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“And God saw everything that he had made, and found it very good.”It is said: Before the world was created, the Holy One kept creating worlds and destroying them. Finally He created this one, and was satisfied. He said to Adam: This is the last world I shall make. I place it in your hands: hold it in trust. From the Midrash |
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PARTON 1
The University of Arizona’s Page Ranch started as a dream and a gift. At
65 years of age, J. T. Page retired as a Kansas City street car conductor.
He and his wife came to southern Arizona to begin a life of dry land farming.(13)
In a June 11, 1983 Tucson Citizen article, his then elderly niece
remembers her uncle:
“He was a determined sort. He tried to dig wells by hand but never got deeper than 30 feet - not far enough to reach water. He had people come out and try water- witching with a twig. He read his bible every day and planted seeds according to the bible and the almanac. He kept a kind of faith.” (15)With only the aid of that faith, a shovel and seventeen years of toil he and his wife undid half a century of destruction and healed their half section of land. One reference refers to him as a “disciple of the land.”(14) They showed the rest of the world that a destroyed grassland could grow again. A February, 1941 American Forests magazine article tells more of the story: “But at this point death slipped in and robbed him of his wife, his helpmate, and for the first time he felt that he couldn’t go on. In what he afterwards called a moment of weakness, he allowed friends to persuade him to move into town and to accept an old-age |
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