Speaker 1: Bushkin.
Speaker 2: In just a few days, it will be Christmas, and
Speaker 2: in houses around the world there will be thousands upon
Speaker 2: thousands of long squat boxes covered in wrapping paper. Inside
Speaker 2: will be little plastic figurines, trains, top hats, empty octagons.
Speaker 2: There will be cards, spinners, tokens, potty pencils, and dice.
Speaker 2: They will play money. There will be scorecards. For this,
Speaker 2: my friends, is the season of the board game. Board
Speaker 2: games have always fascinated me. I used to play double
Speaker 2: board risk as a kid with ten players and the
Speaker 2: games would take minimum twelve hours. Once one took sixteen hours.
Speaker 2: My friend Terry and I developed our own brand of Monopoly,
Speaker 2: where we fixed all the problems with the Parker Brothers version,
Speaker 2: including introducing the use of derivatives. The philosopher Ctun says
Speaker 2: that games are an art form that work in the
Speaker 2: medium of agency. Game shape what you want and how
Speaker 2: you can get it, so every game is a pocket
Speaker 2: philosophy of life, like the story of the woman who
Speaker 2: invented Monopoly to promote a socialist idea about how we
Speaker 2: should tax land, before the Parker Brothers turned it into
Speaker 2: a game about how fun it is to own a
Speaker 2: lot of land. Or my personal favorite, class Struggle, the
Speaker 2: truly tedious board game about communism, invented by an NYU
Speaker 2: professor and scholar of Karl Marx in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: You get the picture. Every game lets you try on
Speaker 2: a way to think about the world. So today on
Speaker 2: the show we have a story from producer Ben at
Speaker 2: Alfhaffrey about a family who invented a board game not
Speaker 2: just to impart some life lessons, but in fact to
Speaker 2: save their own lives. It's a wild, part comedy, part tragedy,
Speaker 2: and the love story perfect for the holidays. It begins
Speaker 2: in the fall of nineteen sixty nine in an apartment
Speaker 2: living room, started a semester at the University of Colorado.
Speaker 1: Moving there. Yeah, it was two blocks off campus, a
Speaker 1: little teeny apartment. We flipped coin, who gets the bedroom,
Speaker 1: who sleeps in the living room? Oil, I slept in
Speaker 1: the living room.
Speaker 3: That's George Roorbacker, inventor of the farming game, but not
Speaker 3: yet at this exact moment, He's creating something entirely different.
Speaker 1: I was in the midst of making it a fringe
Speaker 1: swede jacket. I had done some things for a guy
Speaker 1: and he owed me some money, didn't have any money,
Speaker 1: but he does have a couple of pieces of swede
Speaker 1: that are, you know, right off the col kind of pieces.
Speaker 3: I visited George and Colorado where he lives now, and
Speaker 3: he got out the jacket.
Speaker 1: Okay, the guy that I got the swayed from had
Speaker 1: the most outrageous color of swede I'd ever seen or
Speaker 1: have seen. Since this is like a lurid green, purple,
Speaker 1: lime green, purple, and orange. I believe it was the
Speaker 1: fringe zone, this arm that I was cutting.
Speaker 3: There's your timestamp. Nineteen sixty nine, the war in Vietnam,
Speaker 3: anti war protests on campus, Woodstock, George and the amazing
Speaker 3: technical or swede jacket, which I should say is got
Speaker 3: like a tuxedo.
Speaker 1: It's a one of a kind. Let's just put it.
Speaker 3: It's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1: Oh and tails.
Speaker 3: I'm telling you this not only because the jacket is
Speaker 3: a wormhole to the nineteen sixties, but also because that
Speaker 3: moment with George in his living room slash bedroom was
Speaker 3: the moment his life changed. The sewing was hard work,
Speaker 3: and he'd gotten hungry for a blt. Problem was he
Speaker 3: had the bacon, but he didn't own a frying pan.
Speaker 3: He was kind of plating this when all of a
Speaker 3: sudden he looked out the window and saw a girl
Speaker 3: walking by on the balcony.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: He thought she was gorgeous. He also thought she might
Speaker 3: have a frying pan.
Speaker 1: And I was making a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich
Speaker 1: and with nothing to do. Well, this is prior to
Speaker 1: the invention of mica waves, and the only way you
Speaker 1: cook bacon is in a frying pan. And once you
Speaker 1: get the taste of bacon in your head, it's.
Speaker 3: Hard to get it.
Speaker 1: It's hard to get it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, George drops the Swede jacket and head's next door.
Speaker 4: I was in the apartment on the phone when there
Speaker 4: was a knock at the door.
Speaker 3: That's Anne, the girl from the other apartment, also a
Speaker 3: student at the University of Colorado. She answered the door
Speaker 3: and he said.
Speaker 4: Can I borrow a frying pan?
Speaker 1: She's on the phone.
Speaker 4: Yeah, sure, And I handed him the frying pan and
Speaker 4: he said, I'll bring it back.
Speaker 1: She gets back on the phone and closes the door,
Speaker 1: and I just stand there, just stunned.
Speaker 4: I think I want to get to know that guy.
Speaker 1: Well, first off, she's beautiful, I mean beautiful, and she
Speaker 1: had this long honey brown hair.
Speaker 4: Had she had long hair down to his shoulders, had
Speaker 4: a big beard.
Speaker 1: Basically the outside world said, there's a hippie.
Speaker 4: And he had on overalls and he drove a sort
Speaker 4: of old purple pickup.
Speaker 1: Truck and not not only beautiful face, but one of
Speaker 1: these people. After talking to him, where you realize the
Speaker 1: heart inside is every bit or more beautiful than the outside.
Speaker 1: I mean you could just or I could just feel
Speaker 1: it immediately.
Speaker 4: And the joke is I always say I had to
Speaker 4: marry him to get my friend Pam back.
Speaker 3: And Roerbucker, creator of the Farming game. First thing George
Speaker 3: told me the story of that game is a love story.
Speaker 3: Ann went George a frying pan, he made his blt,
Speaker 3: and then later that night he went back over to
Speaker 3: Anne's apartment.
