"They have mortgaged my machines, my land, and my livestock," Burr told the Forbeses over coffee, "even my grain in the field. My back is agin the wall.
"I'm throwing her up. I'm just walking out the door."
Forbes was stunned. While deep debt has become a fact of life in farm country, like most of his neighbors Forbes had always considered Burr a wealthy man. Starting with grandfather John P., the Burr family had prospered by farming Johnson County's rich soil, each generation doing a little better than the last. Dale's grandfather had been given the honorary title of president of the bank in Lone Tree. Dale's father, Vernon, had been an honorary vice-president, spreading the family holdings by buying cheap land during the Great Depression.
Dale had started off with a leg up, too, inheriting his two-story farmhouse surrounded by some of the best soil in the state. He'd worked hard, day after day starting his chores well before first light and working till long past dark. Until he was 56 he'd farmed alongside old Vernon, living just one house away with the bride he had met at a county fair, raising their two daughters and one son, helping out at 4-H or Our Redeemer Lutheran Church. Now, with son John recently turned 39 and still living at home, Dale was bringing him into the operation, just as his dad had done for him. In 1977 they'd bought a 40-acre parcel to get John started, adding another 40 in 1978 and then another 80 in 1982 -- the land where Richard Goody had been a tenant. Father and son worked as a team, with John tending the hogs while Dale raised crops on as much of the family's 700-plus acres as he could get to.
Now Burr, sitting on a black vinyl chair in the Forbeses' kitchen, was despondent as he sketched out the extent of his debt. First he spread scraps of brown paper across the oval plastic table, notes for the approximately $48,000 he had borrowed from his mother, confined to a nursing home for the past four years. Then there were the mortgages -- just under $425,000 borrowed between March 1984 and March 1985. In addition, the local farm service had liens against Dale for $15,354, and against his son for $36,300. Dale was also overdue in his property-tax payments.
The final straw, he told Forbes, had come over the last corn he had managed to harvest before the first snow. In exchange for a loan of about $20,000, he had sealed 9,000 bushels as collateral deposited with the Johnson County Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS) -- corn he could repurchase later for commercial resale if the price rose in the spring. Then, to buy a little time, Burr had driven over to Hills to deposit the service's check in his personal account, using the money to pay off his lien and his old property taxes.
His relief would be short lived. The ASCS evidently had made a mistake: its check should have been payable jointly to Burr and the bank. Now, the ASCS wanted its money back, and the bank still had the corn. "They're gettin' real rough over there," Burr complained of his lenders. "If they'd leave me alone I could pay all my interest, but as it is I can't even sell nothing." He said he expected the bank to foreclose within the week. His scheduled appointment would be just a formality.
"What will the neighbors say?" a worried Emily asked. "We won't even have the money to buy groceries."
At the time, Forbes had thought the Burrs were both overreacting. With more than 600 acres, and another 120 he would inherit when his mother died, Burr still had a positive net worth. Although he held debts of well over $500,000, land like his was still fetching almost $2,000 an acre, and he could walk away from it all a wealthy man by Johnson County standards, with more than half a million dollars in his pocket. Or if he chose to stay on the land, Burr's problem seemed to present nothing more than a simple business challenge, with a simple business solution.
Still, Forbes couldn't help but wonder just where all the money had gone. "Dale had borrowed more than a half million in a short period of time, and there was nothing to show." He and Emily didn't spend much money on clothes, and they hadn't had a new car in years. Clearly, he hadn't put it into the property. Although their white house was meticulously kept up, the 120-foot live-stock barn had caved in about three years ago, and the outbuildings looked like they hadn't seen paint or nail since old Vernon Burr passed on. Women or drugs? Gambling or hard drink? Each possibility seemed more implausible than the last. The Burrs' only relaxation was the monthly game of bid-euchre they played with a group of other couples to pass the time between harvest and planting
"We talked for about four hours," Forbes recalls. Burr seemed receptive to his suggestion of filing for protection from his creditors under Chapter 11. And as a customer of the Hills bank himself, Forbes assured Burr that president John Hughes was "a swell fella," almost always willing to pull a farmer through. "I thought everything was worked out. When he left, gosh, he was almost elated. 'Maybe I can work this out,' he said. 'God, if I can get my crop in I can work out of it."
Emily, however, was still distraught. "When she left she asked my wife, 'Ruth, come see me, please.' She kept telling us, 'They're going to put Dale in jail.' I only thought she meant he couldn't pay his bills. But now I wonder what she knew. Was she trying to tell us something?"
