Wendell Lee "Curly" Eckert Oral History

Wendell Lee "Curly" Eckert Oral History

Wendell Lee "Curly" Oral History

Churchill County Museum Association

Churchill County Museum Association

September 19, 2000

Analog Cassette, Text File, Mp3 Audio

English

Recording 1, 1:03:03
Recording 2, 21:51

128kbps/44100hz

Churchill County Oral History Project
an interview with
WENDELL LEE "CURLY" ECKERT
Fallon, Nevada
conducted by
MARIAN LAVOY
September 19, 2000
This interview was transcribed by Glenda Price; edited by Norine Arciniega; final by Patricia Boden; index by Gracie Viera; supervised by Myrl Nygren, Director of the Oral History Project, Churchill County Museum
Oh
Eck
Preface
Curly Eckert is a self-made man who overcame numerous obstacles to become a respected owner of numerous Fallon ranches as well as others in central Nevada. Ambition was always his strong point, and he proved this by spending hours working to accomplish whatever goal he happened to set.
The son of Texas parents he joined the Marines at seventeen and was eventually sent to the munitions depot at Hawthorne, Nevada where he met and married Annabell Wilslef. Uncle Sam called him to the South Pacific where he hit the beach at Iwo Jima and was wounded. He was given little time to recover before being shipped out again. When the war was over Curly returned to Fallon where his wife and son were living. He soon saw the opportunity offered in the land-leveling business and through the frugalness of himself and his wife he was able to purchase the necessary heavy equipment. As the years passed he branched from land leveling to clearing sagebrush and seeding crested wheat for an important government reclamation program. As this program wound down he returned to ranching and land leveling and is still active in both processes. He worries about the loss of irrigation water in Churchill County and has some strong words relative to this situation.
He does find a bit of time for card playing and fishing which are two recreational devices that he has certainly earned after all his years of hard work.
Interview with Wyndell Lee Eckert
This is Marian Herman Lavoy of the Churchill County Museum Oral History Project interviewing Wyndell Lee "Curly" Eckert The date is September 19, 2000, and I am doing the interview in the annex of the museum.
LAVOY: Good morning, Mr. Eckert.
ECKERT: Good morning.
LAVOY: Do you mind if I call you Curly?
ECKERT: No. Everybody else does.
LAVOY: All right. Curly, can you tell me where you were born?
ECKERT: I was born in Lubbock, Texas.
LAVOY: And when?
ECKERT: June 3, 1925.
LAVOY: I surmise that you had all of your schooling and everything in Texas?
ECKERT: In Amarillo.
LAVOY: What was your father's name?
ECKERT: George Eckert.
LAVOY: And where was he born?
ECKERT: He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
LAVOY: And your mother?
ECKERT: She was born in Missouri. I don't really recall the name of the town.
LAVOY: And her name was what?
ECKERT: Lela Blanch McDaniel.
LAVOY: Did you have brothers and sisters?
ECKERT: Yeah, fourteen of them. [laughing]
LAVOY: Oh, my, that's quite a group. We won't go into to all of their names and whatnot. When did you leave Lubbock, Texas?
ECKERT: I was only about three months old when I left Lubbock and moved back to Amarillo. I lived in Amarillo until I went into the Marine Corps in 1942.
LAVOY: You enlisted in the Marines?
ECKERT: Yes, ma'am.
LAVOY: Where were you sent?
ECKERT: First of all, I took my physical in Oklahoma City, and then I went through boot camp in San Diego.
LAVOY: And from there?
ECKERT: I got out of boot camp and was transferred to Hawthorne, Nevada.
LAVOY: Hawthorne! You didn't go overseas?
ECKERT: Not at that time. I just come out of boot camp and did some guard duty in Hawthorne. Was there for about eight months. Then I was shipped back down to Camp Pendleton and took my training there. Then went overseas from there; on January 3, 1943 we were aboard ship.
LAVOY: Where did you end up?
ECKERT: In the South Pacific. We had our rest base, they called it, on Maui. Our first operation was Roi Namur in the Mariana Islands, and we went back to our rest base. When we come back from there to Saipan and Tinian and then back to our rest bases. Then February 19, 1945, we headed for Iwo Jima.
LAVOY: Were you in the Battle of Iwo Jima?
ECKERT: Yes, I got hit in the first wave in, and I was wounded the first day. I went back board ship. I was supposed to go back in, but our ship
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got rammed by another ship, so they headed us immediately for Guam.
LAVOY: Did you get a chance to see the raising of the flag?
ECKERT: Nah, I was aboard ship when they raised it.
LAVOY: Did you see it?
ECKERT: Yes, I did.
LAVOY: What was your reaction?
ECKERT: Well, it was quite a thrill.
LAVOY: There are quite a number of books that are coming out now about the men that were responsible for raising it. Have you read any of those?
ECKERT: I've read a few of them, yes.
LAVOY: You were aboard ship, and then where were you sent?
ECKERT: We headed to Guam. Then, after Iwo Jima was secured, I joined my officers back in Maui, the Fourth Division.
LAVOY: And from there, where did you go?
ECKERT: From there we were drawing our gear to go into Japan proper, but the atomic bomb came by, and we were sent home.
LAVOY: When you were sent home, where was home?
ECKERT: Well, [laughing] my wife was living here, so this is where I came back to.
LAVOY: When you were stationed in Hawthorne, you must have met your wife.
ECKERT: Yes, I did. I met her on a blind date. Five weeks later we were married.
LAVOY: Tell us about this blind date. Did you come up from Hawthorne to
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Fallon?
ECKERT: No, her dad was working in Hawthorne at that time.
LAVOY: Where? In munitions?
ECKERT: Yes. About the fifth day I was there, a couple of buddies I'd met there had been dating a couple of other girls, and they brought their friends along, and I met her.
LAVOY: What was her name?
ECKERT: Annabelle Wilslef.
LAVOY: Was she from Fallon?
ECKERT: She was born in Yerington, spent most of life in Reno. Then in 1938 they bought a ranch down there, so she went to school here only about a year. Then her folks went to work in Hawthorne, so that's where I had the pleasure of meeting her.
LAVOY: Well, that's very interesting. You said you got married after five weeks?
ECKERT: Urn-hum.
LAVOY: Tell me, I know you had your duty and everything down there in Hawthorne. She was living in Hawthorne. Is that correct?
ECKERT: She was living in Babbitt at the housing project in Hawthorne, and her dad was working at the base.
LAVOY: Where did you go on your dates?
ECKERT: We just went to Hawthorne, and we never come out of Hawthorne. I did come up with her and her folks one time to the ranch here on the weekend. Other than that, why, my stay in Nevada at that time was Hawthorne and one time in Fallon.
LAVOY: Where were you married?
ECKERT: In Hawthorne.
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LAVOY: By whom? Do you remember?
ECKERT: By the justice of the peace. I don't remember his name, but my wife still does.
LAVOY: Who were your attendants?
ECKERT: We had a double wedding with another Marine and his girl.
LAVOY: Do you remember the names?
ECKERT: Her name was Betty Richards, and his name was Lyle Kuloff.
LAVOY: Where did you honeymoon?
ECKERT: Right there. We didn't honeymoon. [laughing]
LAVOY: Then you were shipped out. Is that right?
ECKERT: Yes, I got furlough transfer in June, I think, and then I reported back to Camp Pendleton, and we formed a Fourth Marine Division. I was in it until they broke the Fourth Division up.
LAVOY: So, you were married January 6, 1943?
ECKERT: That's right.
