The youngsters at Cal Farley’s Ranch in Texas were subjected to years of abuse. But the institution’s feeble response has been a slap in the face to survivors

The Texas boys were beaten, abused, raped. Now all they want is an apology

The Texas boys were beaten, abused, raped. Now all they want is an apology

Steve Smith was just eight when his mother left him in the care of Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch, a Texas institution for at-risk children. From the moment he got there in 1959, the place didn’t sit right with him.

“I cried probably more than any boy that I know that came out [of] there, just homesick, and I didn’t take it very well.”

Almost immediately upon his arrival, Steve was subject to the first of many beatings. For the following decade, he endured regular and arbitrary violence at the hands of staff. He also had to watch helplessly as his younger brother, Rick, was beaten by adults until he couldn’t stand.

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Along with the physical punishment, Steve’s pets were killed, and his friends were worked to the bone in atrocious conditions. Some boys, including Rick Smith, were also sexually abused while under the care of the ranch.

The ordeal has permanently damaged their lives.

At the kitchen table in his immaculate home in the Amarillo suburbs, Steve, now almost 70, goes through all of the details of what happened to him without showing much pain. He’s a tough man – he served in the Vietnam war and was wounded in the line of duty – and his piercing blue eyes only sprout tears twice.

The first time is when he describes how a succession of dogs he owned, all called Boots, were killed by staff members. The other is when he talks about what happened to his younger brother Rick, and how powerless he was to help him.

Rick, Steve, and six other men the Guardian spoke to named staff members responsible for the abuse, which lasted from the 1950s until at least the early 1990s. They say the abuse went beyond them, and was systemic, affecting hundreds of others who went through the ranch.

They say Lamont Waldrip, a long-serving superintendent, was one of the worst abusers. Last month, at the behest of a wealthy donor who wrote a cheque for $1m to build a new dormitory, the ranch named the new building Waldrip House.

The ranch’s current CEO, Dan Adams, acknowledged the weight of the accusations against Waldrip, who died in 2013, but he said that other boys had had “very different experiences” with him and “admired and liked” him.

For the survivors who want to make the ranch accountable for the abuse – and have been encouraged to break their silence after Steve Smith brought them together in a Facebook group – this is an unbearable affront.

A very wealthy ranch – and a revolt

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A postcard of Cal Farley’s ranch that Steve Smith has kept. Photograph: Jason Wilson for the Guardian

Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch is accustomed to the generosity of well-heeled donors, but is less used to having its reputation called into question. Almost since its foundation, the “Christ-centered” but nondenominational institution has been a byword in Texas for juvenile reform and a can-do spirit. There is no suggestion that there is abuse at Cal Farley’s now – indeed, there is broad acknowledgment, even from advocates for the men, that current practices at the ranch are in line with the best in the sector.

With 100 direct employees and 526 across its subsidiaries, it is no small fish, and notable individuals from the ranching and oil industries queue up to serve on its board. Cheques like the one that funded Waldrip House are not unusual: the most recent publicly available tax filings show an annual income for the ranch just north of $56.8m. About $43m of that came from contributions and grants. The ranch also owns parcels of land as far away as California.

The ranch’s founder, Cal Farley, was a professional wrestler and Amarillo businessman. He had been a prominent college athlete before he moved to Amarillo, where he gained prominence as the owner of a tire shop. Throughout the 1930s, he ran a sporting club, The Mavericks, which tried to channel the energies of troubled and abandoned boys in the panhandle. Eventually he was gifted land in Tascosa, a ghost town, by a local rancher, so he could set up a more permanent home for the boys.

But for all their organizational success, Farley and his staff had no special training to deal with wayward children. In 1950, the superintendent was overpowered and thrown in the river by a group of boys who staged an effective revolt, and for a brief moment they were running things to suit themselves.

My brother didn’t even have clothes on, just his underwear. He was screaming and begging and I couldn’t do anything Steve Smith

In an otherwise laudatory biography of Farley published in 1959, A Shirttail to Hang To, this moment is presented as a major crisis for the ranch. The situation “demanded immediate attention. One ‘revolution’ or mass runaway would mean that Cal would never again win public support for his project.”

Faced with a risk to the ranch’s prestige, Farley replaced his superintendent with a professional wrestler named Dorrance Funk, who turned to violence as a solution to the discipline problem at the ranch.

In A Shirttail to Hang To, author Beth Day writes that in the wake of the revolt, “Funk’s immediate problem was to command their respect and obedience”. He would invite “the big boys to ‘work out with him’ on the wrestling mat … Funk illustrated wrestling holds and techniques, and also managed to get over to each boy the suggestion of potential power … After a round apiece with Funk on the mat, not one of the leaders of the embryo revolution suggested they might throw *him* in the river.”

