Fliers With Green Wheels

BY JOSEPH STOCKER PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT MARKOW At a little after three in the morning, the phone rang in the home of Johnny Neace, general manager of the Marsh Aviation Co. in Phoenix. The caller was a farmer living a few miles south of the city. His voice sounded agitated, like that of a man whose house is on fire. “Bugs have hit my field,” he barked. “Found ‘em a few minutes ago while I was irrigatin’. Field’ll be gone by nightfall if we don’t do something. I’ve got some dust stored in my barn, and there’s an airstrip a mile or so from my place. Can you help me out?” Neace, soggy with sleep, said, “Can do.” He hung up and dialed another number to alert a Marsh pilot.

Dawn was just brushing the eastern Arizona sky with pale lavender when a fusty, clumsy-looking biplane lumbered onto the runway at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. It hesitated a moment, revving its engine with a roar that crunched against the quiet of the morning. Then, slowly, ponderously, it took off.

In an hour the job was done and the pilot was back at home base. South of Phoenix a 40-acre patch of lettuce lay snug and secure beneath a slowly settling fog of gray dust. If any bugs still survived underneath that lethal mantle, they weren’t long for this world.

Nearly every day of the year, in some part of Arizona’s vast agricultural preserve, this scene is re-enacted with one variation or another. The crop duster, once regarded as an aerial rakehell whose antics were somewhat akin to climbing a mountain on a motorcycle, has become a strong and stable prop of Arizona agriculture. He’s almost as indispensable to the farmer as the farmer’s tractor.

In the business of farming there’s no calamity more enormous than a regiment of insects threatening to make garbage out of a high-priced produce field and mincemeat out of a farmer’s bank account. At times like this, there’s also no music more pleasant to the farmer’s ear than the drone of the duster coming to the rescue.

The crop duster first ventured upon the Arizona agricultural scene back in the late 1920’s. He had a rickety airplane or two, hung together with wire, glue and some miscellaneous parts left over from World War I. He was looked upon by solid citizens as a swashbuckling, devil-may-care sort of person with holes in his head. The average farmer scorned as pure nonsense the idea of dusting a field from the air. He just went out and did it himself, from behind a horse or a new-fangled tractor.

Today 85 per cent of Arizona’s irrigated farming area is dusted from the air. The airplane accomplishes in three hours what the farmer would need three days to do if he tediously laid his own dust from a ground rig. Agricultural aviation, expanding apace with the the state’s ever-growing agriculture, has become a substantial industry in its own right. There are 22 different crop dusting outfits in the state In -15 in and around Phoenix, three at Yuma and four scat-tered about various parts of Arizona. They range in size from modest operations of two and three planes to the giant of them all-Marsh Aviation-with a fleet of 25 ships and at peak times more than 100 employees.

Along with respectability, the crop duster also has acquired versatility. Bug-bombing isn't the only thing he does. One of his big jobs in Arizona is "defoliating" cotton -and the job is getting bigger every year as cotton gets bigger.

Cotton "defoliation" is a modern-day bit of agricultural sorcery. It's a process by which the duster applies a chemical which causes the leaves to drop off the cotton plant but leaves the cotton intact. That way two things are accomplished: First, the sun is allowed to penetrate to dew-soaked bolls low on the plant, dry them out and save them from rotting. Second, the way is cleared for the mechanical cotton-picker to move in and harvest the cotton without having to take the "trash" with it.

Even this is by no means the limit of the duster's service to Arizona agriculture. He wages aerial warfare against weeds choking irrigation canals and ditches and threatening entire acreages of grain. He seeds great areas of rangeland from the air. He even fertilizes from the air. And when frost menaces millions of dollars' worth of citrus, the duster may be out and aloft in the cold pre-dawn hours, "freeze-proofing" the fruit. This he does by flying back and forth over the citrus groves to keep the air circulating until the sun rises. He also dusts winter resorts and whole communities for fly control. And he gives battle to attacking hordes of grasshoppers, flying so low that the 'hoppers bounce off his goggles and cluster against his struts.

All in all, the duster can credit himself with increasing Arizona's agricultural output by as much as 25 per cent. This translates into lower prices for the housewife as she shops the vegetable bins at her corner grocery. It also trans-lates very pleasantly into terms of more silver jangling in the pockets of thousands of Arizona citizens who profit, directly or indirectly, from agriculture.

But it's dangerous work-one of the most dangerous of all forms of commercial flying. That's because the duster does his flying "on the deck," no more than two or three feet above the ground and at a speed of 100 miles per hour. "The farmer wants that dust right down on the ground," says Cliff Crowl, who flies out of Airhaven, near Glendale, and, at 30, is one of the state's youngest dusting operators. "He wants us to come back with some green on our wheels, and if he wants it that way, that's the way he gets it done."

The duster, of course, wears no parachute. It wouldn't be of any use to him if he did. If his engine quits at lettuce-top altitude, all he can do is set 'er down right there on the spot and hope he lives to dust another day.

Often as not, the field is boxed in with high wires and soaring cottonwood trees. That means the duster must stay "on the deck" right up to the last possible instant, to spread dust into the farthermost edges of the field. Then a steep, roaring pull-up at full throttle, with wheels almost brushing wires or cottonwood branches.

Sometimes he doesn't make it. Cliff Crowl remembers the time when he was dusting a field by moonlight. He failed to see an eight-strand telephone line and plowed right through it, his wings swathed in a shower of sparks. But he managed to stay aloft.

Rex Williams, who runs a dusting outfit out of his own private airstrip north of Tolleson, had the same kind of experience, only more so. He smashed through 24 strands of telephone line, but likewise avoided a crash. The telephone people billed him $84 for the wire and tried to collect for the revenue lost while the lines were down. Williams talked them out of that.

Once in a while strategy will demand that the duster fly under a cluster of wires instead of over them. Crowl tells of having squeaked under a power line 58 times during one dusting job near Casa Grande. Twenty years ago such an exploit would have rated space on page one, like the daredevil who flew under the Brooklyn Bridge. Now it's just part of the day's dusting.

High wires and cottonwood trees aren't the duster's only hazards. The very dust itself is a source of danger. Some chemicals are highly combustible; others are poison-ous. One of the dusting materials recently brought into use is an organic phosphate known as parathion, which was developed in Germany for chemical warfare. In full strength, a single drop on the back of a dog's head would kill instant-ly. The duster works with only a 2 per cent solution, but he wears a respirator and gloves just to be on the safe side.

He must also contend with possible obstructions right in the middle of the field-a lone post, for example, or a tree stump that is invisible until he's right on top of it. One pilot even cracked into a tractor left in a field.

Last year three Arizona pilots died in the chewed-up wreckage of their planes. But veteran dusters say that's not a very high mortality rate considering that approximately a million and a half dusting acres were flown during the year. "The most dangerous part of dusting," says Marsh Pilot George Simons drily, "is driving to and from the airport."

The death rate last year would have been higher but for two important reasons: (1) The duster takes care of his equipment as though his life depended on it, which indeed it does. (2) He goes about his business as cautiously as an old lady descending a steep staircase. If it's a "hot pilot" you're looking for the harum-scarum kind that likes to hang by his toes from the wild blue yonder-you're not likely to find him in the dusting business.

The average duster is a solid, careful, dependable sort of flier. Chances are he's rather up in years, as fliers gomaybe in his middle 40's. He probably came into dusting after knocking around in civilian aviation, doing a bit of barnstorming, perhaps, or some run-of-mill instructing. He has several thousand hours of flying notched into his safety belt, and you'd be as safe flying with him as you'd be with your feet tucked beneath your dining room table. He's usually married, too, and not overly anxious to have his family collect on his life insurance.

