Page 100 - a-columbia-county-boys-recollections-and-memories-of-columbia-county-florida-(2012)-lenvil-h-dicks

A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

demand was so constant and repeated, that I bought a dairy farm from a man named Coy Mayfield, and
the 200 acre dairy farm and his house he was living in only cost me $60,000.00. It was my intent to sell
the land off in 10 acre pieces.

I sold Mr. Mayfield’s house and 20 acres of the land to Robert Cappell for $35,000.00, so I had all of
my money back except for $25,000.00. I had eighteen 10-acre tracts to sell all of which sold at, as I
recall, $4,000.00 per tract.

That was quick money, and easy money, and I began to repeat that pattern quite often thereafter. When I
would need money to make a down payment on a farm, 1 would either go to my Uncle Ollie Dicks or
my Uncle Henry Dicks, both of whom liked to make small loans at 8% interest, and one or the other of
them would loan me enough money to make a down payment on the next farm I was buying. I repeated
that with both of them a number of times, and grew to have a great business relationship with both
Uncle Ollie and Uncle Henry. They seemed to have a lot of faith in me, I suppose partly because of my
daddy, and they were instrumental in helping me to get started.

As I was buying farms and cutting them up into smaller pieces, and selling the various tracts, I also
learned that if I bought a farm which qualified under a Government program called the Soil bank , (a
program under the Department of Agriculture which was aimed at curbing over-production,) and in
effect was paying farmers not to farm. If a farm had been in row crops for 2 or 3 previous years, a land
owner could apply to have his farm put into the Soil bank, and the Government would pay for the cost
of planting all of the fields in pine trees, and then would pay an amount of money each year for 10 acres
thereafter. That figure started out a $ 10.00 per acre, per year, but the before the program was over they
were paying $25.00 per acre. That way, the Soil Bank Program would pay for the land, but I showed
them a short cut. That income, being guaranteed to come in from the Government, caused that particular
farm to become exceedingly desirable, and usually after I had put it in the Soil bank Program I would
sell it within 6 months for easily twice what I had paid for it, on account of the guaranteed income that
would come to the new owner. 1 rode that horse pretty hard, and made a substantial amount of money
doing that, and that is the way I got my start, together with sometime just buying a farm and cutting it up
into smaller pieces, and selling the pieces.

During those days, I was of course the band director at Columbia high School, and along about 1963 to
1966 I found that I could not get away from school many times much before dark, because after band
practice I would frequently have 2 or 3 people waiting to talk to me about buying one of those small
pieces of land that I had manufactured by cutting up larger farms, and in 1965 it occurred to me that I
was making so much more money messing with land than I was being paid for being band director, that
I decided to resign from band directing at the end of the school term in the Spring of 1966.

I went into business with RA Green and Kermit Home, as a Real Estate Salesman, and after 2 years I
opened my own real estate office in 1968.

That office was located on West Duval Street right next door to the house that Pat Summerall had been
raised in, and two doors east of the old G & H Grocery Store, which is now a Dollar General.

My office at that time was a very small office, which had previously been a little place that sold fish
bait, such as crickets, live minnows, shiners, and other types of fish bait. Even after I had been selling
real estate out of that office for a year or two, people would still come in and say “Have you got any
crickets”. It took about 2 years for the public to discover that the place was no longer a bait shop.

After having been in that location for about 5 years, in talking to George Hunter one day, who was the
Standard Oil Distributor, (later Chevron) and George told me that he had taken an option to buy a tract
of land and a house further out on West Duval Street, from Charles and Margaret Morgan for

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