LAVOY: And you and your wife were together just for a very short time.
ECKERT: Oh, about three or four months.
LAVOY: And then you were shipped out?
ECKERT: Right.
LAVOY: Well, I can understand why You were coming back to this area after the War was over. When you came back to this area, did you come to Hawthorne, or did you come to Fallon?
ECKERT: I came to Fallon. I never went back in the Marines. I was
discharged at Camp Pendleton, and my wife met me in Reno. We spent the night in Reno, and then the next day we came back to Fallon.
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LAVOY: Where did you stay in Fallon?
ECKERT: At their folks' ranch. Fact is, I kind of had it bought and didn't even know it, I guess. [laughing] Her dad had kind of set in his mind that I was going to buy the ranch. Fact is they'd already had my wife make a down payment on a tractor. [laughing]
LAVOY: My goodness gracious! Tell me exactly where the ranch was.
ECKERT: On Gummow Drive about three miles west of town and a mile north.
LAVOY: Was that considered your place or the Wilslef place?
ECKERT: Well, go back to Lawry and Streeper. Gummow at one time owned it, but I think Lawry the sheriff was the Lawry and Streeper place around 1900.
LAVOY: What were your observations about Fallon when you came back in 1945?
ECKERT: I thought it was probably the nicest little valley in the United States. Lots of opportunity, lots of people, very friendly people.
LAVOY: It hasn't changed much in that respect.
ECKERT: Well, it's got a lot more people in it now. [laughing]
LAVOY: Yes, that's true. What were you raising on that little farm?
ECKERT: Well, we had a little dab of hay and mostly sagebrush and sand hills until I started leveling it.
LAVOY: What did you use for leveling?
ECKERT: My father-in-law down at the Fallon flour mill about two months before I came home . . . There used to be a Fallon flour mill, and they had the Case machinery dealership, and he was down there buying some chicken feed. There were three Case tractors that came in all at one time, and they were on order, but I don't know who the person was, but my father-in-law was standing there. He came up to Mr. Kendrick and told him he couldn't take it 'cause his wife wouldn't let him have it. It was too much money, so my
father-in-law told him, "Give me a couple of hours. I'll go home. I think my daughter'll make you a deposit on that." So he went home and had her make a deposit on my tractor. I still was a couple of months from coming home.
LAVOY: How much was the tractor?
ECKERT: At that time it was twenty three hundred and ninety seven dollars.
LAVOY: What are they now?
ECKERT: That size tractor now would cost you eighty, ninety thousand.
LAVOY: Oh, my goodness! So, then, she put the down payment on the tractor.
ECKERT: It was actually a hold. That's what it was. She just put up a deposit, and then when I came home, we finished making a down payment.
LAVOY: You finished making the down payment, I'm sure, from what you had saved while you were in the Marine Corps.
ECKERT: Mostly what my wife had saved. I'd sent her a little money, and she worked a little bit, but she'd been living with her folks so we were lucky that way. We was able to save most everything we made.
LAVOY: Well, that's great. What fields did you first decide that you were going to take the sagebrush and the sand from?
ECKERT: There was only one field that was actually leveled, and it was poorly leveled. I left it that way 'cause it was a hundred and six acres, and there was only about twenty-three acres being farmed out of it.
LAVOY: And that was alfalfa?
ECKERT: Alfalfa, yes. So, I left the field that they'd been irrigating for years in small checks. That was the part that was on the west side of the ranch. So then I went on the east side of the house and started leveling the sand hill over there, and then after I got that part leveled, then I went back and re-leveled the fields that were in
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when I came there.
LAVOY: Explain the process to me of how you level sagebrush and make a level field out of it. What machinery do you use on your tractor to do it?
ECKERT: That time I started out with a ten-foot Atlas scraper behind a LA Case. I worked most all the time I had in the daytime, and then I'd go out and work till midnight at night.
LAVOY: m My goodness, how could you see where you were going at night?
ECKERT: It had lights, and the sand hill was big enough that I had no trouble finding the cut, and the holes were big enough that I had no trouble finding the holes.
LAVOY: My goodness. Now there's laser, but in that day and age there wasn't.
ECKERT: No, there wasn't.
LAVOY: How did you know you had it level?
ECKERT: Well, just by eye.
LAVOY: And then when you turned the water in, you knew whether your eye was correct or not.
ECKERT: Right. We did some finishing with the water. In other words we started irrigating, and we stay right with the water with the tractor and the scraper ahead of it. I was fortunate I got friends with Mr. Mills.
LAVOY: Which Mr. Mills?
ECKERT: Percy Mills. He'd been in land-leveling business for years with horses, and this time he'd bought a 13-7 Cat and had a 16 big huge scraper at that time, sixteen-foot BG scraper behind it, and I got to running it at night for him. Then he was doing a job over by me, and I'd run it from that place to my place at night and work it at my place all night and then take it back in the morning. At that time there wasn't any oiled roads in between us, so we could walk it right down the road.
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LAVOY: Did you have to pay him for using it at night?
ECKERT: I worked it. I helped him keep the machinery up, and I helped him on some of the leveling he did.
LAVOY: So in return he let you level your land.
ECKERT: This was just a part of it. I did a lot more with his than I could do with mine, and it worked out great.
LAVOY: That's wonderful. Then, after you had your land all leveled, that would have been how many acres now?
ECKERT: I wound up with about seventy-five acres out of the 80. It was one hundred and sixty acres. And the twenty-six had come off of originally another piece of property. It was a higher bench, so I didn't do much with it for four or five years. Then I eventually worked up and got it all leveled, so out of the hundred and sixty acres, I had over a hundred acres in. Then I started doing custom leveling.
LAVOY: With your own, then you planted it with alfalfa.
ECKERT: Alfalfa and grain.
LAVOY: Who did you sell this to, or did you use it yourself?
ECKERT: I had a few cows, and I used all the hay then. It wasn't producing a whole lot for a while. Then I got to where I was milking thirty-five, forty cows.
LAVOY: So, you had a small dairy?
ECKERT: Right.
LAVOY: What breed did you have?
ECKERT: Holsteins. Then in 1948 I did build a grade-A barn.
LAVOY: Oh! Did you have to do all the milking yourself, or did you have people hired?
ECKERT: No, I did it all myself.
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LAVOY: Oh, my goodness!
ECKERT: My wife would do the washing up and that part of it and help me out in the barn, but she never milked a cow in her life.
LAVOY: You'd have to milk two complete sessions.
ECKERT: Right. Then when we got through milking, I'd just drop the dirty equipment, and she'd clean that up and I'd go off and do custom leveling.
LAVOY: You were a mighty ambitious man.
ECKERT: I put in a lot of seventeen, eighteen hour days.
LAVOY: I bet you did. Who did you sell your milk to?
ECKERT: I started out selling it to the MPA which was the Milk Producers'
Association that they had here in Fallon at that time.
LAVOY: About how much did you get for it?
ECKERT: I can't remember.
LAVOY: Not very much, I'm sure.
ECKERT: No, but it kept my bills paid. That's one thing about the dairy business. We always had an income every month.
LAVOY: Did you have to bring the milk to them, or did they come and get it from you?
ECKERT: They picked it up. That was grade B milk.
LAVOY: What do you mean grade B milk?
ECKERT: It was for butter, cheese. They weren't selling it for human consumption.
LAVOY: You mean for drinking milk?
ECKERT: That's right.
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LAVOY: Oh, I didn't realize that there was that difference in the milk.