By the time Rick and Steve Smith arrived in 1959, there were about 250 residents, and Texas courts had taken to diverting young offenders out of the juvenile justice system and into the ranch. Those boys were thrown together in dorms with others who had never committed a crime, but whose parents could not take care of them.

‘They made me run in front of horses’

Ed Cargill lives in New Mexico now, after a stint in the US army and some years of riding motorcycles all over the south-west. His time in Cal Farley’s overlapped with Rick Smith’s.

After years of living in what he calls “a paradise for adult abusers”, he made repeated escape attempts. Each time he was caught, and punished. On one occasion, he says, Lamont Waldrip delivered a punishment straight out of the Old West.

“I ran away on foot and got about halfway to Amarillo when they caught me, using a helicopter. Lamont Waldrip and another staff member then took me 10 miles away from the ranch, and made me run in front of these horses all the way back. Anytime I floundered, they’d hit me with coiled-up rope or run over me with the damn horse.”

Several of the men say that another escapee was dragged for miles behind two horses back to the ranch. Again, one of the horses was ridden by Waldrip. The man in question talked about the incident in a private survivors’ group on Facebook, which was set up by Steve. His comments were seen by the Guardian.

Cruel punishment wasn’t the only ordeal students had to endure. Sexual abuse also happened, and Rick Smith says he was raped by another boy while under the care of the ranch.

The way Steve tells it, his brother “has been nervous all his life, like he was hiding something. Just in the last year he told me that when he moved into Maynard [his dorm], one of the bigger boys said he’d beat the hell out of him if he didn’t sleep with him that night. He’s had it bottled up in him all that time.”

Cargill says that the wife of a staff member was having sex with him and three other boys – in effect, statutory rape. It’s only in retrospect he has come to realize how damaging this was. “I didn’t realize how bad it was fucking me up. And, she was committing a fucking felony,” he says.

As for Steve Smith, he recalls seeing a dorm parent make a boy take his penis out and hit it with a ruler.

‘He was screaming and begging and I couldn’t do anything’

For decades, the men say, a culture of abuse prevailed at Cal Farley’s.

Martin (not his real name) was sent to the ranch in the early 1980s aged five after being brutally abused and mutilated by his father. Of that time, he says, “if you wanna know what it’s like to die over and over again and watch yourself die in the mirror – I know that”.

On his first night at the ranch, an older male student “dragged me out of the bed, and I went into the bathroom and he basically stuck his dick in my mouth”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Steve Smith’s standard release form from Cal Farley’s. Photograph: Steve Smith

When he committed a minor infraction not long after, Martin’s female dorm parent ordered him to jump in a trash can and scrub it in freezing weather.

“When you put a little kid who’s been tortured inside a trash can, upside down, and make it like a little prison cell and have him scrub … You know, you got these tiny little holes at the top just to let a little light in, you’re scared, you’re freezing, you know?”

Cargill says that his dorm parent would also encourage other boys to administer physical punishment. “I saw him hit two boys with his fist and then tell the rest of the dorm, ‘You better finish what I started or it’s all gonna happen to you.’

“So I watched as they literally beat these two guys half to death, and me and another guy tried to intervene. We didn’t get beat up as bad, but we got beat up.”

Cargill says “their only crime is they were gay. Which, that’s not my place to judge, or my place to punish.”

Steve Smith remembers his helplessness while his brother was beaten mercilessly. “A staff member did it. I heard Rick screaming at the top of his lungs so I ran down there. I looked into his room and the guy was beating the hell out of him with a belt. My brother didn’t even have clothes on, just his underwear. He was screaming and begging and I couldn’t do anything”.

Afterwards, Rick’s nervousness at being at the ranch led to a pattern of behavior that only led to more beatings.

“I pissed the bed till I was probably 10, and for that they beat the hell out of me till I bled,” he says.

Bill Varnado, who was there at the same time as Steve Smith, says “you really didn’t have to ‘get in trouble’ for them to beat the hell out of you.” Normally, he says, “they used a belt, but as you got older they used their fists on boys.”

Joe Stroud, who was there in the 1980s, says the ethos of punishment at Cal Farley’s “went all the way from how people treated themselves, down to how people treated animals, to how people treat anything. It was a culture of violence.”

‘It’s not that I don’t believe it, it’s just that it’s past’

Janet Heimlich, a former journalist, now runs a nonprofit in Austin called the Child-Friendly Faith Project. Through her work and in a book, she has worked to expose religious groups that abuse children. “I am always in search of faith-based organizations that are really great,” she says.

When she first wrote about Cal Farley’s, she used it as an example of best practices in youth care. She still maintains that currently Cal Farley’s appears to be in keeping with modern and humane standards of childcare, and says they “run a flagship program for cutting-edge child therapy”.

In 2015, after she published a laudatory post about Carl Farley’s on her blog, Steve Smith left comments. He wrote about the constant abuse, and the beating meted out to Rick. