Offer of a Free Place in the Sun Likely to Draw Shady Characters

Since the oil bust hit a decade ago, there’s not much left in this Texas Panhandle town.

A couple of swimming holes keep the few children still here entertained in the summer and, on Thursdays, the senior citizens’ club serves a potluck lunch. Watching a good thunderstorm blow across the rolling plains always makes for an entertaining afternoon.

But that’s about it. When the oil wells were capped and the workers moved out, Lefors lost two grocery stores, a bowling alley, a bar and one-third of its population. About 600 people remain, and enrollment is so low that the local school is in danger of closing.

So, with ingenuity born of desperation, School Supt. Norman Baxter and Mayor Bob James came up with a plan over coffee one morning: People could write in and, if they were lucky enough, they just might end up with a piece of Lefors--for nothing.

Twelve vacant lots that failed to sell at auction--worth $150 to $400 apiece--are up for grabs in a drawing Oct. 14. The only requirement is that each winner put a trailer on the lot or begin construction on a house within six months.

Before the deadline passed for entries in August, more than 480 postcards streamed in from as far as California and Maine.

Baxter and James are crossing their fingers that the gimmick will attract young families, restaurateurs and other wholesome, friendly folk.

“We make no discrimination,” James says. “Of course, we’d like people with 18 or 20 kids.”

But what Lefors wants and what Lefors gets could be two very different things.

Meet, for example, applicant Becky Bremmer. She lives with her husband in a trailer home south of nearby Amarillo. Both are in their 50s and don’t work because of disabilities.

“We want to get farther away from our kids,” Becky Bremmer says. “I want to say no when they ask me to baby-sit.”

Then there’s Susan Daughety, a Dallas nurse who is fed up with traffic and crowds and doesn’t like the cramped quarters of her trailer park.

“Kids play ball here and keep hitting the house and I have to keep yelling at them,” she says. “I don’t feel like I need a lot of other people to get along.”

Not exactly kid-friendly, young families.

If history is destined to repeat itself, in fact, the last thing Lefors will get is the June and Ward Cleavers of the world.

“I wish them well, but it’s not going to work. It’s doomed to fail,” says William W. Savage Jr., a history professor at the University of Oklahoma.

“They think they’re going to attract the middle class, people with money to invest, people who are going to add something. The historical likelihood is that just the opposite is going to happen.”

A century ago, during the land runs of Oklahoma homesteading, most people lured to the free land were “bums and losers” who wanted something for nothing, Savage notes. And Lefors, he warns, shouldn’t expect any better.

The one thing town officials have going for them, Savage says, is that they only have 12 lots to give away.

“If they had 40, they’d be up to their hips in trouble by sundown,” he says.

In more recent history, what sounded so good in Antler, N.D., quickly turned into a nightmare. Twenty years ago, a benevolent farmer advertised free land to attract families to--just like Lefors--boost the economy and keep the school open.

“If it turns out like it did here,” Antler Mayor Chester Engelstad says, “we got all the scum of the earth moved in and that was it.”

About 40 people arrived, only a few with children. They put up either decrepit trailers or drafty shacks that couldn’t withstand a North Dakota winter. Within months, many were in town begging for food and unable to pay their utility bills. Only one man stayed five years, long enough to claim ownership, but even he left.

“A lot of the people tried to help get them started, but they refused to work after they could find work,” Engelstad says. “That was the kind of people they were.”

But Lefors is still optimistic.

Town secretary Virginia Maples, a Lefors native supervising the entries, pooh-poohs any naysayers. Since the story aired on national television, she says, she has fielded hundreds of calls.

“They sound so upbeat about it,” says Maples, standing next to a sign at City Hall admonishing visitors that “no profanity or abusive language will be tolerated.”

“The majority of them that have called do have children,” she says. “One has four children in school. They even say if their name isn’t drawn, is there land they can buy?”

Surrounded by prairie, Lefors is 70 miles from Amarillo. Most residents are either retired or commute the dozen miles to the chemical plant or prison in Pampa, a town of 20,000.

Only two city streets are paved, not counting the old state highway that dead-ends at the cemetery. A proliferation of trees, a rarity in the Panhandle, is the town’s saving grace. They shade it from the scorching Texas summers and lend a bit of charm to an otherwise remote, desolate place.

“Lefors is just a small, quiet, oil-field town,” a city letter to prospective residents says without apology. “Not a whole lot happens here.”

Probably the biggest event in town each year is “cow patty bingo.” Almost the entire population turns out to place bets on where a wandering cow will leave its mark.

There’s not much crime, but what little there is is handled by the part-time marshal. Late this summer, when thieves broke into the convenience store and stole cigarettes and candy, it was the talk of the town for two days.

“It’s got a lot of good folks,” Supt. Baxter says of Lefors. He just wants some more, people “committed to the community.”

Already, though, at least one applicant has lost interest.

“I was looking for the cheapest possible way of moving out of the North,” says Emily Stewart, a 69-year-old retiree from Hagerstown, Md. “I’m sick and tired of the cold weather and I’ve had a bellyful of it.”

But she didn’t count on dirt streets that would require her to go “slogging through the mud,” and was disappointed the town didn’t offer a low-interest building loan to go with the property.

“It seemed the land itself is the cheapest thing about going there,” she grumbles. “You come and start paying taxes on the land.”

Lefors might be so lucky if all the entrants withdrew their names, according to Antler Mayor Engelstad.

Two decades ago, his townsfolk were happy to see the newcomers pack up and leave. The school closed anyway, and the land has reverted to a wheat field.

“It just don’t pay out in the long run,” Engelstad says. “I hope they have better luck than we did.”