ECKERT: Yeah. Then they also had, a lot of them that were just small herds that were milking and separating and selling the cream. A lot of that was shipped to Tomales Bay in California. They used to have to bring that into the depot and ship that to Tomales Bay.
LAVOY: How long did you keep this dairy going?
ECKERT: I built the grade-A barn in 1948, and then I kept going until I got pretty big into the land leveling stuff, and then I sold it in 1961. I started doing sagebrush plowing and crested wheat seeding for the BLM (Bureau of Land Management).
LAVOY: With your dairy going all those years, how big did your herd get?
ECKERT: I got up to about forty-five cows. As far as milking cows.
LAVOY: And you did it all yourself.
ECKERT: Yeah. Me and my wife did all the stuff.
LAVOY: That's very admirable.
ECKERT: I went out a couple of summers on BLM jobs . I was lucky enough to have a fellow to take care of it the first year, and the next year a neighbor for three or four months. I'd come in and do the irrigating and then I'd go back out to the job. They milked all summer.
LAVOY: You did a lot of leveling around here. We'll discuss that before we go into the BLM work that you did. Where did you level around here in Fallon?
ECKERT: There wasn't many places I haven't leveled on. [laughing] My first job was on Solias Road for Tom Solias. I worked over there for probably about three months. As I went along I kept picking up little jobs. There weren't too many chances in the valley. This was the start of the tractor era.
LAVOY: In the forties?
ECKERT: Yes. There were still lots of teams. Most people were still using
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horses and horse-drawn equipment to put up their hay and to level with.
LAVOY: Now, tell me this, this horse-drawn equipment--I know all about putting up the hay with horses--but, this leveling of land with the horses, what do they drag after the horses to level the land?
ECKERT: They had what they called a tail board, and they had Fresnoes, and they had slips.
LAVOY: What is a slip?
ECKERT: A slip is just a big shovel pulled by horses. It loads up and then you pull up on it, and it trips itself. It dumps the load.
LAVOY: It dumps the load to the side?
ECKERT: No. No, it just turns away from it. It flops over away from it.
LAVOY: Oh, I see. Tell me exactly what a Fresno does.
ECKERT: It does the same thing. The only thing is the slip is kind of a round shape in front, and a Fresno--they had two-horse Fresnoes, had four-horse Fresnoes, and I'm sure they had six-horse Fresnoes.
LAVOY: Explain a Fresno to me.
ECKERT: It's a bucket that's probably, well, a two-horse Fresno would probably be about four foot wide. It had sidewalls and a back on it, and you'd load it up. You could drag it without having to pull dirt in front of it. It just packed the lower. Then it'd tip the handle up and cut in and dump itself just like the slip did.
LAVOY: Oh, I see. And then you used your eye for leveling. ECKERT: Right.
LAVOY: And then irrigated and went ahead of the irrigation. Is that right?
ECKERT: Yes. Percy Mills kind of started that. That's the first time I ever saw it, and then the tailboard, that was mainly the finishing tool. The slip and the Fresno was more for ditches and that kind of stuff, but the tailboard was just a wide blade. It had a board on the back
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with a chain that the operators would ride on. Then they used the other foot to hold the tilt on the tailboard. Then when they got ready to dump, he'd just lift that foot up and the tailboard would tip up, and it would dump the dirt. Or you could hold it and just let it come out as you wanted it to come out. Instead of all at once, you could spread it out.
LAVOY: With the teams of horses in front, wasn't this a tremendous load for them to pull?
ECKERT: Oh, yeah. Of course, I didn't really get into that. If I had the farmers' horses, I probably wouldn't have stayed with it too long. I was raised on a farm in Texas, and I had enough runaways when I was a little kid that I've never forgotten. So I wasn't too much into the horses. I was fortunate enough to start out with the tractors to start with. The first year or two, we had a couple of teams that we did the haying with.
LAVOY: What kind of horses did you have on the team? Just regular draft horses?
ECKERT: Yeah, just regular draft horses.
LAVOY: And you kept them at your house?
ECKERT: Right. And then we'd trade off with my neighbors when we hayed. They had a team or two. One neighbor named Bill Law and another named Mello, and we used to trade off for haying.
LAVOY: Did your wife have to cook for the hay crew?
ECKERT: When we was haying at our place, yes. At that time they fed two meals a day. She'd feed dinner and supper, and when I was over helping them hay, they fed me dinner and supper.
LAVOY: That's the way things were done in those days. ECKERT: Right.
LAVOY: And then when you were fortunate enough to get your own tractor, then you went out, and, as you say, Mr. Solias was one of the first ones that you did. What were some of the other ones that you remember that you did?
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ECKERT: There's so many of them. I can't remember exactly what the second place was, but I did some work for Travis which they later on started doing custom work themselves. Bob Minner was the grandson. I worked a lot with him when I first come here. He was a young boy at that time. I did quite a lot of work on their place. I did quite a lot of work on the Lohse place, and then me and my father-in-law wound up leasing it for two or three years. I just worked pretty much all over the valley. Sometimes I'd work two or three weeks on a place. Sometimes I'd just go for half a day or whatever.
LAVOY: Well, that didn't give you much time for any entertainment, did it?
ECKERT: I didn't really need much entertainment. [laughing] I was too busy trying to get ahead.
LAVOY: Well, it seems to me that you did a good job of it. When did you first get into this working for BLM?
ECKERT: 1957. I stumbled onto a bid form to--another friend of mine that was doing a little bit of work with a dragline so I went over on a tour to Ely, and I thought I would venture into it, and I did. I got the bid, and I thought I probably bought the biggest plow that was ever made in the world which was an eighteen-foot International disk at that time. I bid thirty-two hundred acres of plowing which with that eighteen-foot disk I was going to get that done overnight.
LAVOY: Now, the eighteen disk was BLM or yours?
ECKERT: Mine. I had to buy it. When I got the bid, I had to buy it.
LAVOY: This bid was for White Pine County, and for thirty-two hundred acres that you were to plant in . . .
ECKERT: I just got the plowing contract for it at that time. The bidding contract come later, and I didn't get it. I missed it by three cents an acre. I had to buy that eighteen-foot disk.
LAVOY: Tell me, an eighteen-foot disk, what did that cost you at that time?
ECKERT: As I remember it was twenty-seven hundred dollars.
LAVOY: Twenty-seven hundred?
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ECKERT: Right. But by that time I had worked up and got a couple of D7 Cats (Caterpiller tractors). I wound up, I had about ten at a later time, but this time, 1957, I had accumulated two. And one of them was this Percy Mills'. He'd died in 1957, and I bought it at his estate, so I wound up buying that D-7 Cat that I'd run back when I first came here.
LAVOY: So that made you three.
ECKERT: Not at that time. That was my first Cat. By the time I got that bid, I'd picked up the second one. I bought that eighteen-foot International disk for twenty-seven hundred dollars and thought that was the biggest thing in the world.
LAVOY: What did your wife think about you leaving home and going down to Ely for a length of time?
ECKERT: She was always very faithful for going along with anything I did. She never held me back. She always helped me.
LAVOY: That's very admirable. Did she stay on the ranch and keep the ranch going?
ECKERT: She did some and then she came out and did some cooking. We batched in between. Me and two other young gentlemen. One of them is dead.
LAVOY: Who was that?
ECKERT: Leslie Johnson whose brother was Roy Johnson. We went out and we did this job.
LAVOY: Where was it in the Ely area?