The accident rate in dusting, says Marsh Aviation's Johnny Neace, is lower even than among "Sunday pilots." That's because the duster, unlike his Sunday contemporary, is always ready for an emergency. He has a spot picked out for a forced landing even before he takes off. "We have to fly a plane so precisely," says Neace, "that we can swat flies with it."

Although a few G.I. pilots came out of World War II into the dusting business, their numbers are pretty small. Just because a flier could put a bomb right in the middle of the main street of Dusseldorf, it doesn't necessarily follow that he can bomb bugs with the same efficiency. Dusting requires a wholly different technique, and oldtime dusters say the hot G.I. pilot rarely can adapt to it.

Cliff Crowl is an exception to the non-military rule. He flew P-38 fighters out of Italy on bomber escort missions into the lower Balkans during the war. But he'd learned to fly as a civilian before he went into the Air Force.

Arizona's dean of the dusters is William O. Marsh, head of Marsh Aviation. Tall, quiet and darkly handsome, 43-year-old Bill Marsh fits the matinee-goer's idea of what a flier should look like.

He was born in northern California, the son of a farmer. He bought a filling station shortly after finishing high school and plowed the profits into private flying lessons at Sacramento. Once he had his pilot's license, he went out of the filling station business and has been a flier ever since.

In 1939 Marsh came to Arizona. A year later he joined Southwest Airways, Inc., and directed the training of 15,000 American, British and Chinese cadets at the two Thunderbird fields near Glendale and Scottsdale and Falcon Field near Mesa. In 1943 he helped set up the firm of Marsh & Franklin at Sky Harbor. For a year the partners concentrated on training ferry pilots for the military. Then, when the government's pilot training program began to taper off, Marsh & Franklin shifted to dusting. In 1945 Bill Marsh bought out his partner and the outfit became the Marsh Aviation Co.

It was tough at first. Farmers are instinctively distrustful of innovations, and dusting was an innovation. There were less than a dozen dusting planes in the entire state. Dusting, when it was done at all, was usually done from the ground, and thousands of acres went entirely undusted. Farmers simply took their chances that Nature's little creatures would leave them alone until they got their crops grown and harvested.

Bill Marsh did as much selling as flying. And when he flew, it was often without compensation. He ran free dusting experiments for the University of Arizona and the U. S. Department of Agriculture to help demonstrate the efficacy of dusting. "It cost us a lot of money," he recalls. "But it sure made us a lot of friends."

Marsh did even more than sell and fly. He tinkered constantly with his equipment to improve dusting's effectiveness. The result was a new-style spreader which scatters the dust evenly over the field and enables the farmer to get a bigger "kill" with fewer pounds of dust. Dusting outfits all over the country have adopted the spreader.

Today Bill Marsh is one of the largest dusting operators in the U.S. His planes fly all over the West and as far east as the Mississippi, dusting everything from wheat to spruce. Two years ago Marsh pilots, along with those of

other dusting firms, took part in a massive aerial war against budworms threatening a million acres of forest in the Northwest. Seven fliers were killed during that onslaught, but Bill Marsh's men came through intact.

Marsh maintains sub-bases at Yuma and Walla Walla, Wash. One of the trickiest assignments for him and his fliers is "hillside dusting" in Washington. Farms in that mountainous country spread up steep slopes, and the duster often flies with one wingtip almost scraping the ground. He works from improvised airstrips that jump off into nothing. It calls for the same prowess at takeoff and landing that is required of a carrier pilot.

Last year Marsh Aviation dusted 600,000 acres. Since the war Bill Marsh estimates that his planes have flown 48,000 agricultural hours. Half that time has been spent flying to and from the job, the other half on the job. Thus, figuring the duster's speed at 100 miles per hour, Marsh calculates that he and his pilots have flown 2,400,000 miles "on the deck," or roughly 100 times around the world.

Nor has it been uneventful. The fact that Marsh has lost only three men over the years is a tribute to the skill of his pilots, for trouble and the dusting business keep steady company.

