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his spare time, he went all over the surrounding country selling Crosley radios for a merchant in Dumas named “Rock” Meador. Meador would pass his copies of National Geographic along to Grover, who read them cover to cover and shared them with the rest of us. During his service in England and Germany duringWorldWar II,he spent every available minute of leave visiting historic sites.Moreover, as an airplane mechanic,he was sent out with a crew to salvage parts from downed planes all over France, Germany, and Belgium as the allies progressed. On one such foray he was caught behind enemy lines in the Battle of the Bulge.Bob recalls Grover’s telling him once that had it not been for the farm,he would have stayed in the air force after the war because he enjoyed travel so much.As an example of his mechanical ingenuity,a wrench he designed and made for use on airplane engines that prevented skinned knuckles was adopted by the air force. Every Sunday for years during the s, there was a baseball game in our pasture, and the local teams used bats that Grover had made on a lathe in the farm shop. In , he married Fayree Sumrall of Dumas and, to the utter astonishment of everyone,decided to live in Dumas rather than build a house on the farm. His reasoning was that with the newly blacktopped road the trip out took only a few minutes. Furthermore, he was sure that since he was older, he would not outlive his wife and could not bear the thought of leaving her alone out there on the farm. Their only child,a son named Grover Cason Jones,called“Casey”for short, was born in . Grover’s decision to live in town certainly did not indicate a fading interest in farming.It was clear from the beginning of his tenure as sole manager in  that he had plans to tighten up whatever loose reins there were and make the farm an even more profitable enterprise than it had already become. He wanted to mechanize, moving from tenant farmers to salaried employees, and to expand his operation by leasing more land.According to his records,it apparently took him eight years to accomplish this.In ,he promoted Clyo Moore, who had been with us almost thirty years by that time, to the position of foreman.In ,he still had three tenants,two salaried tractor drivers, and the foreman who also operated a tractor as needed.  The Grover Generation 1BOLSTERLI_pages.qxd 2/6/08 3:51 PM Page 108 By  he had no tenants at all, just the foreman, who also drove a tractor, and two tractor drivers.The tractor drivers were the sons of one of the former tenant farmers and were placed on year-round salary Grover’s carefully kept records for those years show the effects of his efforts on crop yields.With one exception,each year between  and  showed a higher yield for cotton.In , acres yielded  pounds per acre; in ,  acres yielded  pounds per acre; in , . acres yielded  pounds per acre; in ,  acres yielded  pounds per acre; and in , . acres yielded  pounds per acre.In ,the only one of these years in which he figured his profit from cotton in the ledger,his net proceeds on it totaled $, or .¢ per pound.Finally,there really did seem to be something at the end of the rainbow.1 By , soybeans had become a major crop as well as cotton,and that year the  acres planted in it yielded , bushels,or . bushels per acre.In  he planted  acres that yielded , bushels, or . bushels per acre. But it should also be noted that during these years he had two salaried jobs as well. He was Desha County Tax Assessor and also president and gin manager for the Pendleton Gin Association, a cooperative he had helped form after World War II, a position for which he received compensation during the autumn months when the gin was running. For several years he leased the part of the Bodine Place that had been prepared for raising rice to some rice farmers from across the Arkansas River.Meanwhile,he began to level the rest of the farm so it could be irrigated efficiently and to lease land from neighbors to farm for himself.One of these was a -acre tract belonging to J.N. Holcombe, the man who had invited our family to stay with him until the  Flood...

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