ELEVEN

John Ogonowski: Salt of the Earth

To the passengers of American Airlines transcontinental flights, John Ogonowski was one of those confidence-inducing figures in pilots’ dress uniform who come on the public address system early in the flight and say, essentially, “Don’t worry, you’re in good hands.” But Ogonowski had many roles in his life. At American Airlines he was a familiar figure, a senior pilot with twenty-three years of service, most recently on Boeing 767 aircraft. To his family, which included his three daughters and his wife, Peggy, he was known as John Deere Johnny, because he was an inveterate and indefatigable maintainer of the machinery he kept on the 150-acre farm he ran in Dracut, Massachusetts, near the New Hampshire border—a real working farm, not a city slicker’s weekend retreat where the farming was done by somebody else. To the Cambodian refugee immigrants who farmed land that Ogonowski owned, and whom he mentored in the practices and techniques of New England, as opposed to Southeast Asian farming, he was a benefactor, a friend, a man who wanted to help.

Ogonowski was—to put this simply and directly and with no nod to journalistic neutrality—a great guy, the kind of guy you would like to have met. “They got some of our best,” Mrs. Ogonowski said of the September 11 terrorists, and she is right. Twelve days a month, her husband flew transcontinental flights. The rest of the time, he tended the peach orchard and the fields of hay, corn, pumpkins, and blueberries on his beloved farm. He had the manner of both of his vocations—imposing in his captain’s uniform; weather-beaten, ruddy, rugged, and callused, wearing the scuffed, nondesigner dungarees of a farmer. From their front door the Ogonowski family could see the rolling hills of New Hampshire, whose border with Massachusetts ran just a few hundred yards from the farm, and Ogonowski farmed in part because he had a love of that view and that land.

Certainly he didn’t farm for the money, because, basically, there wasn’t any. Without his skills, a farm like his in northern Massachusetts would bankrupt a person with far deeper pockets than he had. But Ogonowski had farming down to something midway between a hard science and an abstract art. His nighttime reading was journals with names like Implement and Tractor, Farm Journal, and Highbush Blueberry Production Guide. Peggy used to say that his John Deere 740 tractor, stored in the barn, was “John’s other 767.” In September 2001, the barn, with its green aluminum roof, creaking as it expanded in the heat of the sun, was piled high with some fifteen thousand bales of hay stacked to the rafters, and it wasn’t just any old hay. It was soft—green—and without any dust at all. “It looks like it came out of a garden,” Frank Panek, Ogonowski’s cousin, said. “You won’t find hay like this ever, ever again in life.”

A few years ago, Ogonowski got a call from a friend in the Agriculture Department asking if he’d help in a new program—a joint effort between the government and some universities called the New Entry Farmer Project—that would give Cambodian arrivals a new start in the United States. Ogonowski was the perfect person for a project like that, a person for whom farming was what sculpting marble or playing golf would be to somebody else, something that you do well for its intrinsic value. He immediately turned over fifteen acres of his own fields right away. He was the kind of guy, in other words, who lived the life that he consciously designed, as a pilot, a farmer, an environmentalist, and a good friend to twelve Cambodian farmers who grew Asian vegetables on his land, and for which he always seemed to “forget” to collect the rent that, technically, was owed him. Ogonowski’s family came from Poland to be farmers in America a century ago, and John saw the Cambodians who came to Massachusetts doing the same thing a hundred years later.

So he extended a welcome to people very different from him, and he did a lot more than that. He plowed, manured, and harrowed land for them; he made water available for them from a pond on his land; he helped build a greenhouse for seedlings; he taught them about marketing; he applied for grant assistance to help them expand. He found twelve more acres to add to the fifteen he donated, so that alongside his crops, very familiar in traditional New England, there were pea tendrils, peppers, water spinach, taro root, and a dozen or so more, sold at an Asian farmer’s market to Lowell’s growing Vietnamese and Cambodian communities. It’s not too much to say that John Ogonowski was a kind of living Jeffersonian ideal, the sturdily independent farmer who engaged in public life and took seriously the obligations of citizenship.

Rechhat Proum, a Cambodian from Kompong Thom, who came to Dracut in 1988, remembers that in his first year on a plot on the southwest corner of the Ogonowski farm, nothing of his grew. The conditions of northern Massachusetts were too different from those that he knew in tropical Southeast Asia. But John showed him how modern irrigation could come close enough, and the next year Asian cucumbers, lemon grass, taro root, water spinach, and other vegetables not generally seen in Massachusetts sprang from the ground.