Speaker 4: So George came over and it was my roommate and
Speaker 4: I and George proceeded to get really high and tell
Speaker 4: the entire movie of King Kong.
Speaker 1: How it was made, and you know, just all of
Speaker 1: the nuances of where it fit in society.
Speaker 4: And I was like, oh my god, this guy is nuts.
Speaker 4: I mean he literally told the entire movie. If you
Speaker 4: ask him a story, he has to go back to
Speaker 4: the very beginning, until every detail from the very beginning.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's a strange it's a strange topic
Speaker 1: to spend the evening talking about with the woman that
Speaker 1: you're gonna ask to marry you. What a week and
Speaker 1: a half, but it must have worked.
Speaker 3: That's Wednesday. Thursday, George walks in to class and writes
Speaker 3: her a poem. Friday, they get on a plane to
Speaker 3: Seattle to meet Anne's parents. Saturday, George gets in a
Speaker 3: long argument with her dad, a businessman and veteran, about Vietnam.
Speaker 3: A week later, George and Ann decide to get engaged.
Speaker 1: This is where I want to be, this is who
Speaker 1: I want to be with. It was instantaneous.
Speaker 4: It was just a knowing that he's my partner, he
Speaker 4: should be my partner, and we should do life together.
Speaker 3: Just before Christmas, the square that kicks off play on
Speaker 3: the game board. They tell Anne's parents they're getting married.
Speaker 4: They were not overly excited about George.
Speaker 1: Her parents were horrified.
Speaker 3: But George and Ann won't change their minds. Sometimes you
Speaker 3: just know. The weeks passed by in a haze. Lucky Roles,
Speaker 3: only sixes classes missed, exams, taken papers, and poems written.
Speaker 3: Ringing round the board till it's June, George graduates and
Speaker 3: he and Anne get married. It's theme of nineteen seventy.
Speaker 3: They decided to take a trip around the country just
Speaker 3: to see where and who they wanted to be. George
Speaker 3: comes from a family of doctors and academics and always
Speaker 3: figured he'd be a professor, but plans change, and had
Speaker 3: been working as a cleaner, and they had saved up
Speaker 3: one thousand dollars. They loaded up George's purple Dodge pickup
Speaker 3: truck and set off. They drove through thirty seven states
Speaker 3: over the course of ten months. As they wandered, they
Speaker 3: got fascinated by a new movement of going back to
Speaker 3: the land.
Speaker 1: We had gotten interested in the dream to the degree
Speaker 1: that we decided, well, neither one of us has ever
Speaker 1: lived in the country, maybe we want to do that.
Speaker 3: In the nineteen seventies, the environmental movement was coming of age.
Speaker 3: The First Earth Day, the founding of the EPA, the
Speaker 3: most substantial legislation to protect our natural environment, came all
Speaker 3: in a rush. People weren't just worried about what we
Speaker 3: put into our rivers in air, though they were worried
Speaker 3: about what we put into our bodies.
Speaker 5: I think that a very great, great deal of sickness
Speaker 5: is because of the refined foods.
Speaker 1: I think we're literally at the.
Speaker 5: Mercy of the people who take all the minerals and
Speaker 5: vittems out of the sugar, out of the flower.
Speaker 3: The organic food movement took off. Between that and the
Speaker 3: mounting feeling that we were killing the earth, a lot
Speaker 3: of people, especially young white college students, started looking for
Speaker 3: a way to reconnect in.
Speaker 4: Our uncertain nuclear future. The homesteading movement is once again
Speaker 4: gaining ground.
Speaker 3: They wanted to be self sufficient. They read magazines like
Speaker 3: Mother Earth News and Whole Earth catalog books like Buckminster
Speaker 3: Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and Adele Davis's Let's
Speaker 3: Get Well. They ate vegetables raw from their gardens and
Speaker 3: cook Gypsy soup from the Moosewood Cookbook. They sang songs
Speaker 3: like Joni Mitchell's Woodstock, I'm going.
Speaker 6: To camboat on the line, I'm gonna try and get me.
Speaker 3: Americans have been going back to the land since the
Speaker 3: nineteenth century, but those early movements were typically a response
Speaker 3: to economic crises. The settlers were romantic, but also practical
Speaker 3: living off the land, subsistence farming. That was one way
Speaker 3: to be sure you wouldn't starve when the next panic came. Also,
Speaker 3: it made for a lot of good books, movies, and
Speaker 3: of course old timey radio shows like The Grand Bees,
Speaker 3: Green Acres.
Speaker 7: Martha Martha. Let's face it, the price of food wouldn't
Speaker 7: be any problem to us if we'd done what I
Speaker 7: wanted to do five years ago and bought a farm.
Speaker 3: But the nineteen seventies back to the Land movement was different.
Speaker 3: It wasn't a response to an economic crisis like the
Speaker 3: Great Depression. It was the expression of an ideal. The
Speaker 3: back to the landers wanted to make things and live
Speaker 3: in sustainable communities. Some people just wanted to live in nature.
Speaker 3: But George and Anne wanted to farm, and all of
Speaker 3: a sudden an opportunity fell into their laps. A friend
Speaker 3: of Anne's parents bought a duck hunting club in Washington State.
Speaker 3: They needed a caretaker, the club, not the ducks.
Speaker 4: Basically, it was four rooms, a bathroom, a bedroom, a
Speaker 4: living room in the kitchen opened the door the place.
Speaker 4: It was full of dead bugs and mosquitoes.
Speaker 1: The house and the duck club was a shithole.
Speaker 4: And it was hot, and it was miserable.
Speaker 1: There's really no other way to describe it.
Speaker 4: What the hell, We'll take it.
Speaker 3: The club was in a town called Toppin'ish in the
Speaker 3: Yakima Valley. The Yakima is some of the most fertile
Speaker 3: farmland in the United States. It can grow asparagus, apples, hay, corn, wheat, barley, mint, grapes, peaches, pears,
Speaker 3: and cherries. The kind of land it takes eons to
Speaker 3: make warm by day and cool in the evening with
Speaker 3: plentiful sunshine. An American Eden, George and Anne started a
Speaker 3: garden off the shack near the creek and got jobs
Speaker 3: in town. George is a teacher and is a bank
Speaker 3: teller on the weekends. George helped out to cattle ranch
Speaker 3: and learned about taking care of livestock and riding horses.
