John Lewis Roach

Inducted in 2013

Mar 4

Goodyear - Maricopa County

Inducted in 2013

P.W. Litchfield established the Apprentice Farmer Program in the 1930’s. While still in high school in Page County, John was selected for the second Apprentice Farmer program. Arriving in April 1938, he walked to Goodyear Farms for the Avondale Depot.

If you had mentioned the apprentice farmer program to most people in today’s world, they wouldn’t have known what you were talking about, but John Lewis “Shorty” Roach knew it well. He was part of it. Sponsored by Southwest Cotton Company (later Goodyear Farms) in the 1930s, the program took a select group of young would-be farmers each year. It provided them with the tools to become successful in agriculture. You were making an application through the FFA at College Springs High School in Page County, Iowa. John was in the second group selected—Paul W. Litchfield, from which the city of Litchfield Park is named.

Born December 5, 1918, in Essex, Iowa, John was the third child of Harry Bell Roach and Bertha Gertrude Trout Roach. John graduated from high school in 1947. The following year, after being accepted into the apprentice program, he packed his bags, hopped on a train, and said goodbye to the lush farming country he’d always known to move to the Arizona desert. Arriving in April of 1938, John walked from the depot in Avondale to the farm. He said later that if he’d had the money, he would have returned to the train and gone home.

In the beginning, John lived in Litchfield Park and worked as a farm laborer for the company. An enterprising young man with a farming background, he soon bought himself a cow, which he kept at the local stable. He milked it morning and night, delivering milt door to door. When the dairy that had the exclusive right to provide milk in Litchfield Park complained, John got around the problem by bottling his milk and selling it on his front steps so that his customers could pick it up. In 1939, he moved to one of the farm camps where he bought a second cow and set himself up with a route delivering milt to the various camps. It wasn’t long until he could rent a farm and began a dairy operation in earnest.

The love of John’s life became his bride in 1941 when he married Bettie Jo Marsh. An Arizona native, Bettie Jo was the daughter of Claude and Laura Belle Marsh, a couple who farmed in the south Phoenix area. Bettie Jo laughed that she and John married on the spur of the moment. “We just decided one Saturday night to marry her the next day. We didn’t want it in the Arizona Republic, so we left the country.” They drove to Salome, which was in Yuma County then.” “We talked to my sister and boyfriend about going as witnesses. We said we weren’t legally married because we weren’t of age.” Their witnesses might not have been of age, but their marriage certainly stuck. They celebrated over 71 years together before Betty Jo’s death on April 15, 2013.

John’s farming career was interrupted in 1942 when he was called into military service. He was told he would only be gone for a year when he was drafted, so he got his brother-in-law to take care of the farm. It wasn’t long before he learned that he would be gone much longer than the one year promised, so he got a leave and came back to sell off all of his farm equipment. He left, still owning Goodyear Farms for $1,500.

John and Bettie Jo’s daughter Barbara was born in 1944 while he was in service. Returning to the farm with a youngster in tow, John decided dairy farming was not his life, so he opened a feedlot on 80 acres rented from Goodyear Farms. Early in the operation, John built a mechanized manager to cut down his feeding times from an hour and a half to seven minutes, and the manpower needed to be zero. The concept was innovative enough to catch the eye of The Arizona Republic Magazine.

In 1954, John and a long-time friend from the apprentice program, Gene Baker, partnered. Each had a farm near the Luke Air Force Base, but in 1957, after having both farms condemned for runway expansion and the new farms they purchased were condemned by the government for base housing, John and Gene landed at Wellton and began buying feeder lambs to graze the fields. Betty Jo remembered the lambs were dropped off at the train station in Tacna, and they had walked them to the farm. “When they arrived, they were so hot and thirsty that half of them jumped in the canal. They rescued most of them. That was the only time for sheep,” she laughed.

The partners built cattle pens and began moving their cattle-feeding operation from Litchfield Park to Wellton. They fed between 1500 and 2000 cattle in Wellton until 1980, when a 100-year flood inundated the operation. John’s older brother Dale was managing the feedlot for them then, and after the flood, he decided it was a good time to retire. The feedlot was not reopened. A couple of years after the feedlot closed, John and Gene leased out their holdings in Wellton and Litchfield Park in favor of their retirement.

In addition to their cattle operations and growing vegetables, alfalfa, and some cotton at one point, the Roach-Baker partnership had a vineyard where they grew 80 acres of Thompson seedless grapes on the Northern between Dysart and Litchfield Park.

In 1962, John and Bettie Jo built the house on the property now owned by Morton Salt at Dysart and Glendale Avenue. “Mr. Rockwell from Glendale drew up the plans and everything.” I had it laid out how I wanted it, she said. “He built it for us for $23,000.”

In 1972, a geologist from the Casa Grande area approached them about the salt deposit under their land. “He said we were sitting on a dome.” The salt deposit turned out to be one of the largest in the country. The Roaches sold the land around 1974.

One night, while they were living on the Glendale property, there was a massive explosion of propane gas at the underground storage facility next door. “It was about midnight. I was getting ready for bed and heard the big boom. I looked out my bedroom window on the south, and the whole sky was lit up, and I ran to the east door. The whole place was on fire down there.” The fire did not touch them, but Betty Jo remembered it gave her a terrible scare.

Later, in the mid-70s, Bettie Jo became interested in genealogy and researched family history and pioneers in the Southwest Valley for the local historical societies. They moved to Goodyear in 2006. John died in October 2013.

In addition to their daughter, John and Bettie Jo have three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. None of them are in agriculture.