Marsh himself had 28 forced landings in a single year. In one of them his plane caught fire in the air and his flying suit was ablaze when he finally landed and leaped clear.

He escaped probable death another time by bouncing his plane over an irrigation ditch. His engine quit at 300 feet and he realized that his rate of glide would plop him squarely in the ditch, which was 10 feet deep and lined with concrete. So he aimed his ship at the near side of the ditch, hit, bounced and landed 20 feet beyond in a soft, plowed field. Only damage was a bent landing gear.

There was still another occasion when Bill Marsh's presence of mind came in handy, along with his duster's instinct for spotting emergency landing fields every minute aloft. He was flying from Brawley, Calif., to Los Angeles to pick up some equipment. As he passed over a tiny desert town, he looked down at its dirt streets and reflected, "If my engine quit now, which way would I land?" He deter-mined the direction in which the power and telephone lines ran along the streets and how he might avoid them. Then he forgot about it and flew on to L.A. Returning, however, he developed engine trouble over the town and made a safe landing there.

Now and then a duster is called upon to perform serv-ices beyond the line of duty. Not long ago a flash flood hit the desert near Buckeye and left a woman and her son marooned on a remote strip of road. Orval McVey, a Marsh pilot, spotted them from the air, then landed at Buckeye and telephoned the location of the stranded pair to the sheriff's office. Air possemen flew out and dropped food.

And once it took a duster's peculiar skill to nab a fleeing desperado. The fugitive had abandoned his car near Yuma and was trying to make his way across the desert on foot. A Marsh pilot, Bill Wilcox, spied him from upstairs. Dropping down to the deck, Wilcox made low level passes at the desperado to keep him pinned to the ground until officers arrived to take him in tow.

Such extra-curricular activities as these, however, figure only slightly in the duster's daily life. Most of the time he's occupied with the business at hand-providing vital reinforcement to the farmer in the never-ending war to turn back Nature's crop killers. The business today is big, and it's liable to get even bigger yet.

Right now, for instance, experiments are being made with new chemicals designed to kill off sagebrush, mesquite and salt cedar and permit the unimpeded growth of range grass. If the experiments are successful, a whole new vista will be opened up to the crop duster. There'll be millions of acres of rangeland to be dusted, and, by the dusting, rescued from the omnivorous desert. This in turn can mean an incalculable increase in Arizona's output of cattle and an equally incalculable increase in Arizona's level of income.

Now, more than ever, the crop duster is an accepted part of the Arizona scene, as much a part of it as cowboys and Indians, dogies and grapefruit. And to the fliers who come home with green on their wheels, there is the satisfaction of knowing that, in the process, they have made Arizona greener, more productive and more prosperous.

ELGIN . . . Continued from page three

The oldest ranch in the Elgin area is the Babocomari Ranch, owned by Frank C. Brophy, president of the Bank of Douglas. Mr. Brophy says the history of the ranch runs back to the days of Father Kino, who placed a herd of cattle on the east end of the ranch near the end of the seventeenth century. One might say these were the first cattle in the continental United States, he added. Originally the ranch as it exists today was part of the San Ignacio del Babocomari Spanish Land Grant made in the early 1830's. It was owned at that time by the Elias family, which is still prominent in Southern Arizona and the State of Sonora in Mexico. They attempted to settle the area, but the Indians drove them out before the enterprise could succeed. They deserted the grant, never to return.

In 1883 the land grant was claimed by Dr. E. B. Perrin, who had purchased the property rights from the heirs of the original owners in the Elias family. At the time of his purchase there were many squatters on the land, which he evicted. Most of the people living there thought they had good title to the land. Among those was Will Roath, who is a rancher today near Elgin. A government land court was established in Santa Fe in 1894, which threw out Dr. Perrin's claim. As soon as the squatters heard the news they moved back to the Babocomari grant. Dr. Perrin then took his claim to Washington, D. C., where finally, at the beginning of this century, he was granted clear title to 34,707 acres out of the 120,000 which he claimed to have owned. He then evicted all of the squatters and fenced in the property, an important turning point for the cattleman, since it was the first step towards the ending of open range. Eventually all of the land would be fenced in and the days of sharing the range would be gone forever.