Speaker 1: There was something that struck a cord inside me that said,
Speaker 1: this makes sense. Well, it's like you eat something new
Speaker 1: and it just oh, that was really good.
Speaker 3: He left his teaching job to work more with the
Speaker 3: farmers in the valley, learning all he could about farming,
Speaker 3: and stayed on at the bank. They got cattle and
Speaker 3: ate the food they grew from their garden.
Speaker 1: We not only like it, but we're doing well at it.
Speaker 1: I think this is how we want to live.
Speaker 4: I came home one day from work and George said,
Speaker 4: I found a farm.
Speaker 3: It was twenty seven acres in the Yakima Valley on
Speaker 3: sale from an improbably named widow.
Speaker 1: Her name was Leifa Fields.
Speaker 3: They bought Leifa's place, and over the years their farm
Speaker 3: did so well. They got bigger and expanded. They had
Speaker 3: walnut trees and apricots in their garden, mint and alfalfa
Speaker 3: in the field. Their conquered grapes went to Welch's Juice
Speaker 3: and their sweet corn to del Monte's. They worked eighteen
Speaker 3: hours a day, seven days a week at the farm,
Speaker 3: at the bank, at the feed lot. They were rediscovering
Speaker 3: a whole way of life that was new for them
Speaker 3: but old hat to a lot of their neighbors, and
Speaker 3: the community helped them find their way. They had their
Speaker 3: first child, a baby boy named Blake, and they were happy.
Speaker 1: And basically since we left the Duck Club, we had
Speaker 1: been on a roll where things were getting better and
Speaker 1: better and better.
Speaker 3: The early nineteen seventies, those back to the Land years
Speaker 3: were amazing for American farmers.
Speaker 1: I didn't know any farmer who had gone broke. Gone
Speaker 1: broke is back in the dust bowl era.
Speaker 3: That stretch of farming prosperity. It happened under one man,
Speaker 3: in particular, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Rusty Butts, Indiana born,
Speaker 3: raised on a farm in the nineteen tens. Here's Butts.
Speaker 1: I don't want to go back to good old days.
Speaker 7: I only want to go forward.
Speaker 3: Whether Butts was really taking the country forward or backwards
Speaker 3: was something people would come to argue about. He was
Speaker 3: a friend to big agribusiness, also to Republicans. He kept
Speaker 3: a wood carving of two elephants having sex in his office.
Speaker 3: Why because he said he was trying to make Republican
Speaker 3: voters multiply, and he had a terrible sense of humor.
Speaker 3: In the post war decades, increasing farm productivity had already
Speaker 3: driven down the number of farms and increased their average size.
Speaker 3: Now Butts wanted to take the trend even further. He
Speaker 3: wanted to supersize American agriculture, and he got the chance
Speaker 3: in the early nineteen seventies, just as George and Anne
Speaker 3: were buying their first farms. The Soviet Union had just
Speaker 3: gone through a patch of terrible weather. If they were
Speaker 3: going to eat, they needed to import crops. The Soviets
Speaker 3: bought up a quarter of the American harvest, billions of
Speaker 3: dollars in US grain and soybeans. Wheat prices rose enormously,
Speaker 3: farm income hidden all time high. Butts had found a
Speaker 3: glos mobile market for American crops. He told farmers to
Speaker 3: get big or get out. Agribusinesses thrilled to the spike
Speaker 3: in demand for their new herbicides, machines and fertilizers. Bigger,
Speaker 3: modernized farms meant bigger sales.
Speaker 7: Our challenge is not to go back to more innffacient ways.
Speaker 7: Our challenge is not to put more people back on
Speaker 7: the land. Our challenge is to adapt to the change
Speaker 7: in situation which we find ourselves.
Speaker 3: Butts's vision was part of the reason farming knowledge began
Speaker 3: to ebb away. The emphasis on efficiency of growing as
Speaker 3: much as you possibly could came at the cost of older,
Speaker 3: more sustainable practices like crop rotation and plant diversity. Instead
Speaker 3: of small amounts of several crops, you got thousands of
Speaker 3: acres of just soybeans. Another farm all corn. Butts's vision
Speaker 3: was not exactly the back to the land dream, but
Speaker 3: George and Ann still benefited. A lot of farmers did.
Speaker 3: At least at first, the value of farmland skyrocketed. Farmers
Speaker 3: were living well, The family farm was becoming more like
Speaker 3: a factory, and the family farmer took out loan after
Speaker 3: loan on easy credit to expand, which is why when
Speaker 3: George saw a thousand acre ranch for sale, he thought, why.
Speaker 1: Not fourteen miles out of town, four miles from the
Speaker 1: next door in Ahror and you can see the Milky Way,
Speaker 1: and it just felt just absolutely right.
Speaker 4: And we said, this is where we want to raise
Speaker 4: our kids.
Speaker 3: The thousand acre ranch was surrounded by canyons ninety five
Speaker 3: miles away from their old farm, across the Sadus Pass,
Speaker 3: fringed by timber, off the Cascades Mountains, at the breaks
Speaker 3: of the clickatat river where the rocky land pulls away
Speaker 3: from the water. They called it the Break's Ranch. The
Speaker 3: day they saw it, they made an offer. The next
Speaker 3: day they got a call.
Speaker 4: So the house burned down.
Speaker 3: It is one hundred percent gone electrical fire. Consider that
Speaker 3: this place is ten times the farm. George and Ann
Speaker 3: have ever worked. Consider that the farmer's selling it or
Speaker 3: doing so because they've fallen on hard times, and consider
Speaker 3: that the house is now burned down. This I think
Speaker 3: was a sign from the universe about what was to come.
Speaker 3: George and Ann had the chance to fold up the
Speaker 3: board and walk away, but that's no way to play
Speaker 3: a game.
Speaker 1: And we've been rolling fives and sixes since today. We
Speaker 1: got off the bus. I said, Uh, well, hell, let's
Speaker 1: let's go for the place and we'll build a house.