“John never took money from me,” Proum said. “I give him vegetables instead.”

Ogonowski did an interview with National Public Radio only a few weeks before he died in which he explained the link he made between his own Polish ancestors and the immigrants from Cambodia. He called helping them “a good chance” for himself. His brother, Jim Ogonowski, was always amazed that John, who had too much to do already, took on the whole, time-consuming farmer-to-farmer project. “That was the kind of guy he was,” Jim said. “You can’t imagine what he did with them. It’s incredible.”

Ogonowski was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, not far from Dracut where he later set up his farm. He went to Catholic schools until college, beginning at St. Stanislaus Elementary School in Lowell, then Keith Academy for high school, where he liked wearing a smart schoolboy uniform and a tie. He was a good student although not especially talkative, self-contained, not interested in winning popularity contests, more interested in farming than in sports. He went to Lowell Technical College, which later became a branch of the University of Massachusetts, and got a B.S. in nuclear engineering. It was the era of Vietnam War protests and a kind of chic cultural rebellion, but that did not attract him. He enrolled in ROTC and joined the air force when he graduated in 1972. He got his flight training at a base in Texas and then was stationed at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina.

And then suddenly he was half a world away, piloting enormous C-141 transport planes across the Pacific to Vietnam, laden with equipment and materiel, and sometimes, on the return trip, with the bodies of American soldiers who had died in the war. He stayed in the air force for a few years after the American withdrawal from Vietnam, rose to the rank of captain, and, in 1978, left to take a job as a commercial airline pilot.

As a junior pilot, he flew a variety of different routes with a variety of crews. One day, while filling out some paperwork before a flight, John got to talking with Margaret LaValle, a pretty flight attendant who was also based in Boston. Peggy, as she was called, remembers he had an air of authority about him, and she is straightforward about her initial reaction.

“There weren’t a lot of single pilots at the time. He was cute and I liked him,” she said.

They were married the year after they met. John was thirty-two and Peggy was twenty-nine, and both wanted children. They moved into a condominium that Peggy owned in Brighton, Massachusetts, outside Boston, while they renovated an old house John owned in Pelham, New Hampshire. John knew from the beginning of their marriage that he missed farming, the beauty of the land, the cycle of the seasons, the annual miracle of fruit and vegetables, and, luckily for him, his schedule as a pilot, with both work and nonwork days clustered together, gave him the stretches of nonflying days he needed to take care of a farm and fly commercial jets both.

The combined career was in itself a family tradition. John’s father, Alexander Ogonowski, drove a truck for forty years, and worked a 120-acre farm on the side, so John himself and his two brothers and two sisters had pitched in when they were growing up. An uncle, Albert Ogonowski, who ran a farm down the road, had recently retired after a long career as a dentist. John’s own first step was to buy some rundown fields in Dracut in the 1980s, just two miles from his parents’ farm. It was called White Gate Farm. He drained and reseeded his land, trying to convert what had been fallow into productive land again, and over the years he built it up. He studied the craft of farming with the precision of a doctor studying a medical journal. He knew about things like satellite imaging, where the dry spots were and the wet spots, and he traveled far and often to farm shows, in Iowa, Indiana, and Upstate New York.

“If he had a layover in California and there was a farm show out there, he’d rent a car and go to it,” Peggy Ogonowski said. Farms like the Ogonowskis’ weren’t tiny, but they were more labors of love than labors of economic prosperity, and none of them made enough income to support the families that lived on them. “People do it as a second career, as an avocation,” Peggy said, though it was an avocation that took a lot of hard work. “He was down and dirty,” Peggy said of John. “He’d walk in the house covered in oil and everything else. He did all of the heavy, heavy labor. He worked as many, or more, hours as a farmer as he did as an airline pilot, which was a full-time job.”

For Peggy, a city girl, not a country girl, farming was, let’s say, an acquired taste. “Do you remember Green Acres?” she said. The reference is to the 1960s sitcom in which Eva Gabor played a prissy aristocrat stuck on a farm. “I’m Eva.”

Still, Peggy saw what made John happy, what kept his mind and body productive and engaged, and she willingly went along with his choice to live on the farm. She watched him as he planted crops that flourished and repaired the farm’s heavy machinery.

“Every piece of equipment ran perfectly,” said his brother Jim. And everything was kept clean and ordered, except for his green Chevy pickup truck, which had layers of caked-on dust.

