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It’s a hay and cattle ranch and like the man who owns it, everything about it is efficient and there’s no nonsense of wasted effort. There’s a big ranch house, where the ranch manager, Johnny Eckeart, and his wife live the year ’round, and where the Crosby kids bunk during the summer.
There’s a bam, nearly big enough to stack the 3500 tons of hay they harvest. There’s a hydroelectric plant fed by streams coming from the mountains through twenty-three miles of pipe. There is machinery the like of which no farm ever saw for sheer efficiency — stuff like a hayrack made out of tubulous steel and another machine that does the work of eight men in stacking hay. There’s a complete woodwork shop and then scattered around a plot of green lawn, there are the guest houses — and the houses for the crew, cowboys, farmhands and cooks, fifteen in all.
Bing and Dixie’s house and the guest houses have a big living room with two bedrooms and a bath between, and are furnished in a comfortable California-Monterey style.
Everybody — the Groaner himself; Dixie, the kids, the guests and the crew — all eat together in the big dining room of the main house.
The routine on the ranch is wonderful. The Chinese cook rings a bell at five-thirty a.m. which means “get up.” The second bell at six means food’s on the table. It’s country style, even at dinner, which is at six p.m. The food’s down when you get there. You pass it around and pitch in. After each meal, you take your own dishes to the completely modem kitchen, which has garbage disposal, dish washers and all that. You are in bed at eight-thirty at the latest.
In between you work and play in a very pleasant proportion, a la the owner’s methods. Nobody ever lolls. Dixie and my wife kept plenty busy, ordering the food and seeing to everybody’s comfort, and I had my own special task of loading trucks with sand to be brought to the lake, where some of the hands would take over to turn that sand into a beach.
Gary’s job was soaking fence posts in creosote and placing them. When he first hit the ranch from his school in the East, he weighed 183 pounds. By the time he returned he. was down to a trim 160. The twins, who are fourteen to Gary’s sixteen, helped with the fence making and haying, drove rakes, etc. for six weeks. Linny, the (Continued on page 100)
Bing prefers the ruggedness of Nevada ranch life to the comfort and splendor of his beautiful Beverly Hills mansion
When their truck stalled on return from fishing, Phil, Wally (below), Bing and Dennis hiked seven miles to nearest phone
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