Speaker 3: They negotiated the price down and bought the land and
Speaker 3: also fifty head of cattle. A neighbor lent them a
Speaker 3: trailer to live in, and George started to solve the
Speaker 3: whole house situation in a very George way.
Speaker 1: Well, it's like the fringe jacket, you know. And there
Speaker 1: was a contractor in Yakima who was actually building two
Speaker 1: geodesic dome at the top.
Speaker 3: For the uninitiated. A geodesic dome is a structure popular
Speaker 3: in the sixties counterculture, involving lots of triangles fit together
Speaker 3: in the shape of a dome.
Speaker 1: And you can put the walls in tior anywhere you
Speaker 1: want them because they're not holding up the roof. The
Speaker 1: roof is holding up the roof.
Speaker 4: George was a dreamer. He believed everything could be done,
Speaker 4: and he was right. He was right most of the time.
Speaker 3: They bought the dome Easter weekend of nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 3: with their one year old looking on. George and Anne
Speaker 3: put up the forty five foot structure triangle by triangle.
Speaker 3: With a bunch of friends. They moved into the basement,
Speaker 3: plywood ceiling, concrete floors, with a drain in the middle,
Speaker 3: a hose to draw water from the spring, and absolutely
Speaker 3: no heat.
Speaker 1: You talk about back to the land, we're.
Speaker 3: Back only six years earlier. They'd never farmed in their lives.
Speaker 3: Now they own one thousand acres miles from the nearest person,
Speaker 3: surrounded by mountains. Spiritually, geographically, financially, they were way out there.
Speaker 3: The trouble with games of chance is when they go
Speaker 3: your way. You think it's all about you. You're lucky,
Speaker 3: or you're special, you've got the hot hand or the
Speaker 3: midas touch. But if you roll the dice often enough,
Speaker 3: your average moves towards the middle, and if you've started high,
Speaker 3: you're gonna get laid low.
Speaker 1: Well, all of a sudden, a place that normally gets
Speaker 1: twenty five to thirty inches of rain. We got four
Speaker 1: inches of rain.
Speaker 3: There wasn't enough hay to feed the cows, and instead
Speaker 3: of thirty five bushels of wheat per acre, they made ten.
Speaker 3: It was nineteen seventy seven. Something like this was happening
Speaker 3: to farmers across America. Prices were down, costamerizing with inflation,
Speaker 3: and farmers were having to take on more and more
Speaker 3: debt just to survive.
Speaker 1: And the pitomized stomach, the bottom is falling out.
Speaker 3: They had their second child, a boy named David.
Speaker 1: And so year seventy nine kicks in, we get two
Speaker 1: and a half inches of rain.
Speaker 3: Disaster, The crop failed, the farm was failing, and took
Speaker 3: a job far out from the ranch, and things were
Speaker 3: going badly for everyone. George could sense it in the
Speaker 3: local store at the feed lot.
Speaker 1: About the middle of May, and she gets out of
Speaker 1: the car and I've just come in for dinner, and
Speaker 1: she lets the kids loose in their room and she
Speaker 1: comes up to me and she says, honey, I'm pregnant again.
Speaker 4: We both knew that it was a slim chance. We
Speaker 4: were staying that this we were gonna have to mith
Speaker 4: the experiment failed and we were going to have to
Speaker 4: give it up.
Speaker 3: Anne and George owed more in interest on their debts
Speaker 3: than they could make in a year. They were living
Speaker 3: in an unfinished house with two kids and a third
Speaker 3: on the way. The spring turned to summer and it
Speaker 3: was time to cut the hay. George bailed by moonlight
Speaker 3: when the dew came up and the dried out crop
Speaker 3: had a chance of sticking together. On July seventh, nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy nine, he got up at three am and stepped outside.
Speaker 1: There's no other lights other than starlight above and the
Speaker 1: lights of my tractor. And I'm as a lone as
Speaker 1: a man can be, crushing pressures, no way out kind
Speaker 1: of pressures. I am at fault for this disaster. What
Speaker 1: can I do? And for some strange reason, I have
Speaker 1: no idea how or why this blanked into my head.
Speaker 1: This problem I'm in would make the hell of a
Speaker 1: subject for a board game.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back. It's nineteen seventy nine. Family farms
Speaker 3: across America are in trouble. One farmer in particular is
Speaker 3: taking it pretty hard.
Speaker 1: Crop prices are just total shit.
Speaker 3: George Robrocker, farmer in trouble crushing debt, failing farm baby
Speaker 3: on the way. It's three am and he's out in
Speaker 3: the field, not asleep, but still dreaming about a board game.
Speaker 1: I finally get done, baileyen Hey, eat breakfast, go down
Speaker 1: in the basement, get a scrap of sheet rock and
Speaker 1: a framing square, and drawn myself a game board picture.
Speaker 3: George alone in the basement of his geodesic dome, surrounded
Speaker 3: by thousands of acres of failing farmland, scratching out a
Speaker 3: board game on a loose piece of sheet rock. Here's
Speaker 3: a fine line between genius and insanity, or sometimes no
Speaker 3: line at all.
Speaker 1: And it occurs to me that those four sides could
Speaker 1: be the seasons. Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: The sun is high overhead now sapping the last moisture
Speaker 3: from the alfalfa. There are cows to feed, work to do,
Speaker 3: but George is riding the lightning. He can't stop inventing
Speaker 3: farmer figurines, debt from the bank the Yakima Valley at
Speaker 3: the center, a board game about how miserable it is
Speaker 3: to be a farmer.
Speaker 1: I didn't go back out to the field, I didn't
Speaker 1: eat lunch, and comes home and it's pretty warm, the
Speaker 1: kids are fried, and she walks in the door and
Speaker 1: I just literally can't wait for the kids to get
Speaker 1: out of the way to tell her I've just discovered
Speaker 1: the trapdoor the way out of this mess.
Speaker 4: It had just come like full out of his head.
Speaker 4: Here was this game, and we got to do this, yo.
Speaker 4: This is what's what's gonna save us.
Speaker 1: And she gave me a look like, are you frigging crazy?
Speaker 1: A board game?
