season, and Debby and Jan wonder whether it’s too cold to be outside. After conferring with Frankie McWhorter, they decide to have the dinner in the old schoolhouse and the dance outside. As the sun goes down and a crowd begins to gather, Jim Bussard hauls in a load of wood, and Doug Ricketts builds a fire. Frankie and the band, the Smokey Valley Boys, launch into “I Can’t Stop This Juke Box in My Mind,” and the crowd around the fire adjourns to the lantern-lie dance platform. They stay on the floor as Frankie plays “The M-Bar-M Ranch Waltz,” a song that had its origins on a ranch near Miles City, Montana. “Been a lot of cowboys danced to that ol’ waltz,” he remarks. He sings a catchy western-swing version of “Mack the Knife” and then “Sentimental Journey,” the first song Jim Bussard heard as the troop ship he was on in the Pacific brought him home from World War II. Frankie always plays it for his old friend.

Frankie and the band play, and the dancers – young, old and in-between – keep dancing, with periodic trips to the fire to warm up. After about an hour, the musicians take a break. When they return, it’s so cold that their instruments are going haywire, and their fingers are turning stiff as frozen sausages. “We’ll play one last tune,” Frankie tells the crowd. “It’s one I’ve just written. I call it ‘The Wolf Creek Waltz.'”

Frankie’s fiddle is like a supple voice singing in counterpoint to the silence of the plains. I stand off to the side and watch couples swirl and glide and twirl around the platform. I watch Robert and Tootsie Rogers, in their late 70s and newly married, glide by; and Lewis Blau, maybe the best dancer in Lipscomb County, with his wife Jo; and Doug Ricketts the furniture maker and his wife Kathy, who helps Laurie Brown edit the Canadian Record; and Lewis and Rayna Deets; and Ruth Erickson, who used to live in Boston, dancing with Max “the Mad Mortician” Myer; and Denver artist Michael Untiedt and wife Donna, who have driven in from Santa Fe; and Ron and Linda Wayland; and Bobby Lewis the auctioneer.and his wife Carol; and Ronny and Arlene Walker. On this cold autumn night, under stars scattered like glittering grains of sand across a black velvet sky, I’m watching a community of people who care about each other – and, to echo Debby Opdyk, “They sure can dance!” On this night near the end of a century, whether Lipscomb will be here 5 0 years from now or a hundred years from now doesn’t really matter all that much. On this night, Lipscomb is lively.

12 TEXAS CO-OP POWER • JANUARY 2000