ECKERT: There was two pieces. There was a piece that they called
Heckathorne. I don't know if you know where Heckathorne is. It was a maintenance station between Ely and Pioche. Then the remainder of the thirty-two hundred acres--there was eight hundred and some acres there, and the remainder of it was over, I think, in what they call Pony Creek or something, just before you get into Pioche.
LAVOY: Tell me, why was the BLM having you level this ground? What
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was the reason for it?
ECKERT: This wasn't leveling. This was tearing out the sagebrush and planting it to crested wheat for range for the people that had the range rights. They would be doing this crested wheat seeding program.
LAVOY: Why did they choose crested wheat?
ECKERT: I can't really tell you this. I know that it doesn't take very much rainfall. It puts on quite a bit of growth. It did very well, particularly in Elko and Ely. I've been back several times and seen some of the seedings. It's actually done very well.
LAVOY: So, they have this wheat put in. How long did it have to grow before they could turn animals out on it?
ECKERT: They'd plant it this year and next year they'd let it on it.
LAVOY: That quickly?
ECKERT: Urn-hum. They had to fence it, all this, and then get water to it, but within one or two years this was actually a big fenced pasture. So what it amounted to was it was just a big fenced pasture for the rancher that had the range rights. It did real well.
LAVOY: You did this during the summer, or what time of the year were you out doing this?
ECKERT: We got to where we most of the time go out in May and come back in about the last part of October or November, the time the seeding was done.
LAVOY: This was as you got into it later, but as this point in time when you were doing this in Ely, when did you go out?
ECKERT: I went out in the latter part of May. I didn't get back that year until around October, either.
LAVOY: Your wife and your father-in-law kept your ranch going?
ECKERT: Right. That year.
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LAVOY: Did your father-in-law live on the ranch with you?
ECKERT: Yes, he did. We'd already moved in a little house. He was living in the little house on the Stain ranch at that time.
LAVOY: He and his wife?
ECKERT: Uh-huh.
LAVOY: So, then they gave your wife some help in running the ranch? ECKERT: Right.
LAVOY: And at that point in time you still had the cattle? ECKERT: Right.
LAVOY: And so they were helping with the milking, too.
ECKERT: My father-in-law did the milking that year.
LAVOY: When you found out that you did not get the contract for seeding the following year, did you ask for another contract for leveling?
ECKERT: This didn't have anything to do with that. This was just tearing out sagebrush and seeding. When I bid the first bid, then that automatically put me on the mailing list. So after that I got every bid that they mailed out on the plowing and sagebrush.
LAVOY: Where did these BLM bids come from?
ECKERT: At that time Salt Lake City was the bidding office, and then a later date they changed it to Portland, but I always got my money from Denver, so that was the main thing. [laughing]
LAVOY: Approximately what did they pay you when you first started with this leveling?
ECKERT: You bid it by the acre. They have a piece of brush. They want to plow it out. Sometimes they would bid in culmination with the seeding. You'd bid the plowing and the seeding, or you would just bid the plowing by itself. When I first started out a good round figure would probably be about three dollars and a half an acre,
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would be discing out the brush and be hitting it twice.
LAVOY: Doesn't seem like very much to me.
ECKERT: It wouldn't be very much today, but it was quite a bit at that time. Then the seeding when I first started was right at a dollar an acre.
LAVOY: Did they supply the seed?
ECKERT: They supplied the seed. I furnished the equipment and all the rest of it.
LAVOY: It just seems odd to me for that little amount of money that you could keep your equipment going with the gas and the oil and everything else.
ECKERT: I managed to do it and did all right with it.
LAVOY: And now the gas at that point in time was about how much a gallon?
ECKERT: Probably around fifteen cents.
LAVOY: Unbelievable with what it is now. And then the oil would be?
ECKERT: I think at that time we were paying around a dollar a gallon for oil, so it should be about twenty-five cents a quart.
LAVOY: For the upkeep of the machines, did you do all of that?
ECKERT: Me and the men that were helping me, we usually kept the equipment up. All the welding. Basically all we did was buy the parts. Sometimes we couldn't buy parts. We had to make parts.
LAVOY: Where did you learn to do this?
ECKERT: By trial and error, I guess. Something happen, why, we just dove into it and fixed it. Did whatever we needed to do.
LAVOY: If you had a part that was broken that you couldn't repair, what did you have to do? Did you have to go into the closest town, or how did you handle that?
18
ECKERT: To start with I'd usually call in. There was a dealer here.
LAVOY: Who was the dealer?
ECKERT: The International dealer. There was two partners. I can't remember. Ben Harrison was one of them and Lanning was the other one. The other one I also bought that first disk from. I'd call in, and by the time I got here, they'd do their best to try to have the parts for me. After we found out what parts were broke mostly, they stocked them for me. Sometimes they even had to go clear to Stockton and pick up the parts because we needed them in a hurry.
LAVOY: You had a nice relationship with them.
ECKERT: Right, and at that time you were pretty close to the dealers.
LAVOY: One thing that has just dawned on me, how did you store your gas?
ECKERT: I had a couple of five hundred gallon tanks. One on a trailer that we could pull around the field, and then I had one on a stand. Then the distributors would deliver the fuel out to us.
LAVOY: What distributors did you use?
ECKERT: When I started out, I was using Standard Oil, then I went to Union Oil. Then Union Oil got to where, I'd just call them and tell them I was going to use so much fuel on this job, I needed two thousand gallons in storage, and when I got there all I'd do is call them. They'd bring the storage out and the tanks, and it was taken care of.
LAVOY: Who had the Union Oil dealership?
ECKERT: I can't remember the ones that had the dealership over there, but I bid most of it through Biffle here. He was my local dealer here. I'd just call him and tell him and Union Oil Company would take it from there.
LAVOY: Would he bring from it here, or would he get it through the town closest to you?
ECKERT: It would be the town closest. If I was in Ely, the distributor there would deliver it to me. He would make the deal through Union Oil
19
Company wherever that was. Sacramento or wherever it was. From there they would get hold of the dealer closest to the job, and that's who serviced me.
LAVOY: It makes me wonder how the drivers could find you way out there in the boonies.
ECKERT: I always had to give them directions.
LAVOY: I bet you did. [laughing]
ECKERT: Relationships was a lot different then. You were a lot more one on one with each other. The fact is the last time I did my last job I was a number just like the rest of the federal government now. But, up until 1968, you were still a human with the government.
LAVOY: You did this, then, regularly every year?
ECKERT: For eleven years.
LAVOY: That would be from 1957 to 1968. You kept your ranch here and everything?
ECKERT: Right.
LAVOY: And your father-in-law kept track of it for you.
ECKERT: In 1961 I sold the cows because I was getting too involved with this. I could still come in and do the irrigating and most of the haying.
LAVOY: Well, and by that time your father-in-law was getting up in years.
ECKERT: Right. Fact is he was getting past the stage where he could do it.
LAVOY: Did your wife come and join you every year when you went out?
ECKERT: She mostly run back and forth. She'd spend what time she could out there. Then she'd run out our supplies. Then my daughter and daughter-in-law were doing most of the cooking out there after about the third year.
LAVOY: When did you and your wife have your first child?
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ECKERT: My first child was born in [December 26] 1943.
LAVOY: Who was that?
ECKERT: That was David. In 1946 [August 9] my daughter was born.
LAVOY: And her name?
ECKERT: Sharon.
LAVOY: So by the time that you were really into crested wheat bit, your children must have been getting close to eighteen?
ECKERT: When I took my first bid, David would have been fourteen. He got married when he was twenty, and by that time we were into it pretty big. My daughter was married at the same time.
LAVOY: Who did she many?
ECKERT: She married Lanny Vesty.
LAVOY: Is that somebody from Fallon?
ECKERT: They moved into Fallon, I think, in about 1945.
LAVOY: Is that V-e-s-t-y?
ECKERT: Well, [laughing] my grandson spells his V-e-s-t-e-y, and his dad spells his V-e-s-t-y, so I don't . . . [laughing]
LAVOY: Did your son ever go out and help you with this?
ECKERT: Oh, yes. After we got into, maybe we'd have jobs going two or three places. He'd run one, and my son-in-law would usually follow up with the seeding and stuff He'd run that part of it.
LAVOY: When did you really get into having so many tractors?
ECKERT: Probably about 1962.
LAVOY: And then how many tractors did you have, if I'm using the right word, Caterpillars?
21
ECKERT: Right, Caterpillar tractors.
LAVOY: Did you have at that time?
ECKERT: I had five Cats and five strings of plows at that time.
LAVOY: Five Cats, how big were they?
ECKERT: D7s and D8s.
LAVOY: And then the others. What did you say?
ECKERT: The strings of plows.
LAVOY: How wide were they?
ECKERT: We were pulling thirty-six foot of plows behind each Cat.
LAVOY: Thirty-six feet of plows. Does that mean wide? ECKERT: Right.
LAVOY: Those are huge.
ECKERT: We built a hitch where we could hook two plows side by side, and they're each eighteen foot wide. From the original disk we changed over to what they called Wheatland plows. The difference being Wheatland plows was only one beam of disk, and the disk is two beams. You got one going one angle and the other one going the other angle. But with the Wheatland plow you could set a more severe angle into them and get a lot more pull in the brush. Do a better job of pulling them out.
LAVOY: You seem to be always in the eastern part of the state. Why did the BLM not do the same thing with the Fallon area?
ECKERT: In the first place the terrain wasn't suitable.
LAVOY: Why?
ECKERT: Mostly, you're seeding this on the slopes of the hill.
LAVOY: And why?
22
ECKERT: You're down in more alkali here. You're lower elevation. The rainfall, particularly Elko and Ely. I did it in Battle Mountain, we did it in Pioche, we did it in Caliente, but there was never an area in Churchill County that I put into crested wheat. The closest we got to that was Austin.
LAVOY: You mentioned that they did some irrigation after you planted, or did I misunderstand you?
ECKERT: You misunderstood me. There's no irrigation.
LAVOY: You just relied upon rain?
ECKERT: That's right. You was up actually up on the side of a mountain where they put these seedings.
LAVOY: Around Ely there, were you by Mount Wheeler?
ECKERT: We were around it. We weren't real close to it. I never really got to know the area of Ely. I could go back now, and I couldn't find my way back to some of the plowings. I did a lot of plowing out of Ely, but the majority of them I did out of the Elko District. I did an awful lot of plowing there.
LAVOY: Where in the Elko area did you plow?
ECKERT: Jiggs, Strawberry Valley, out by Wilson Reservoir, Tuscarora. We went clear up into almost to the Idaho border toward Jackpot, right out of Thousand Springs.
LAVOY: Sierra Pacific bought that for many years.
ECKERT: And we was actually on that road going to the O'Neil Mountains, and then I did go into Idaho right across the border from there, too. Fact is I bought a strip in Idaho right along the Nevada-Idaho border.
LAVOY: You certainly were a busy man with that. When you stop and think, how many thousand acres do you think that you actually put into crested wheat?
ECKERT: I probably plowed, I would say, pretty close to five hundred thousand acres, and I probably seeded very near that same amount.
23
Sometimes we seeded a lot of the burns where they had like a year like this. At that time they were taking advantage of this crested wheat, putting that in crested wheat to hold down the erosion and stuff.
LAVOY: A question that I'm just wondering, you planted the crested wheat. Usually when soil is disturbed, that darn cheat grass comes in right afterwards. Was that a problem?
ECKERT: Not too much. The crested wheat seemed to hold it back. It seemed to be competition, and that's one thing about cheat grass. It doesn't tolerate too much competition. Most of the time when you see the cheat grass, that's because there's nothing else there. There's several things that don't take much competition to keep them out. If they're not disturbed or nothing, why cheat grass and halogeten and a lot of this stuff comes in. Even, say, for goatheads or puncture vine, whatever you want to call it, they don't stand much competition either. If you notice, most of the time, you'll see even sandburs same way in the hay ground. If they got a good thin hay there's no sandburs. The sandburs come in on levees and open spots there on ditch banks, that kind of stuff.
LAVOY: Something that I am just wondering about. You planted all of this. Did you ever go back to see the animals that were grazing on it?
ECKERT: Oh, yes. I've been back. You just naturally go back by some of them a couple of years later whenever you're doing another job, and you see the cattle and stuff out on them. They basically started out just using it for fall feed. In other words when they brought the cattle down out of the high country, they'd bring them in the crested wheat because basically all they eat off of this is the heads, two or three inches of it and the head. But, then later on, they got to where they were using them early in the spring. One of the reasons being it had kept the cows and the bulls together, and they were getting a better breeding program, and they were getting better calf crops. Then they'd go up in the hills, and then they'd come back to them in the fall.
LAVOY: Did you see many deer and antelope and whatnot?
ECKERT: Different areas. We'd see a lot of deer. We'd go from here to Ely, and from Austin on you'd see deer in the early years. Towards the last, I don't know why, but you very seldom saw deer, even up
24
over Secret Pass or in the Elko area where there was good deer range. You wouldn't hardly see any deer, and I don't why. We'd go all summer and maybe see one doe and one fawn or something.
LAVOY: Of course, with our drought years that made a big difference with the wild animal thing, too. When did you finally decide that you had had enough of this, or did the government stop their crested wheat program?
ECKERT: After about 1966, that's when the government started to change severely. When I started on these bids, you'd go to the Battle Mountain District, you'd go to the Ely District, you'd go to the Elko District, and there was about five people that did everything. That was the secretary, the manager, the whole works. By the time I quit in 1968 there was about fifty-five people in every office. This is when I became a number. I just got sick of it. You didn't talk to the same people twice. I just figured I had enough of it.
LAVOY: I think that after you'd plowed over five hundred thousand acres that you would have had enough of it.
ECKERT: But, then the thing of it, it was just the way that the government changed. The fact is, a couple of years later I got a letter from the bidding office asking me why the people weren't responding to their bids.
LAVOY: And you told them.
ECKERT: I told them just exactly my feelings on it. They were bureaucrats. That's what it was. There was no personal feelings anymore, no personal involvement. When we first started out, I could call up the district manager. I could get an answer on the phone. He knew where he was at, I knew where I was at. Towards the last they sent a man out there that should be able to give me an answer. Well, I gotta go find out, and maybe I wouldn't see him again for two weeks. I didn't need an answer in two weeks, I needed an answer that day. It just got very hard to work with.
LAVOY: I imagine that it did. What did you do with all of these tractors that you had?
ECKERT: I just come in and went into the land leveling big time here.
25
LAVOY: Oh, you just switched from doing BLM land leveling to land leveling here.
ECKERT: You're kind of getting this mixed up. The BLM isn't land leveling. All you're doing there is plowing and seeding. We're not doing the leveling.
LAVOY: Okay.
ECKERT: I was coming in, like in the fall, coming in, say, in November, then I'd come in and I'd go ahead and work on land leveling here through about May, and then in May I'd go back out again to the BLM. I'd park my carryalls behind the Cats, put plows behind them. That was the difference.