Three daughters came along in those years also, first Laura, then Caroline twenty months later, and finally Mary-Kate three years after that. With three growing daughters, Peggy and John, who had been living just over the border in Pelham, New Hampshire, decided that it would be better to build a home on the farm, which would give them more space and cut down on their travel time between the farm and their house.

John took on the new house like he took on everything else, studying every detail, even the finer points of stone masonry and slate, since the sides of the house were built of fieldstone and the roof from slate taken from a church hall in town that was being dismantled. The back steps were the granite stairs from a theater in Lowell where, as it happens, Bette Davis performed as a young woman. A three-season porch on one side of the house looked out onto the surrounding property. There were Adirondack chairs on the lawn. John’s eye for materials and enthusiasm brought all these elements together in a spacious dream house.

He rarely set foot in a shopping mall and generally wasn’t much interested in buying things, except for the tools, material, and equipment he needed to keep the farm going. He built two barns and, in general, was a consummate tinkerer. As a big-time commercial airline pilot, he had all the necessary social graces but he never sought an audience beyond his family. He had no artifice, wore no jewerly or fancy clothes, drove a pickup truck, and was more comfortable talking to other farmers than he would have been talking to college professors. He never liked New York, and when Peggy, the Long Island native, would take her daughters there, he would jokingly reprimand her for it.

“The worst thing he’d say is he sometimes asked, ‘Do you got two minutes to help me?’” his brother Jim remembers. These “two-minute” projects often stretched into two-hour mechanical ordeals, and that’s how he came to get his family name, John Deere Johnny.

There is a New England picture-postcard quality to the Ogonowskis’ life in Dracut, where the colonial houses are smart and well kept and the main street, Broadway, is lined with American flags. On a very clear day, through some trees on the Ogonowski property, you can see Boston’s Prudential and John Hancock towers, but generally the place seems far from Boston. The Ogonowski family life centered on the house. They ate dinner together every night that John was in town and he’d help the girls with their homework. Later in the evening, instead of watching television, he read technical journals on agriculture and heavy equipment. He learned the minutiae of machines from bulldozers to backhoes to 767s. He was what Peggy calls a “regular dad,” who took his daughters to farm shows and outings in the country.

At American Airlines, Ogonowski became a captain in 1989. He was a respected, sure-handed, reliable veteran. Back in Dracut, he was a founder of the Dracut Land Trust, which sought to buy land and keep it out of the hands of developers. And then there were the Cambodian refugees participating in the Farmer-to-Farmer program. “He got to know a few of them,” Peggy said. “He respected the fact that they were hardworking and dedicated. Most of them, like John, work full-time jobs. They’re only farming an acre or two. They don’t have big heavy equipment. They relied on John to do the initial plowing and the like to get the fields ready for planting. So they’re supplementing their income in farming and hopefully eventually it will take off.”

John himself said in his NPR interview that, in his view, once a person is a farmer, they’re a farmer for life. “They’re hooked,” he said. “I don’t know if the children of these farmers are going to be so active in it, but they may be because these Cambodians, they bring their whole families out here. You’ll see the kids out there weeding and picking the crops. So they may take a liking to it.”

The interviewer asked Ogonowski about his own children, and whether they would continue in farming.

“I hope so,” he replied. “I have three daughters, and they’re good workers. They pick blueberries and sell pumpkins. And, hopefully, they’ll continue, so I can retire.”

John Ogonowski never had that chance. On the morning of September 11, he left his house at 5:30 A.M. for the scheduled 7:58 takeoff of American Airlines flight 11. He was often the pilot of that particular early-morning flight from Logan Airport to Los Angeles, and, in fact, Peggy, in her days as a flight attendant, had worked that flight often also—“thousands of times,” she said. Peggy didn’t get up to see him off; there was no reason to; this was an ordinary occurrence in the Ogonowski household, just another transcontinental flight by one of American Airline’s most experienced pilots.

“I just said good-bye,” she said.

We don’t know what John was thinking as he got in his pickup for the drive to Boston, less than an hour away in that traffic-free early morning. Maybe he thought of the fifteen thousand bales of the best hay in the world stacked in his barn; maybe he thought about the pumpkin harvest still coming up. The weather was beautiful, perfect for the picnic he was planning for that weekend at the farm. Well, maybe he was thinking of something else, we don’t know, but it’s nice to think that he was thinking about the 150 acres he had carved out of fallow land and made scientifically productive, because, as we know, he was never to see White Gate Farm again.