Investor's Business Daily, June 12th, 2007
As a doughboy in occupied Germany after World War I, Cal Farley noticed sad, hungry boys who would often gather with nothing to do.
They were disaffected youth in a defeated country.
Farley wanted to help.
It didn't matter that many of their fathers might have been shooting at him just weeks before. He organized the boys into baseball teams and served as their coach.
"That was the way he was," his daughter, Gene Farley Harriman, told IBD. "He worried over the kids. He said they had been through a terrible time. A lot of them lost their parents or their dads."
It would be the start of a lifetime mission to help poor and disadvantaged youth.
Forty years after Farley's death, his legacy continues with twin Texas homes for youngsters: Boys Ranch near Amarillo and Girlstown USA near Lubbock.
Farley created Boys Ranch to house and educate boys who were slipping through the cracks. The mission later expanded and absorbed Girlstown USA. More than 7,000 young men and women have called the ranches home, getting an education, a dose of religion and a measure of discipline.
Farley -- a talented athlete, successful businessman and showman -- has been called America's greatest foster father.
"Mr. and Mrs. Farley provided for me what my father wouldn't and my mother couldn't," Douglas Brady, 64, told IBD.
Brady was 10 when his mother sent him and his two brothers to live at the ranch. His father had walked out on the family. His mother was struggling to raise four boys and three girls alone in Kansas. Brady and two brothers were getting into fights and other trouble.
Safety Net
Brady, now an electrician and a member of the Cal Farley's Boys Ranch Alumni Association board, says he might have ended up in prison if not for Farley's influence.
"Fatherhood is a biological event, and being a dad is a special event and special thing," Brady said. "Most any man can be a father, but it takes a special man to be a dad."
Where Farley learned the art of being a dad isn't clear.
By all accounts, his own father was distant. He and his twin sister, Zaida, born in 1895, were the youngest of six children. The family soon moved from Iowa to a rundown farm in Minnesota.
Young Farley worked in the field by day and wrestled with his brothers by night. He eventually left the farm to play semipro baseball.
When America entered World War I in 1917, Farley enlisted in the Army and was off to Europe.
When the war ended in 1918, millions of Allied troops were on the Continent waiting to be sent home and discharged. Farley spent his time playing baseball and winning wrestling matches.
That's also when he started helping German boys.
"If you really and truly like kids, it doesn't make much difference whose kids they are," Farley said in Louie Hendricks' biography, "No Rules or Guidelines."
Upon returning to the U.S., Farley still dreamed of a career playing baseball.
He soon found out that he had more love for the sport than talent.
He got a chance with the minor league St. Paul Saints in Minnesota. But the league's fast pitching arms and his poor eyesight didn't mix.
In 1923, he requested a trade to the Gassers, a minor league team in Amarillo. Farley had once passed through the small Texas Panhandle town and liked it.
Just like in Germany, he noticed packs of boys hanging around with nothing better to do. The kids, who were too poor to buy tickets, could get in for free if they retrieved stray balls. So he would try to hit foul balls over the fence.
Cheering in the stands was a young Maybel "Mimi" Fincher, who would soon become his wife.
Farley's new team sputtered and folded in his only season. Soon he scraped together enough money to buy a failing, debt-laden tire shop. He convinced the creditors that he could make it work.
When the oil boom hit Amarillo, Farley's Wun-Stop-Duzzit tire shop thrived.
Still, times were tough for many. Droughts came. Then the Great Depression hit.
And there were those boys.
Farley saw them hanging out in pool halls or at the ballpark when they should have been in school. Sports had kept him on the right path, and he figured it could do the same for those kids. So in 1934, he started the Maverick Club, which organized baseball, wrestling and other sporting events for youth.
Farley often said the club successfully reached nine out of 10 boys.
"It was the 10th boy, however, that Cal could not forget -- the boy who might someday be numbered among the nation's criminals, the boy for whom the ranch was started," Hendricks wrote.
The Maverick Club idea caught on. But Farley thought some boys needed more structure. In 1938, a rancher agreed, donating his property northwest of Amarillo to Farley. Boys Ranch was born. Farley soon sold the tire business and devoted his attention to the ranch. Mimi Farley kept the books in order.
Farley couldn't charge the parents for the services. They couldn't pay.
So the camp started with housing structures from surplus Army barracks. Local residents donated bedding and food. He and his wife dipped into their own wallets to support the ranch. And for donations, he hit up the famous athletes he knew from his Army and wrestling days -- boxing champs Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey.
In 1987, Boys Ranch merged with Girlstown USA.
The needs of kids coming to Boys Ranch and Girlstown have changed.
Once the ranches would take in many young children, raising and educating them. Now approaches to helping troubled kids are different. The social service agencies that refer many of the kids try not to remove them from parents. The ranches still can take in small children; the youngest kid is 6. But most come as teens.
Poverty is still a common thread. But more of the kids today have experimented with drugs and sex.
Dan Adams, the camp's director, doesn't soft-pedal. Not all the kids make it. Boys Ranch and Girlstown can't help everyone.
"The kids bring baggage, but there are a lot of successes," Adams said.
Those successes keep staff members going, but it's Farley's foresight that pays the bills.
Financial Plan
The businessman in Farley knew better than to rely on the spending whims of government. He set up a foundation that continues to provide half the annual budget. A loyal donor network makes up the rest.
The ranches receive no public money, Adams says. Farley wanted to make sure the organization could live on without him.
On a Sunday morning in 1967, Farley sat down in the back of the ranch's chapel. He greeted a boy in the pew in front of him. Then, as the service started, he closed his eyes.
He died from a brain hemorrhage.
But Farley wouldn't be forgotten. In 1996, the U.S. Postal Service recognized him on a 32-cent stamp as part of its "Great Americans" series.
And his ranches continue. His daughter thinks they will never run out of kids to help. "Times are never so good that everybody has what they need," Harriman said.