LAVOY: Oh, I see. The leveling that you did here, did you do work out at the Base when they were starting that?
ECKERT: I never did do any of the base work. I just leveled mainly for the farmers. I did do a little bit for TCID [Truckee-Carson Irrigation District], and I helped worked on the county roads for the road department on occasion. I was just available to do whatever somebody needed me to do.
LAVOY: I think you were a very ambitious man. I think after all that work in the summer, I would've come in for the winter and rested. [laughing]
When you decided that you were going to stop doing this seeding, did your son-in-law and your son stop with you?
ECKERT: Yes, and then they stayed working for me with the land leveling.
LAVOY: Oh, they did!
ECKERT: In 1967 I bought another ranch down Pasture Road about a
hundred sixty acres down there, and in 1969 I bought another two hundred and forty acres on Sheckler Road, and we leveled them all.
LAVOY: Whose ranch did you buy on Sheckler?
ECKERT: Actually, it goes back to Ferguson, I think, was one of the first
26
owners in it, and then [Walt] Whitaker and I can't remember the other guy's name, but I bought it from a man by the name of Leland Civish, but he was only there for about five or six years. Dodge bought it from Art Bevins, and he had a casino over in Yerington. Then he farmed it for a few years and Civish bought it from him, and then I bought it from Civish.
LAVOY: Did you improve the property?
ECKERT: I just completely made a different place out of it.
LAVOY: Did you and your wife build a new home?
ECKERT: No, there was a new home built there in 1953. Mr. Bevins built a home on it which is a nice home. Before we moved out, we'd built a new home off of Gummow.
LAVOY: Did you sell your Gummow property?
ECKERT: Not at that time. Then in 1972 I bought nine hundred acres out in Antelope Valley.
LAVOY: My goodness, you were a land baron, weren't you?
ECKERT: Then my son moved out there, and we kept that for eleven years. Then we sold that and moved back to Fallon.
LAVOY: Tell me exactly where Antelope Valley is.
ECKERT: The turnoff is just half way between Austin and Battle Mountain. I don't know what the number of the road is now, but it was Altamira Farms. It was created about the same time I bought that out there. They had everything right along the highway. They had twelve, fourteen thousand acres there. I had to go back in fourteen miles off the highway. They started at the highway. We did quite a lot on it, too. We developed it. When we went there, there was 320 acres in one piece and six hundred acres in the other piece. That one didn't have anything on it.
LAVOY: Who did you buy that from?
ECKERT: The 320 acres was bought from Elmer Fuller. I bought the other one through the real estate. I don't even know what the name was.
27
I never met him.
LAVOY: Did your son remain out there?
ECKERT: He remained out there till we sold it, his children were almost ready. It was time to come in. We sold it 1982, 1983.
LAVOY: In the meantime, though, you and your wife were in the new place in Sheckler.
ECKERT: We were living in Sheckler. Me and one grandson was running most of the places here then.
LAVOY: The one on Sheckler, what crops did you raise there?
ECKERT: Basically, hay. Anything else we put in there is a rotation crop which I understand in the seventies, shift probably 1981, 1982, we used to put in a lot of barley mostly for our rotation crop, and then the price of barley got to where it didn't even hardly pay you to raise it, so then I went more to the corn and the silage, dairy feed.
LAVOY: Then did you sell that to the dairymen around here?
ECKERT: Yeah, the dairymen there. And then I put in a feed lot there, too and I fed a lot of my own feed there.
LAVOY: Whose cattle did you feed?
ECKERT: My own. I'd buy feeders through the sale, and then I'd fatten them up and sell them to the slaughter house.
LAVOY: About how many did you feed?
ECKERT: We'd fatten out about five hundred head a year.
LAVOY: You must have had a large feed lot.
ECKERT: Well, it was pretty good sized. Every time I would sell a load, I'd buy a load, so throughout the year, we'd feed out about five hundred head.
LAVOY: Did you buy them through the auction here?
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ECKERT: Pert near always. Pert near hundred per cent.
LAVOY: And you'd buy the four month, five month?
ECKERT: No, buy them pert near a year. Basically about around five hundred pounders.
LAVOY: About yearlings?
ECKERT: Yeah, almost yearlings.
LAVOY: And then you would get them to what weight?
ECKERT: Take them up to a thousand, twelve hundred pounds.
LAVOY: And then you would sell them again through the auction?
ECKERT: No, no. I'd ship them direct to the slaughter house.
LAVOY: And where was the slaughter house?
ECKERT: Originally, it started out right out of Sacramento, Elk Grove.
LAVOY: You said you shipped them. Did you by this time have trucks that you yourself took them down, or you contracted?
ECKERT: No. It started out that I was selling to Louis Guazzini, and he would make arrangements for a truck. Sometimes we would split a truck together or the slaughter house would send a truck up. Then a little later on I started selling to the big outfit in Idaho, the IBP. That was through Dave Stix who handled those. Everything was put on consignment, and so for the most part, we did pretty well.
LAVOY: Did you raise herefords or mixed breeds?
ECKERT: Just feeders.
LAVOY: How many years did you do this?
ECKERT: I think I sold my last one probably in about 1989, 1990. I was doing this here for at least ten years.
LAVOY: Then you decided to go out of that business?
29
ECKERT: It got to where the feeders got too high for the fat price.
LAVOY: And cattle prices have dropped so.
ECKERT: Yeah. As I said, the difference between feeder prices and fat price just didn't fit, and the bigger feed lots, part of the reason, I guess, they were feeding thousands of heads. At that time there was probably fifteen, twenty of us doing the same thing I was doing.
LAVOY: Here in the Fallon area?
ECKERT: Right, and now there isn't hardly anybody doing any feeding here anymore.
LAVOY: Really!
ECKERT: That time when I was feeding, Nevada Cattle Feeders, sometimes they'd have ten thousand head in.
LAVOY: Who owned Nevada Cattle Feeders?
ECKERT: I can't really come up with the names.
LAVOY: That's all right. I just was not familiar with that, and I just wondered who it was.
ECKERT: The last ten years it was open, I dealt with Gary Snow. He was part owner of it, at least the manager, and I sold him all my off feed. A very good person to do business with, but at the same time there was , like I say, ten or fifteen of us doing a little feed lot, and now there isn't any of them. Even Nevada Cattle is out of business.
LAVOY: This whole area is moving from an agricultural area.
ECKERT: Well, basically, we've been forced out by taking our water, and the Bureau is just tightening up on everything to where--it's environmental.
LAVOY: Now tell me, let's just discuss this water issue a bit since you own so much property, and I know you're having problems with water as all the rest of us have had. Give me your feelings on what has happened to the water in this valley.
30
ECKERT: They've just taken a lot of it away from us.
LAVOY: Now, who is they?
ECKERT: I understand it's the federal government, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Paiute Indians, whatever, Pyramid Indians, and I've said they've taken it away. All they've done, they've come in and they wanted so much water, so they can't get one way, so they just reclassify the ground and go from bench ground which is four and a half acre feet and classify it as bottom ground. They didn't have to prove nothing. We have to prove them wrong, and it hasn't happened.
LAVOY: How much water did you lose?
ECKERT: I lost three hundred acre feet.
LAVOY: No recompense?
ECKERT: No, nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just by the stroke of the pen they classified it from bench ground to bottom ground.
LAVOY: We had the same thing happen. I know what you're talking about. Do you think there is any hope that we will get some of our water back, or is it a lost cause?
