They don't make people like this anymore - much to our detriment
R.I.P. J.G. Boswell
From the
Sacramento Bee:
The King of California
He was the biggest farmer in America and the last of California's great land barons, a man who had drained an inland sea and made the rivers run backward as he carved out the richest cotton patch in the world.
How his family had brought their Southern plantation to a corner of the West in the 1920s was a story of astonishing vision and will and the flouting of nature, not to mention a parade of hubris. Yet J.G. Boswell was quite determined to die without ever telling it.
"You don't get it, do you?" he snarled at me during a phone call in 1999 to discuss the idea of a book about him. "I don't give a damn about my legacy."
Another taste:
We piled into a beat-up Chevy truck and barreled into an immense engineered landscape where the earth hardly rose or fell an inch as it rolled out � the secret heart of California.
At some point, it occurred to us that we had traveled half a day, a distance of some 150 miles, and never left his farm. Nearly every road, field and irrigation canal belonged to Boswell and every worker we passed and he waved to was a Boswell worker, and every truck, tractor and leveler for which he politely moved to the side of the road bore the same diamond-B logo.
A wonderful obituary -- the book looks like it will be a lot of fun to read.
Posted by DaveH at April 14, 2009 11:20 AM