Speaker 4: One crazy thing that's goo to see the other crazy thing.
Speaker 3: The game works a bit like Monopoly. It starts when
Speaker 3: you inherit land from your grandfather ten acres of hay
Speaker 3: and ten acres of wheat, each represented by a little
Speaker 3: vinyl stamp with a bale of hay or a wheatstock
Speaker 3: on it. There are six farms in the center of
Speaker 3: the board, each named after a real place in the
Speaker 3: Yakima Valley, and you've got one of them. Around the
Speaker 3: edge of the board is the calendar year, blocked off
Speaker 3: by harvest times, your hay cuttings, cherry harvest, livestock sales,
Speaker 3: and so on. You begin with five thousand dollars in
Speaker 3: debt with a fifty thousand dollars line of credit. The
Speaker 3: goal is to make enough on your farm that you
Speaker 3: can quit your job in town, which at the start
Speaker 3: is the only way you're staying afloat. It is a
Speaker 3: punishing game. Typically, your debt only gets worse in the winter.
Speaker 3: You can buy more seed or livestock or equipment, but
Speaker 3: it almost always costs more than the cash you have
Speaker 3: on hand, so you have to borrow and eventually either
Speaker 3: pay it back or declare bankruptcy.
Speaker 4: But that was farming. Had to have the debt. It
Speaker 4: is spanishing. It's not fun all the time, so we
Speaker 4: had to do balance make it be possible.
Speaker 3: They spent every night working out the mechanism of the game,
Speaker 3: playing it again and again. They put everything they'd learned
Speaker 3: about farming into it. In harvest seasons, you roll the
Speaker 3: dice to see how good your crop is, check the
Speaker 3: harvest rate chart for prices per acre, and then pull
Speaker 3: an operating expense card that tells you how much it's
Speaker 3: going to cost to harvest that crop. Sometimes you land
Speaker 3: on a farmer's fate square and you have to draw
Speaker 3: a card to see how you're lux breaking. Often something
Speaker 3: bad happens tractor malfunction, grain embargo, irs, garnishing your wages,
Speaker 3: Mount Saint Helen's erupting. All these things that could happen
Speaker 3: to you in the game, all of them had happened
Speaker 3: to George, Ann or one of their friends at some point.
Speaker 3: It's a perfect model of the family farm. It's also
Speaker 3: the story of their lives. But just like when they
Speaker 3: got into farming, George and Ann had absolutely no idea
Speaker 3: how to manufacture a board game.
Speaker 4: And at the time we just thought we needed a printer.
Speaker 4: We just thought we needed a box maker.
Speaker 3: It turned out nearly every part of the game needed
Speaker 3: to be manufactured by a specialist. The folding cardboard came
Speaker 3: from Los Angeles, the acreage stamps from New Jersey, the
Speaker 3: dice from Rhode Island. One company prints the money, a
Speaker 3: different one makes the game board art, and another makes
Speaker 3: the board backing. And the family still had to cut
Speaker 3: out each individual play dollar in their basement.
Speaker 4: And our four year old would put a a rubber
Speaker 4: band around for us.
Speaker 3: It's August nineteen seventy nine. As George worked on piecing
Speaker 3: the game's supply chain together, farmers around the country were
Speaker 3: sounding the alarm about a coming crisis in agriculture.
Speaker 8: The tractors are traveling in a caravan, honking horns, waving flags,
Speaker 8: and sporting posters in an attempt to gather more support
Speaker 8: for farmers across the country.
Speaker 3: Farmers drove their tractors to Washington, DC that year to
Speaker 3: protest falling prices and rising costs. They called it a tractorcade.
Speaker 3: Most farmers were facing a version of George's problem. They
Speaker 3: were over leveraged, underpaid, and unable to explain the complexities
Speaker 3: of their situation to voters who mainly cared about keeping
Speaker 3: the price of groceries down. The situation was only getting
Speaker 3: worse all the while George was building his own lifeboat.
Speaker 3: It's September. If George and Ann were going to make
Speaker 3: any money, they needed to go big, so they sold
Speaker 3: half their cows, took out a loan in order to
Speaker 3: run of ten thousand games.
Speaker 4: When we say we bet the ranch on it, we did.
Speaker 3: Board games sell best at Christmas. December was only three
Speaker 3: months away and was due at the end of November.
Speaker 1: The middle of September turns into the end of September,
Speaker 1: and the end of September turns into October.
Speaker 3: But making the game is only half the work. Sewing
Speaker 3: without reaping one.
Speaker 1: Of the questions, of course, when you're producing ten thousand
Speaker 1: copies of a board game, is how do you sell
Speaker 1: the damn thing?
Speaker 3: In case you hadn't noticed, George is a born salesman.
Speaker 3: He sent a letter pitching the game to President Jimmy Carter.
Speaker 1: Three weeks after I sent the letter, I got a
Speaker 1: mimeograph letter from underling of an underling saying, essentially, thank
Speaker 1: you for whatever you said to the White House.
Speaker 3: Have a nice day, a bum roll. But meanwhile, George
Speaker 3: had started writing ads for farm magazines with information about
Speaker 3: how to order the game, and the order started to
Speaker 3: trickle in, And then George had an idea for a
Speaker 3: Hail Mary.
Speaker 1: Hello Americans, This is Paul Harvey, stand bype on yous.
Speaker 3: Paul Harvey was a radio broadcaster who is especially popular
Speaker 3: among farmers. Everybody listened to him on tractors, trucks, and
Speaker 3: bus radios. Probably there is no radio program American cattle
Speaker 3: have heard more of. George dashed off a letter to
Speaker 3: Harvey and slipped in a copy of an article about
Speaker 3: the game from a local newspaper. The days passed, and
Speaker 3: then miraculously, Paul Harvey talked about it on his show
Speaker 3: Harvey's archives are a bit of a shambles, so I
Speaker 3: couldn't find the broadcast to confirm for myself. George and
Speaker 3: Ann didn't hear it directly either. They found out about it,
Speaker 3: they said, because all of a sudden their games started
Speaker 3: to sell.