ECKERT: There is a few loopholes that they've left open, and there's been a few of them get some of it back. It goes back to the records that's been kept for the last thirty, forty years. If you haven't got a good set of records, if you haven't got money you want to put into the lawyers, why you're going to lose it. But there is a few loopholes. There has been a few of them that had what it took to get it.
LAVOY: And the average person didn't.
ECKERT: No. Most of them has got it back on the one stipulation they had of their water table. If there's a six-foot table or below they have a pretty good chance of coming back from the set of the ground . But the one rancher in particular who's Dave Mattley, I leveled that back in the early sixties for a man named Heinrich. This is a two hundred and forty-acre ranch. I worked on it for four different years. He completely leveled just like I did my place from one end of the other. He kept records of pert near every yard we moved,
31
ever seed that was planted, ever check was watered, when it was watered, how much it took, how much he cut off of it, and then Mattley come in, and he was all set up there with Heinrich's records, and he went ahead and did a marvelous job of bookkeeping himself. Now he has gotten his water back, and he's catty-cornered just southeast from me about one mile or three-quarters of a mile. His ranch is located there. Same type of soil, and I haven't got those records. He's a family that come out of Reno, had a lot of property. They sold it a lot of it for lots of money. Money has really been a factor in this. This basically what it takes to get your water back, and it didn't cost them anything to take it.
LAVOY: No, and we paid for their lawyers. With this arsenic problem that we supposedly have in Fallon, what is your feeling on that?
ECKERT: I tell you it's baloney. I've been here for better than fifty years. I've never had anything from it. I don't know of anybody, and I don't think any of the doctors here that'd tell you that anybody has had anything happen to them from drinking the arsenic water. I think it's just more EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] money that we're going to have to come with and pay the taxes on and get nothing out of it.
LAVOY: I think your story is certainly one of government taking control of the average person.
ECKERT: Yeah, and I'm actually getting a little bit ornery in the last year or two, too. I used to be proud to pay taxes. I owed it, and I was proud to pay it, but anymore if I can get out of paying it, I'm not going to pay it.
LAVOY: Well, I can understand that fully. Actually, have you retired now?
ECKERT: No. I'm semi-retired, I guess, but now instead of doing for myself, I go out and do it for somebody else.
LAVOY: Like what?
ECKERT: Oh, custom baling. And I'm still doing a little bit of land leveling. I have ninety-two acres out here of sub-division ground, sagebrush ground, no water right. A year ago I started developing that because I'm a person that has to have something to do.
32
LAVOY: Where is that?
ECKERT: It's off of Gummow Drive. I actually homesteaded it in 1953. It adjoined me out there on that piece of property I had on Gummow. I went in there with high hopes of making a nice sub-division, and now I've run into City Hall again on that, and I'm losing interest in that.
LAVOY: The sub-division that you were hoping to put in, where was it exactly?
ECKERT: It's right at the end of Gummow Drive.
LAVOY: Were you planning on putting houses in?
ECKERT: What I was figuring on doing was, in the first place I went in and moved the canal that wandered around through it. Straightened it out through working with TCID [Truckee-Carson Irrigation District]. No problem with the TCID, but then the Bureau runs the TCID so at the end we both had to do what the Bureau said. More bureaucracy. We got that out of my hair, and then I have to have a permit to do anything I do out there, so I go to the planning commission and the engineers, and this is where the stumbling block comes. Everything you do, you gotta wait two months, you gotta pay this, you gotta pay that. Then they won't accept what you want. You gotta accept what they want. Right now I've been seven months trying to parcel off an acre for my grandson, and I don't have done it yet. I've spent two thousand, four hundred dollars, and I can't even show you the acre they plotted off.
LAVOY: My goodness. Were you planning on putting in streets?
ECKERT: Of what I was wanting to do, and I did. I straightened out the canal and made a presentable piece of property, and, hopefully, I was going to get some developer interested in it. I was available if he wanted me to put in the dirt work. I don't have the asphalt, but I have the equipment to put in all the dirt work and underground, or whatever, but I haven't got that far with it. I haven't even got the one acre off that I wanted to get off before I do anything else.
LAVOY: That is a shame. I see that you have been so busy working, that I imagine that there are not too many organizations that you have been able to join.
33
ECKERT: No. The only two things I've did other than work is hardtop racing and square dancing.
LAVOY: What is hardtop racing?
ECKERT: It's stock cars. When I first started out doing that in 1953, we raced at the fairgrounds [940 West Williams Avenue]. The little fairground. We'd go in about seven or eight races a year.
LAVOY: Oh, Eddie Johnson was involved in that.
ECKERT: Eddie Johnson was in on that. He come in after I did.
LAVOY: You raced at the fairgrounds. Was this with old cars, new cars?
ECKERT: Oh, old cars. They had to be ten years old or older. The first one I started out with was--Bill Lattin raced it first--was a 1937 Ford. That's what I drove in 1953. Then I got associated with Jim Baglin. He was our good Chevrolet man and a good mechanic, and he thought I was good driver, so we made a pretty good team. I raced up until he died. Then when he died I kind of shut her down.
LAVOY: That racing went on for how many years?
ECKERT: I raced for over thirty years.
LAVOY: Do you have trophies to show?
ECKERT: Boxes of them.
LAVOY: Boxes of them! Well, I'm very impressed with that.
ECKERT: I raced my last race in about 1989.
LAVOY: Did you win?
ECKERT: I won my share.
LAVOY: But you didn't win in 1989 is what you're telling me?
ECKERT: No, I won my share. We have a race every week here, every two weeks.
34
LAVOY: Where are they racing now? Out at Rattlesnake?
ECKERT: Rattlesnake Hill. I furnished the equipment for that in 1972, I think, we built that.
LAVOY: Do you go to all the races?
ECKERT: Yeah. Him and I go together.
LAVOY: Oh, the gentleman that just came in.
ECKERT: Yeah.
LAVOY: Does your wife go to the races with you?
ECKERT: No. She did when I was racing, but she don't go.
LAVOY: While you're just observing.
ECKERT: Yeah.
LAVOY: And then you said you were square dancing. What group do you belong to?
ECKERT: We were called the Arsenic Swingers, the Fallon group. That was their name. About the time we organized our club, we had the first flack over the arsenic in the water here.
LAVOY: Oh, so that's why you named it the Arsenic Swingers.
ECKERT: Yeah. They had a committee to pick out a name. Three or four names come up, and that was one of them, and they went with it.
LAVOY: Where do you dance?
ECKERT: We danced pretty much all over Fallon. We did a lot of it down at E.C. Best School, West End. We danced in the house that I live in a few times. He was kind of a caller. Mostly when we danced there was just taking a few lessons. Then we went all over. We went to Reno, we'd go to Carson City, we'd go to Yerington, wherever they had good callers.
LAVOY: Do you go to that national square dancing?
JS
ECKERT: It's not national. I go to the state one. We have a Silver State convention we have every year.
LAVOY: Where is that usually held?
ECKERT: It's always held in Reno at the convention center.
LAVOY: How do the Arsenic Swingers do there?
ECKERT: They did all right. I look forward to it every year. It started out it was in May, and then they changed it to June after they built the bowling outfit in there. I think the reason being that they had a bowling convention about the same time that we were having our convention. They were kind of interfering, so we just changed the date, but they still have that today.
LAVOY: So now when do you go? In September?
ECKERT: My wife broke her ankle in 1987, and that kind of did us in on the square dancing. We both still love it, but we can't do it.
LAVOY: Oh, I tell you, old age is hell, isn't it? [laughing] Who was your caller for the Arsenic. Swingers?