With the exception of the 34,707 acres of the Babocomari grant allowed Dr. Perrin by Congress, the rest was open range until 1910 when Tom Wills wrote a story for nationwide publication. This article praised the Elgin area's agricultural prospects and all the rich land that was available to the homesteader. A land boom followed with people arriving from all over the United States to claim their share of the land. Some knew so little about farming that they paid real estate promoters to stake out a suitable piece of land for them. No survey had been made of the country and the homesteaders placed their claim stakes in the approximate location of their claim. Later this was to cause many property disputes when true land boundaries were established by an accurate survey.The land boom lasted until 1915 when drought finally drove the dry land farmers from the country. Those five

years when the land was under cultivation proved it was suitable only for grazing cattle and not for cultivated crops as so many of the homesteaders had hoped. There wasn't enough rainfall and moisture in the soil to support cultivation. When the homesteaders left, the land reverted to the rancher and the tall grama grass once again sprang up.

The days of the open range had disappeared with the arrival of the homesteader; as the farmer gave way to the return of the rancher and his cattle, he left one thing behind which still stands today as a monument to the settling of the West-the barbed wire fence which extends as far as the eye can reach across the rolling hills, separating each ranch from the other.

The Elgin ranching community is bisected by Babocomari Creek, which has water in it only during the rainy season, and runs from the west past the town of Elgin east into the San Pedro River. The Elgin area consists of about twenty square miles. With an altitude of 4,750 feet at the town, the entire area has a moderate year-round climate with temperature extremes of 95 degrees in the summer to 10 degrees above zero in the winter. The average annual rainfall is 16.16 inches. Elgin is bounded on two sides by mountains: the Huachucas to the southwest, the Mustangs and the Whetstones to the northeast. Elgin is located fortymiles east of Nogales on Highway 82. Tombstone is thirtysix miles to the east. The drive from Elgin to the south through Vaughn, Canelo, down to Lochiel on the Mexican border and then to Nogales, is one of the beautiful scenic drives of that section of Arizona. The road is not hard surfaced, but is always open except after heavy rains. At nearby Fort Huachuca, one of the oldest forts in Arizona, one can see a buffalo herd and other wild game at the national game preserve. In season hunting for deer and javalina (wild pig) is good, although the ranchers in the Elgin area ask the hunters to be careful they don't shoot any of their cattle.

miles east of Nogales on Highway 82. Tombstone is thirtysix miles to the east. The drive from Elgin to the south through Vaughn, Canelo, down to Lochiel on the Mexican border and then to Nogales, is one of the beautiful scenic drives of that section of Arizona. The road is not hard surfaced, but is always open except after heavy rains. At nearby Fort Huachuca, one of the oldest forts in Arizona, one can see a buffalo herd and other wild game at the national game preserve. In season hunting for deer and javalina (wild pig) is good, although the ranchers in the Elgin area ask the hunters to be careful they don't shoot any of their cattle.

Frank Brophy acquired Babocomari Ranch in 1936 from the Perrins and has consolidated it so it can now be considered intact and under one ownership. Mr. Brophy has developed the ranch into one of the the showplaces in Arizona. He has experimented in the latest types of ranching. He has placed some of the land under irrigation in order to grow permanent pasture for his stock. Also he has become noted in the United States as a breeder and trainer of fine horses.

Today the community of Elgin is peaceful and quiet. The dirt farmers have scattered with the four winds, leaving the land to the cattle, the cows bawling gently for their calves and the wind rustling the tall grama grass back and forth oblivious of the erratic coming and going of man.