Speaker 4: Dolors, and Western Farmers said that Paul Harvey spoke about it,
Speaker 4: and so they all want one in their store.
Speaker 3: Western Farmers Association was a big chain of farm stores.
Speaker 3: It was late November and the game was moving. George
Speaker 3: hitched a horse trailer to his pickup and loaded it
Speaker 3: up with games to bring to the stores that Saturday.
Speaker 3: An went into labor.
Speaker 1: Well, Laura had the good sense and the courtesy to
Speaker 1: hold up until we got the lid on the box,
Speaker 1: and Laura was born at.
Speaker 3: Home Sunday night at one thirty am. Meanwhile, word of
Speaker 3: the game had begun to spread through the Grange Halls
Speaker 3: farm magazines, even a story in the Washington Post just
Speaker 3: weeks later.
Speaker 1: Wellin six weeks, we had sold seven thousand, up to
Speaker 1: ten thousand copies.
Speaker 3: In the nick of time, it looked like George and
Speaker 3: Ann were going to save their farm. But that's after
Speaker 3: the break in January of nineteen eighty, the farming game
Speaker 3: was starting to take off. People magazine wrote it up,
Speaker 3: and in George started a company called the Weekend Farmer
Speaker 3: Company to manage it. But they needed this game to
Speaker 3: be more than a passing fad. They needed it to
Speaker 3: pay for itself and help them save their farm. So
Speaker 3: George worked up a new sales strategy.
Speaker 1: In the wintertime, there are farm supply shows all over
Speaker 1: the United States where farmers go to kick the tires
Speaker 1: on the new tractor whatnot.
Speaker 3: He decided to tour the farm shows selling the game.
Speaker 3: They bought an old fifteen passenger Dodge van and took
Speaker 3: out all the seats. If you packed it to the roof,
Speaker 3: it held twelve hundred games. George hit the road.
Speaker 1: And so what I would do is, I'm headed to Missoula, Montana,
Speaker 1: and I stop in every little town on the way there.
Speaker 1: In little towns, the people that manage the stores or
Speaker 1: did at that time, or the people that own the stores,
Speaker 1: and you could walk in the front door and within
Speaker 1: a minute and a half be talking to the owner
Speaker 1: and find out if you could sell the game to
Speaker 1: the guy or not, and if not, you're back on
Speaker 1: the road. Five minutes later.
Speaker 3: This was how the farming Game found its true audience,
Speaker 3: the diehards. Somebody would play with a friend and then
Speaker 3: that friend would order a copy. Eventually, George and Ann
Speaker 3: set up an eight hundred number. Soon a ups driver
Speaker 3: was coming out to the farm most days, passed the
Speaker 3: sign reading Primitive Road to pick up shipments of the
Speaker 3: Farming Game. In the summer, he'd bring the kids popsicles.
Speaker 3: The eight hundred number patched straight into the house and
Speaker 3: the phone rang off the hook.
Speaker 4: The phone was beside our bed, so we answered it
Speaker 4: in the middle of the night, so sometimes you're talking
Speaker 4: to the phone boy. It's a good thing. You cannot see.
Speaker 4: There's no video that goes with this phone.
Speaker 3: George kept on the road to turn up new business,
Speaker 3: but as he drove around the country games in tow
Speaker 3: agriculture had fallen into a death spiral. While farmers were
Speaker 3: growing on credit in the nineteen seventies, inflation was rising too,
Speaker 3: and the Federal Reserve decided to jack up interest rates
Speaker 3: to slow it down. Suddenly, banks started calling in the
Speaker 3: loans they'd been so confident in years earlier, and the
Speaker 3: farmers couldn't pay. Within the span of just a couple years,
Speaker 3: family farm income dropped by more than eighty percent. In
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty one, the USDA said about half the farmers
Speaker 3: in the country would eventually be driven from the land.
Speaker 3: But it wasn't just the farms when they went all
Speaker 3: the small local businesses that sold them seeds for the
Speaker 3: fields and feed for their livestock, and ice cream and
Speaker 3: candy for their kids. They began to close. Two rural
Speaker 3: communities and family farms were falling apart.
Speaker 1: We had a nationwide economic crisis, which at the very
Speaker 1: same time was it a nationwide family crisis because at
Speaker 1: that time every farm in the United States had some
Speaker 1: family roots two or three or four five generations back.
Speaker 1: So you inherit this from granddad, and you're the dumb,
Speaker 1: sull bitch who lost it.
Speaker 3: A lot of that land was bought by farm management
Speaker 3: companies corporations. We sometimes hired the broke farmers from the
Speaker 3: same farms back to work it. However bad it was
Speaker 3: for white farmers, it was worse for black farmers. They
Speaker 3: lost their land ten times faster. More than half a
Speaker 3: million people left rural America in a single year. Losing
Speaker 3: a job is one thing. Losing a farm is losing everything.
Speaker 1: It looked like death. And when you bury the farm,
Speaker 1: a big part of your heart, a big part of
Speaker 1: who you are, a big part of who your family is,
Speaker 1: is dead. But it's I can't go any deeper into that.
Speaker 7: The situation with bad loans and low prices has gotten.
Speaker 1: So bad the nation's largest source of farm loans need
Speaker 1: big help and fast.
Speaker 5: Ninety three thousand mid sized US farms are deeply in
Speaker 5: debt and are on the verge of going broke.
Speaker 1: I had a gun in a pickup. The thoughts that
Speaker 1: entered my mind that maybe my family was better off
Speaker 1: with me going alive.
Speaker 3: It was terrible, But as the crisis worsened, the Farming
Speaker 3: Game became a kind of advocacy tool in a way
Speaker 3: for farm families to find some relief from their troubles.
Speaker 3: A North Dakota mental health program used the game to
Speaker 3: help farmers relieve stress and talk about their problems. It
Speaker 3: became well. It became a body of knowledge, a chronicle
Speaker 3: of a disappearing way of life, but maybe also a
Speaker 3: way to save it.
Speaker 1: In Southern California, whose family was in the citrus business,
Speaker 1: was given the Farming Game for Christmas, and when she
Speaker 1: played it. Immediately, she saw the ability to teach the
Speaker 1: basic economics of farming and just the social superstructure in
Speaker 1: which the business is set.