ECKERT: When we started out, Barney Strickland was the caller, and then we've had several since. That's one thing about square dancing, callers come and go. That's the main thrill in square dancing. It's a challenge dance, and you go where the callers are the best challenge. We had our favorites we'd go to, and that was the main thing about the convention every year. You had the top callers in the nation.
LAVOY: Since you've not been able to go square dancing because of your wife's breaking her ankle, for entertainment besides going to the
races with the cars, do you go down to the auction?
ECKERT: I go to the auction once in a while, but not too much.
LAVOY: And look at the price of the cattle.
ECKERT: Yeah.
LAVOY: Do you go fishing?
36
ECKERT: I haven't gone fishing since my buddy died.
LAVOY: And who was that?
ECKERT: Pete Capurro [Attilio].
LAVOY: Where did you and Pete used to go fishing?
ECKERT: We started out at Pyramid and Kingston, Walker Lake, Desert Lake Creek. We fished at Lahontan quite a bit.
LAVOY: Do you eat the fish out of Lahontan, just out of curiosity?
ECKERT: You bet I do.
LAVOY: Mercury or not.
ECKERT: Mercury or not. There is no substitute for the walleye. They're a good eating fish. I don't care where they come from.
LAVOY: Sounds like a good Texas man, I tell you. What was the biggest fish you ever caught?
ECKERT: A thirteen and three-quarter pound out of Pyramid.
LAVOY: And what was it?
ECKERT: A cutthroat.
LAVOY: How many years ago was that?
ECKERT: I'd say about nine, ten years ago.
LAVOY: So, basically, life has slowed down quite a bit for you.
ECKERT: Oh, yeah, but I substituted and go out and do custom work. [laughing]
LAVOY: Well, I tell you, I think you'll be working until the good Lord calls you.
ECKERT: I'm sure I will. If I quit, I think he'll call me pretty quick.
37
LAVOY: I think that's a good thing to keep busy all of the time. I'm trying to think if there's anything at all that we have missed, and I am going to regress back to one thing that your wife mentioned to me, that I'd like you to explain to me . This goes back to your years of planting the crested wheat. I understand that you hired a prisoner from the state prison to help you, and your wife didn't know about it.
ECKERT: She's right. I got a phone call one evening from, I think, he was an assistant warden, his name was Bradley, he'd been the coach or something at the high school in Fallon, and he knew that I had to hire men and I usually took a lot of high school kids. That's the reason he knew this. He asked me if there was a chance that I would take this prisoner. He was up for parole, but they have to have a place to go to get out.
LAVOY: What was he in for?
ECKERT: Involuntary manslaughter. It was a car wreck. I couldn't see anything particularly dangerous about hiring somebody that had a car wreck and regardless of what he did, there was a car wreck and somebody got killed in it. They made arrangements to get him over here, and my wife had to bring him to Elko where I was, and she had one of the grandchildren with her, and we were about fourteen miles out of Elko. About Winnemucca my grandkid was hitting him with his baby bottle, and she was getting pretty nervous being by herself with him anyway, but everything worked out all right.
LAVOY: I think she was a very brave person going off with him in the first place.
ECKERT: Well, yes, but, like I say, we both had the same opinion that anybody can have a car wreck.
LAVOY: I think she mentioned something about the warden called you and you said well, if I'm going to take him he has to come over right away.
ECKERT: Um-hum.
LAVOY: Did the warden bring him over?
38
ECKERT: Bradley brought him over. The assistant warden, whatever he was.
LAVOY: He brought him to your house.
ECKERT: He brought him to my wife's house.
LAVOY: And she and a grandson and the prisoner . .
ECKERT: Right. Brought him to Elko.
LAVOY: Drove all the way to Elko. Where did you live? Did you have a trailer that you used?
ECKERT: We had three or four trailers for the men to sleep in. Then my daughter or my daughter-in-law usually took the biggest one and did the cooking for us.
LAVOY: So, the prisoner then would have lived with the other men that were working.
ECKERT: Right. Usually two or them slept in a trailer.
LAVOY: How long did you keep him?
ECKERT: I think, as I remember, about three months. Soon as that job was over, I didn't need him anymore, and that was the stipulation right off to start with. If they had a job to go to, they could get out. Even if he only stayed there one day, but that made him eligible to get a parole. If he didn't have a place to go to work, he wasn't eligible.
LAVOY: Then your wife had to return him?
ECKERT: No.
LAVOY: Or you had to return him?
ECKERT: When he got to Elko, I had to take him up to city hall, and he had to register, and then when I got through with him, he was free to do whatever he wanted to far as I was concerned. He probably still had to be registered, but I don't know what happened to him after that.
39
LAVOY: So you just more or less dropped him off in Elko?
ECKERT: I think we brought him back here, and then he went on his own from here. He finished out the job.
LAVOY: Then he probably had to go through the law officials here.
ECKERT: I think he went back to Reno and then he had to register there, I'm sure of that. But that was as far as I had to go with him was to give him a job, and then when I was through with him, he had to do whatever he was supposed to do. That's the way the law reads, I guess. I don't know. He had to have some place to go.
LAVOY: At that point in time.
ECKERT: Right. They give him parole if he had a place to go to work, and he didn't have to work for three months or three weeks or whatever. He just had to have a place to go to work, and we hired him.
LAVOY: I think that's very interesting, and I think your wife is very brave to have taken a complete stranger like that and brought them up.
ECKERT: He worked out fine. He made us a good hand. He appreciated it.
LAVOY: You didn't see him or anything before?
ECKERT: No, I never had no idea who he was. I just went by what Bradley told me.
LAVOY: That's very, very interesting. In finishing our interview, is there anything that you think of that you would like to say about your life here in Fallon, how you've enjoyed it, or any last comments that you'd like to make?
ECKERT: I think that Fallon's treated me good. I've never regretted coming here, never regretted meeting my wife, had a wonderful life.
LAVOY: And you've made a lot of friends.
ECKERT: Made a lot of friends and a few enemies. [laughing]
40
LAVOY: Have you joined the coffee klatch that Fallon is so noted for?
ECKERT: No. I did for a little while, but after about a year of going down there early in the morning and have coffee I quit that. I'd rather go out and start doing something else.
LAVOY: I think that you are a very ambitious gentleman, and I certainly want to thank you for taking the time to come and tell us all about this. To me it's very, very interesting.
ECKERT: It's been nice talking to you.
LAVOY: I just want to thank you again on behalf of the museum.
41
WENDELL LEE "CURLY" ECKERT INDEX
Antelope Valley, NV,27-28
Arsenic Swingers, 35-36
Birth, 1
BLM experiences, 11, 14-25, 38-40
Cattle feed lot, 28-30
Children, 20-21, 27-28
Dairy farm, 9-11, 20
Eckert, Annabelle Wislef, 3-4, 7, 10-11, 13, 15, 20, 35-36, 38-39
Eckert, George, 1
Eckert, Lela Blanch McDaniel, 1
Fallon Flour Mill, 6-7
Fallon, NV, 6, 19
Farming experiences, 9-11, 20, 26-30, 32-33
Fishing, 37
Guazzini, Louis, 29
Hardtop racing, 34-35
Land leveling experiences, 7-9, 11-15, 26-27, 33
Marriage, 4-6
Milk Producers' Association, 10-11
Mills, Percy, 8-9, 15
Nevada Cattle Feeders, 30
Stix, Dave, 29
Union Oil Company, 19-20
Water problems, 30-32
World War II, 3-4

Marian Lavoy

Wendell Lee "Curly" Eckert

Churchill County Museum Annex