John Wayne Saw A Banker Padlock A Crippled Veteran’s Farm In Kansas 1959 — Then He Paid It Off D
The padlock was already on the gate. It was October 1959 and the morning was coming in cold and flat across Reno County, Kansas. The way October always did out there. Sky the color of old pewtor. Wheat stubble running to the horizon. The kind of silence that sits in your chest if you’ve never lived inside it.
A man named Gerald Hobbs was standing at his own gate at 6:45 in the morning, one hand on the post, looking at a padlock that had not been there the evening before. Gerald Hobbs was 41 years old. He had worked that ground for 19 years, 16 of them with his father, three of them alone after his father’s heart gave out in the South Field in June of 1956.
The farm was 280 acres of winter wheat country, a machine shed, a house with a porch that tilted slightly left, a windmill that needed new bearings every spring, and a mortgage held by First Meridian Savings of Hutchinson that Gerald had been paying on since 1947. He had never missed a payment in 12 years.
Not one. The leg he’d come back from Korea with in 1952 made the work slower than it used to be. He didn’t talk about Korea. Nobody he knew talked about Korea much. He walked with a cane from November to April when the cold got into the joint and without one the rest of the year if he kept moving. He kept moving.
He had a daughter named Patrice who was 9 years old and walked to school a quarter mile down the county road every morning and a sister named Lorraine in Witchah who he called on Sundays. That was his life and it was enough. What had happened was this. Gerald had gone to First Meridian in August asking to defer one payment, $63, because the combine had thrown a rod in July, and the repair bill had taken the margin he’d been saving.
He had explained it clearly. He had the paperwork. He had 12 years of receipts, every one on time, in a rubber banded stack that he brought with him in a manila envelope. The man at First Meridian, his name was Raymond Dael, and he had a habit of setting his pen down on his bladder very deliberately before he spoke, told Gerald that the bank’s policy did not provide for payment deferral, and that if the August payment was not received by the 15th, the account would be referred to the bank’s foreclosure division. Gerald paid August. He paid it by borrowing $63 from his sister Lorraine, which she gave him without being asked twice, and which he mailed back to her in November in a money order, even though she told him not to bother. He paid September. In October, Raymond Dowel had come out with a notary and two men from the county sheriff’s office and
put a padlock on Gerald Hobb’s gate with a notice of foreclosure proceedings nailed to the post beside it. The notice said Gerald had 30 days to cure a deficiency of $612.40, the total of two payments, late fees, and what the paperwork called administrative costs of proceedings. Gerald did not have $612.
He did not know where he would get it. He was standing at the gate looking at the padlock when a truck pulled off the county road and stopped. The man who got out was tall, wearing a canvas work jacket and a battered tan Stson that had seen more weather than the coat had. He walked to the gate with his hands in his jacket pockets, looked at the padlock, looked at Gerald, and then looked at the notice nailed to the post.
He read it the way a man reads something he wants to be sure he has read correctly. Then he looked back out at the 280 acres of Kansas wheat ground and stood there for a moment in the cold. He did not introduce himself. He said, “Your place?” Gerald said it was. “How long?” “19 years,” Gerald said.
The man nodded once and looked at the notice again. He took his hand out of his pocket and touched the padlock briefly, not pulling on it, just touching it. The way a man touches something to confirm it is real and not something he imagined. Here is the story. Gerald Hobbs had come back from the Chosen Reservoir in November of 1950 with a right knee that would need three surgeries and would never bend past 90° again.
He had been 19 years old when he shipped out and 21 when he came back. He had come back to his father’s farm, learned what 19 years old had not yet taught him about a combine and a winter wheat rotation and the particular stubbornness of Reno County soil, and he had worked that ground faithfully for the better part of two decades.
He had not asked for anything from anyone except that $163 deferral in August which the bank had declined. The wheat that fall was good. It would have covered the deficiency and then some at harvest. The problem was that harvest was not in October. Harvest was in July. Raymond Dowel of First Meridian Savings had scheduled the foreclosure proceedings for October.
This is the thing that older canons who remembered this county understood and did not say out loud. The timing was not accidental. A farm sold at foreclosure in October went for less than a farm sold at foreclosure in July. Someone with the right kind of money could buy 280 acres of winter wheat ground for considerably less than it was worth.
And the wheat that Gerald Hobbes had planted in September would feed that transaction. If you’ve ever known someone who carried a debt like this quietly, who worked the ground and paid every bill and still had the system close in on them, drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. The truck that stopped on the county road had California plates.