Speaker 3: The lady worked for an advocacy group for women in agriculture.
Speaker 3: In the mid nineteen eighties, they decided the country needed
Speaker 3: to know about the game. They flooded the halls of
Speaker 3: the Capitol with hundreds of board games, one for each
Speaker 3: member of Congress, five hundred and thirty five games in all,
Speaker 3: trying to explain what was happening to farmers. The board
Speaker 3: game didn't get any laws passed, but it was making
Speaker 3: its way out into the world, sharing the hardships of
Speaker 3: farming and the joy of it. Right when the country
Speaker 3: hit a crisis of understanding, schools began teaching the game
Speaker 3: in droves. According to George, more than three thousand and
Speaker 3: classrooms in North America have used the game in one
Speaker 3: way or another to teach kids about what it means
Speaker 3: to run a farm. I talked to a slew of
Speaker 3: agriculture teachers and they all said the same thing. The
Speaker 3: game was a perfect teaching tool because it was fun
Speaker 3: and it was true. It got passed along one year
Speaker 3: to the next, spread from classroom to classroom. Like seeds
Speaker 3: on the Wind, the Washington State Legislature passed a resolution
Speaker 3: recognizing the game's educational value. When the Soviet Union fell,
Speaker 3: the US Agency for International Development helped bring George and
Speaker 3: the Game to Russia to help teach what privatized farming
Speaker 3: would look like. Over time, the game sold hundreds of
Speaker 3: thousands of copies. With the money from the Farming Game,
Speaker 3: George and Ann could keep their own farm running, a
Speaker 3: small oasis at the far reaches of the farm crisis.
Speaker 6: The house that we grew up in was built up
Speaker 6: around us.
Speaker 3: Laura Roherbucker, the daughter who occasioned the Farming Game, She
Speaker 3: and the game they're the same age.
Speaker 6: I don't know if you heard the story. Like when
Speaker 6: I was born, there's this little nook in our living
Speaker 6: room and my dad was building it, and my mom said, Okay,
Speaker 6: I'm gonna have this baby, stop building, so clean up
Speaker 6: your mess. And then my dad never finished that little nook.
Speaker 6: You can still go there and there's still like insulation sticking.
Speaker 4: Out around it.
Speaker 3: All the kids remember the phones, how the ring of
Speaker 3: the eight hundred numbers sounded different than the other two lines.
Speaker 3: The order sheets printed in triple get posted by each phone.
Speaker 6: It rang all hours, so back then, like eight hundre
Speaker 6: number twenty four seven just rang into our house and
Speaker 6: all the kids we're going off the wall, like doing
Speaker 6: whatever we're doing, and just monkeying around, and my dad
Speaker 6: would yell before aso the phone, it's.
Speaker 4: A money call.
Speaker 6: It's a money call, quiet town, And of course we wouldn't.
Speaker 6: And so then my dad's trying to take a farming
Speaker 6: game order on the phone as these crazy noises here
Speaker 6: in the background, and we'd hear him say, oh, congratulations,
Speaker 6: you're the ten thousands call or this week or something.
Speaker 6: We're all celebrating here in the office, and it's just
Speaker 6: us kids yelling and screaming in the background.
Speaker 3: Farm kids are born into jobs. Farming game kids the same.
Speaker 3: When they got to be eight or so, they started
Speaker 3: taking the calls themselves.
Speaker 6: If you didn't feel like taking an order, but you
Speaker 6: were the one closest to the phone, you know, your
Speaker 6: brothers would scatter and you'd be the ones staying there
Speaker 6: with the phone's ringing, So you'd answer the phone, Hello,
Speaker 6: we can for our company in a year old voice.
Speaker 6: M yes, oh that's a great question. But this is
Speaker 6: a shipping department. Let me get you sales, and you
Speaker 6: put them on hold, and then you say, Mom, the
Speaker 6: phones for you.
Speaker 3: The house was full of games, cardboard boxes for forts,
Speaker 3: hundreds of dice, millions of dollars in play money. But
Speaker 3: the house itself was a kind of wonderland too. At
Speaker 3: Christmas they'd get these gigantic twenty foot trees and nail
Speaker 3: them straight into the floor. They lived year round in nature,
Speaker 3: watching the seasons turn, shading one into the other. At
Speaker 3: each corner of.
Speaker 6: The game, you get just enough snow to pull the
Speaker 6: sleds out and slid down the horse pasture. You know,
Speaker 6: that's right next to like this little creek that when
Speaker 6: the snow melts, it fills with water and you get
Speaker 6: to like get sticks and pretend they're fishing poles and
Speaker 6: then just pass that as the waterfall that pours down
Speaker 6: and in the spring it rages like you got to
Speaker 6: keep little kids away from it. And then by the
Speaker 6: end of summer it's totally dry and you just have
Speaker 6: like a rocky bet. I mean, there's just you can
Speaker 6: explore forever just right outside the door.
Speaker 3: That life is why George and Anne, but everything they
Speaker 3: had on the game a long shot to let them
Speaker 3: raise their kids in nature, tending nature. They were an
Speaker 3: idiosyncratic farm family, but other farm families, even ones who
Speaker 3: didn't live in geodes Sicdomes, have always been the game's
Speaker 3: biggest audience, And during those hard years when rural America
Speaker 3: was coming apart, they were playing it in so many kitchens,
Speaker 3: with the table cleared and the bright green of the
Speaker 3: Yakima Valley laid out under the ceiling lamp, the dark
Speaker 3: outside s trouting an ailing farm, the family imagining what
Speaker 3: a lucky role would feel like, or a bumper crop,
Speaker 3: or a bad thing you could laugh at instead of cry.
Speaker 3: Those moments are the game's true legacy, and they aren't
Speaker 3: recorded for posterity, but George glimpsed one of them one
Speaker 3: year during the crisis when he had left his family
Speaker 3: at the ranch to head out on the road selling
Speaker 3: the game at an agricultural exposition in Montana.
