Bye-Bye Marco Island or "Paradise Lost" by Grandpa

It's the summer of 1979, things are going reasonably well. The motels are doing very good; the only problem is personnel, mainly managers. They seem to think that a manager was worth twice as much as the going rate, and if they were that important, they shouldn't have to work! Leroy was having a fit finding and keeping people in place. We had received a good offer from Regal 8 Inns, our ex partners, to buy us out. This sounded good but what would we do? We couldn't sit around and twiddle our fingers, and we definitely didn't want any business that depended on people.

This was the summer of my 30th class reunion, which was held at the Ramada Inn at Blackstone and Shaw in Fresno. Margaret and I decided to attend. Most of my classmates were there and we had a good time. About half of them were farming and farming was doing very well. I had enough experience as a young man growing up to properly handle a vineyard, and they were turning good profit at a selling price of $1000 a ton with costs of about $500 a ton. This made sense and my entire life I had heard the advise of "Buy land, young man, buy land". "You can never lose money on land".

I decided to check it out, so once a month I flew to Fresno looking into vineyards and the farming market in general. It looked very good but the vineyard cost was high (approx. $14-15,000 an acre).

We decided to go full steam ahead and made the deal with our ex-partners. I looked at property from Delano to the south, Merced to the north and everything inbetween. I considered everything - grapes, almonds, walnuts, oranges and pistaccios, and settled on grapes.

Our first purchase was a twenty acre vineyard on Cedar Ave, 1/2 mile south of Manning (Fresno area). It had an old small beat-up house which we removed and bought a new double-wide modular. Katrina, Lynn and family lived there.

Our second purchase was a 40 acre vineyard on Klepper Ave, 1/4 mile west of Elm Avenue (Caruthers area). This had a good home on it.

Third came a 60 acre vineyard south of Madera, a nice older home, two big barns, employee home and came with all the equipment I needed. The property backed up to the San Joaquin River (we had 1320 feet of River frontage),

We sold our home in Marco Island for a profit (but wish we could say the same for the sale of the boats!). We loaded up with a rental U-Haul, pulling my pickup which Leroy drove for us. Leroy had opted to stay with us and live on our 40 acres near Caruthers and help me with my farming. In the meantime Bill and Frances chose to move their operation of Regal 8 Inns of California back to California, buying property in Oakhurst. Ralph and June decided to stay in Florida.

This all took place the first of June 1980 and Margaret and I drove to California via southern Illinois picking up Debbie who was spending the summer with us.

Margaret had not seen any of the three properties, including the one we were moving into in Madera, so there was some apprehension on her part.

So that's the story on how we wound up in Fresno and became farmers!