Widows of the Land : But Another Says She’s Been Weeded Out

Irene Morgan’s romance with the land ended the day her husband of 20 years, a broke farmer with nothing left to lose, put a rifle to his forehead and pulled the trigger.

“That was it for me. Ten days later, my girls and I moved off the farm and into town. I was finished with that land forever,” Irene Morgan said.

She was widowed March 28, 1985. Floyd was 42. His death came two weeks before the First National Bank of Torrington was scheduled to auction off his farm implements. That sale would have ended his agricultural career.

“Farming wasn’t just a job with Floyd,” said Irene Morgan. “It was his identity, his nationality, his religion. Working with the ground gave us both a sense of connection with the Almighty. But it had gone sour by the time Floyd killed himself.”

Raised Sugar Beets, Hay

The Morgan farm had grown from 80 acres in 1931 to 400 acres in 1978 before the family lost 160 acres through foreclosure. Floyd farmed with his 73-year-old father, Francis. The two men raised sugar beets, hay, pinto beans and corn, and pastured about 60 head of cattle.

“All we ever wanted was to earn a living wage above the cost of production,” said Irene Morgan. “We can holler and scream at our government, but that’s not the problem. The world has become self-sufficient in food production. The supply is there but not the demand.”

Floyd Morgan was a founding member of the grass-roots American Agriculture Movement. He participated in two AAM tractorcades to Washington, gave speeches throughout Wyoming and protested U.S. farm policy in newspaper articles.

“The only reason that many of us stay in this game is because of our fierce devotion to the land and to our way of life,” Morgan wrote in a letter to Rep. Dick Cheney (R-Wyo.), published in the Torrington Telegram in 1982. “Isn’t America lucky to have such a stubborn bunch in the countryside? We know our job, and we also know what proper and just farm economics could do for the nation. That dream alone provides us with a good deal of incentive to stay alive. The only ones left on the land now are the ones who are the hardest to kill.”

Irene Morgan said her husband’s decision to end his life must have been a long time in the making.

“In all our years together I never had to pick up a sock,” she said. “He was very orderly and methodical. That day, for the first time in weeks, he didn’t seem worried. He was in control. As he left the house he turned around in the yard and came back three times to kiss me.

“I asked if he was OK and he said, ‘I love you very much.’

“He picked a place to park the pickup where he knew we wouldn’t pass by, that somebody else would find him. Floyd didn’t like pain. You’d think that would have deterred him. The pain.”

Six months after her husband’s suicide, Irene Morgan’s daughter Brenda Lynne, now 19, married a farmer.

“I worry about them. There was a good side to living on the land. There was a oneness with creation, it was pleasurable, it was fulfilling,” she said. “But the flip side is the uncertainty. Is that hailstorm going to wipe you out? Are the grasshoppers coming? Is the bank going to close you down?”

$350,000 in Debt

Today Irene Morgan supports herself and her younger daughter, Leatha Rene, 16, by working five days a week as a housekeeper at Torrington’s Community Hospital. A small, 41-year-old woman with short, curly black hair, lively brown eyes and an unlined face, Irene Morgan cleans houses for money on her days off.

Irene Morgan said debts totaling nearly $350,000 still hang over her head.

“I’m in a constant state of high energy, unable to sleep and running on adrenaline. I feel like an animal being hunted, so I just keep moving so I don’t get caught.

“If I slow down long enough to start thinking about the bankruptcy, the IRS and the taxes, I’ll be a pathetic thing,” she said. “So I keep working, working, working.”

In July, 1985, Irene Morgan declared bankruptcy. Initially, her husband’s $100,000 life insurance policy was awarded to her and her daughters, but a bankruptcy judge reversed that decision and ordered the money turned over to the First National Bank of Torrington after the bank appealed.

Irene Morgan said she owed the bank about $160,000. Most of her remaining debt is to the Farmers Home Administration.

Won Her Appeal

Late last month, Floyd Morgan’s widow won her appeal of the decision turning over her husband’s life insurance. A federal judge in Cheyenne ruled that the bankruptcy judge had committed “a clear error” in siding with the bank.

“I can’t believe it,” Irene Morgan said after that ruling. “You hope, but if you put too much hope in one basket, you might say, ‘If the rug is pulled out from under you, you have a pretty big fall.’

“And so I was trying to condition myself to survive without it but fighting for the cause anyway. It’s Christmas early.”

“Irene Morgan is one tough lady,” said her attorney, Gerald F. Murray of Torrington. “She hangs in there and somehow she keeps this image that she’s surviving, she’s going to be OK.”

Motivated by Principle

Murray did not handle her bankruptcy affairs, but he said his client had been motivated by a strong belief in a principle.

“She believes that when they were having good times, Floyd went to the trouble to try and protect her and the kids from disaster with that $100,000 policy,” he said. “When disaster occurred she believes Floyd was comforted by the thought that he had at least saved his family.”

At night, after Leatha has gone to bed and Brutus, the brown mutt, is asleep at her feet, Irene Morgan sits in her small mobile home in a Torrington trailer park and thinks about what has happened to her.

Often, she takes out the neat scrapbooks she compiled when her husband was speaking on behalf of farmers. She stares at snapshots of Floyd scattered about the living room. On the walls are her oil paintings, scenes from happy camping trips, pictures dominated by towering pines, snow-covered peaks, rushing mountain streams, fields of wildflowers.

Farmed Tough Land

In one is a log cabin and a rider on a horse. The idyll is a fantasy of what life might have been one day had Floyd, who farmed tough, dry land on a flat plain, not picked up the gun that one sunny morning on the cusp of spring.

“My life has taught me there is nothing more important than family and friends,” Irene Morgan said. “I miss the farm, but it would have been very difficult to stay there, to see the land we worked and played on, to see the things he built and loved. If you’re one of the ones who get weeded out, like I am, you go do something else.

“I would like to go to college and get into the counseling field, maybe drug-abuse counseling.

“Right now I have to finish raising Leatha and pay off what I can when I can. I can only do so much. My life is in limbo.”

Planted Flowers

This year, Irene Morgan planted flowers around her trailer, and on the hot, still evenings of summer she takes pleasure in mowing the tiny patch of yard.

When she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, the smell of new-mown grass brings back the scent of the farm. It is a remnant of a life gone away, a time given up to ghosts.