Speaker 1: And I'm sitting behind the booth waiting for a customer
Speaker 1: to walk by, and there's sort of a crowd of
Speaker 1: people milling around, and at the back of this crowd
Speaker 1: was this absolutely gigantic guy farmer. Anyway, he is eyeball
Speaker 1: in the booth an eyeball on me, and I'm thinking, boy,
Speaker 1: what's on his mind? If it's not good, I don't
Speaker 1: want to be here. He kind of pushes his way
Speaker 1: through the crowd and he comes right up to me,
Speaker 1: and he said, I want, I want to shake your hand.
Speaker 1: And I am hooked in a handshake with a oh
Speaker 1: about a six foot six, three hundred and fifty pounds
Speaker 1: guy who could wrestle a steer and win. And he's crying.
Speaker 3: The man told George he was divorced with two sons.
Speaker 3: The oldest, a teenager, had been arrested not long before.
Speaker 3: When his son was home from jail and was over
Speaker 3: at his dad's house with his little brother, they pulled
Speaker 3: out the farming game and the three of them began
Speaker 3: to play.
Speaker 1: They were laughing and just being the kind of family
Speaker 1: you want to be. And anyway, this family of three men,
Speaker 1: two little ones and one giant one played the game
Speaker 1: every Sunday afternoon and left the game where it was
Speaker 1: on the table until the next time, and the boys
Speaker 1: came and then picked it up in the middle of
Speaker 1: the game. And anyway, he's still holding my hand and
Speaker 1: he looks me right in the eye again, and he said,
Speaker 1: you say my boys, and then he turned around walked away.
Speaker 3: Farming is cyclical, like the seasons. The Farming game turned
Speaker 3: out to be countercyclical. Over the years, it became clear
Speaker 3: that it sold best when times were worst. It's been
Speaker 3: in print ever since nineteen seventy nine, and sales picked
Speaker 3: up both during the financial crisis and the COVID pandemic.
Speaker 3: That first crisis, though, the early nineteen eighties, is when
Speaker 3: George's fate in the games diverged from the fate of
Speaker 3: the American family farm. He'd been in lockstep with the
Speaker 3: trends of the day, the Butt's agenda bigger, buying on credit,
Speaker 3: planting fence road to fence row, and then watching it
Speaker 3: all come apart. But the game saved the Roarbackers, even
Speaker 3: while the farm crisis drove so many other small family
Speaker 3: farmers off their land. At the start of the twentieth century,
Speaker 3: nearly forty percent of Americans lived on farms. Today about
Speaker 3: one percent due there are still family farms, just fewer
Speaker 3: and mostly bigger. And in George, they had meant to
Speaker 3: make a board game. They wound up writing a eulogy
Speaker 3: late last winter. I spent a weekend with the Roarerbackers
Speaker 3: in Colorado. They still owned the farm in Washington State,
Speaker 3: but they live here now, in a little town in
Speaker 3: the far southwest of the state, near a national forest.
Speaker 3: We talked for hours and hours, but on the last
Speaker 3: night there was one thing I had left to do.
Speaker 3: We played the farming game me George and Laura, her
Speaker 3: husband Tim, and her daughter Vivian.
Speaker 6: I see hey, and set it up.
Speaker 1: How my five thousand dollars a Yet everybody starts with
Speaker 1: of course, Oh no, God.
Speaker 6: That's ingenius.
Speaker 4: Just wow, what a great idea.
Speaker 6: We're gonna find out who admitted the game at the
Speaker 6: end of this take.
Speaker 1: Him out to the party.
Speaker 3: We began to play I've never been a farmer, so
Speaker 3: with each bumper crop or farmer's fate card, I was
Speaker 3: learning some of the things George and Ann learned from
Speaker 3: their neighbors that their neighbors had learned from their parents. George,
Speaker 3: for his part, seemed to be learning some lessons for
Speaker 3: the second or third time.
Speaker 4: I noticed all you have leftis five hundred dollars. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you're going to go bankrupt in the first ten minutes.
Speaker 1: Well, I do have a reputation of either winning or going.
Speaker 3: Brok and told me earlier that George either wins big
Speaker 3: or loses big. That night he was out of the
Speaker 3: game before he made it around the board twice.
Speaker 4: Now here's where your situation is.
Speaker 1: You're out of money. I got some troubles here, you
Speaker 1: always said.
Speaker 3: Watching George and Ann play together was like seeing the
Speaker 3: whole story in miniature. The dreamer and the pragmatist two
Speaker 3: ways of thinking about chance. You expect the best or
Speaker 3: you prepare for the worst. I had come to their
Speaker 3: story expecting it to be a story about the loss
Speaker 3: of agricultural knowledge that used to be the most common
Speaker 3: kind of common knowledge there was, and I'd thought when
Speaker 3: I set out that the game was just a very
Speaker 3: sweet way to share it again. But playing the game
Speaker 3: that night, I was thinking about games and risks and
Speaker 3: knowns none knowns. George says farmers have to be optimists,
Speaker 3: otherwise they'd never plant a seed. The farming game is
Speaker 3: a model of farming, but farming is a model of
Speaker 3: life itself. Their good years and bad. You can pair,
Speaker 3: but you can't control. You live in a world where
Speaker 3: things grow if you care for them, and if you're
Speaker 3: going to play games of chance. It's best to play
Speaker 3: them with someone else. That way, you win even when
Speaker 3: you lose.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna buy some you can't.
Speaker 8: Why, Oh, I'll see it.
Speaker 9: I was gonna buy them less, but you are going okay.
Speaker 2: This episode originally ran on The Last Archive, a podcast
Speaker 2: about the history of truth. You can find a link
Speaker 2: to listen to more Last Archive episodes in our show notes.
Speaker 2: The episode was written by Ben Adaph Haffrey, who produced
Speaker 2: it with Lucy Sullivan. It was edited by Sophie Crane
Speaker 2: and Julia Barton and executive produced by Jillapoor, Sophie Crane
Speaker 2: and Meila Belle, engineering by Jake Krsky, fact checking by
Speaker 2: Amy Gaines, and original music by Matthias Bossi and John
Speaker 2: Evans of stell Wagon Symfidet. Happy holidays everyone, I'm Malcolm Glauco.