Gerald did not know whose truck it was. He did not follow pictures in magazines, and he had not been to a movie theater since before Korea. He was standing at a padlocked gate at 6:45 on a cold October morning, and a tall man in a canvas jacket was reading the foreclosure notice nailed to his post, and Gerald Hobbes did not know what to make of any of it.
He knew what to make of the look on the man’s face. He had seen that look in the Marine Corps. It was the look of a man who has assessed a situation and found it unacceptable and has moved past the assessing into whatever comes next. The man with the Stson turned from the notice and said, “How much do they want?” Gerald told him, ” $61,240.
” The man looked out at the field for a moment. Gerald heard him say something under his breath that Gerald later told his sister was not something he could repeat to her, but that she’d understand if she’d been there. Then the man walked back to the truck. Gerald thought he was leaving. He was not leaving.
He opened the cab and when he came back, he had a checkbook. He set it on the hood of the truck and wrote the check there. Leaning on the cold metal, he tore it out and held it toward Gerald without ceremony. Gerald looked at it. It was made out to First Meridian Savings of Hutchinson for $61,240. I can’t take that, Gerald said.
The man said, “You’re not taking anything.” He looked Gerald Levelville in the face and said, “I was at Inchon August of 1950. The Marines who went to Chosene 3 months after I shipped home are the reason the line held at all. He paused. He said, “You held the line. That money has been yours for 9 years. I’m late getting it to you.
” He pushed the check toward Gerald once more. Gerald took it. He didn’t speak for a moment. Not because he was searching for words, because the words that existed in him at that moment were not ones that came out of a man’s mouth. They were the kind that sit behind the sternum and stay there. The man said, “You’re going to take that to Dowel this morning before the bank opens if you can manage it.
Get there when he unlocks the door. Don’t wait.” He got back in the truck. The people at the feed store in Nickerson later told a county extension agent that a truck with California plates had come through that morning. Nobody had gotten a good look at the driver. A woman at the grain elevator in South Hutchinson said she had seen a tall man in a tan hat buy a coffee from the counter and read the Hutchinson news for 20 minutes and then leave without buying anything else.
Nobody who worked for First Meridian that morning remembered the man who had come with Gerald Hobbs to present the cashier’s check. They remembered Gerald. They did not remember the man beside him. Wayne never told anyone. Gerald Hobbes drove to Hutchinson that morning, presented the check at the counter, and asked the teller to stamp the receipt in front of him. She did.
The account was current. The foreclosure proceeding was withdrawn. Raymond Da was not in his office that morning. Gerald was told he had called in late. The padlock was removed from Gerald’s gate by the sheriff’s deputy who had put it there, which took about 4 minutes, and Gerald stood and watched it come off, and then stood there a while after the deputy’s car was gone.
He farmed that ground for another 27 years. He and Patrice farmed it together starting in 1969 when she came back from Kansas State with an aronomy degree and a husband named Carl who knew machinery. Gerald worked alongside them until 1978 when the bad knee finally made the combine steps more than he could manage.
And then he managed the books and the rotation schedule and walked the fence lines in the mornings until he couldn’t do that either. He died in 1986. Patrice and Carl kept the farm. Patrice’s son, David, graduated from Kansas State in 1991. He teaches high school agriculture in Nickerson today. He has taught there for 33 years.
He has taught nearly 400 students the basics of soil science, crop rotation, farm finance, and what he calls on the first day of every semester the economics of staying. The Hobs farm is still in the family. 280 acres of Reno County wheat ground, same windmill, new bearings. On the wall of Gerald Hobbs’s old kitchen in a house where Patrice and Carl still live, there is a framed copy of the payment receipt stamped by the first Meridian teller on October 14th, 1959. Patrice had it framed in 1986 after Gerald died. Because she found it in an envelope in his desk with nothing else in the envelope except the words in Gerald’s handwriting, a man stopped. The afternoon light moves across that frame every day around 4:00 and then it goes and the receipt stays on the wall
and the farm stays in the ground and the line holds. Wayne never said a word about it. Not to the crew that was waiting for him in Witchah. Not to the director who asked why he’d come in 2 hours late that morning. Not to anyone who interviewed him in the years that followed. And there were many. He had been at Inchon.
He knew what Chosene had cost the men who went. He understood that what he’d done on a county road in October of 1959 was not a favor. It was a debt paid. There is a particular kind of man who understands the difference. Who notices the padlock on the gate of a man who cannot manage the steps of a combine without pain.
who reads the notice nailed to the post and who does not calculate what it will cost him to act. He just acts and then he goes. That is what the measure of a man actually is. Not what he does when the room is watching. What he does when the only witness is a stranger at a gate and 19 years of wheat ground and a cold Kansas morning.
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