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By Root 1573 0

out of Willa Cather. They met at a state convention; he was Master Counsellor for the Order of DeMolay, and she was the Queen of Job’s Daughters. Alice’s family lived in western Nebraska, near Chappell, a good two hundred miles away. Floyd was mad for her, but his father refused to let him borrow the car. Floyd had $30 to his name. He spent $25 of it on a beat-up one-cylinder motorcycle that, with luck, would take him to Alice. “It was a helluva trip out there. The roads were all dirt in those days. I wore out a pair of boots balancing that one-lunger, but I made it. When I got ready to go back home, the damn thing wouldn’t fire up. Alice’s father looked at it and said, ‘Your magneto’s shot.’ I said, ‘Can we fix it?’ He spent two hours trying, but the sonofabitch was beyond repair. I had to sell it for what I could get, which was five bucks, and start hitchhiking home. Hitchhike, hell. You hardly saw a car in western Nebraska in those days. I’d walked about three miles when I came upon an old guy with his head stuck under the hood of his truck. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ and I looked in and saw that his magneto was shot. Well, in the last two hours I’d learned about magnetos. I took his apart, saw right away what was wrong with it, and fixed it then and there. That old geezer was so impressed that he offered me a job on the spot. I never went home again.”

Floyd and Alice married secretly in Georgia, where Floyd had gone after two years at Hastings College to work on a gas pipeline being built across the South. They spent their three-day honeymoon in Florida. Floyd signed in ahead for three days of work and they took off. A supervisor, his heart warmed by a young couple in love, covered for him. “I was nineteen,” Floyd says. “I think that was the first lie I ever told in my life.”

When his stint in Atlanta was up, Floyd and Alice went back to Hastings. For $15 a week, he drove a truck between Hastings and Lincoln. Driving anything—a team of horses—was a dream job to many a farm boy, but Floyd found it excruciatingly dull. “I finally said to myself, ‘Hell, $15 a week is nothing. I’ll go out to western Nebraska with Alice.’ I got myself a job on Fred Smith’s place. Man, that was a badly run operation. They had new weeding tractors and their wheat fields were still being run over by weeds. They only ran the tractors during the daytime—they were too lazy to run them at night. This land was dry-farmed, and those weeds were using precious rainfall that was needed by the wheat. There were lights on the tractors. They should have been running the goddamned machines twenty-four hours a day. So I finally said, ‘This is a helluva way to run a farm!’ Fred Smith thought I was quite an upstart. He said to me, ‘How would you run it?’ and I said, ‘I’ll show you.’ I climbed on one of those tractors and I ran it till ten o‘clock at night. Then I went to bed, got up at three in the morning, and finished the job by four the next afternoon. Cleared out every weed on that farm. I was hell-for-leather. I didn’t stop to take a leak. Old Fred Smith came up to me later as I was changing clothes and said, ‘With that kind of drive, you’re wasting yourself. You ought to go back to college.’ ”

The sensible thing for a mechanically gifted farm boy who didn’t particularly like farming to major in was engineering. At Hastings College, Dominy had given it a brief go and quit. “I didn’t like the preciseness,” he says. In 1930, he entered the University of Wyoming at Laramie, choosing economics as a major. He was captain of the hockey team. He stayed on and won a master’s degree in 1933. By then the country’s economy was in a screaming nosedive and the West was five years into the Great Drought. The ranchers around Laramie couldn’t sell their cattle—first because no one had money to buy them, second because the cattle weren’t worth buying anyway. They were thirsty and starving, vacant-eyed beasts with bellies bloated from hunger and protruding ribs. Stupefied by the intensity of the disaster, Wyoming’s people were in the same condition, mentally if not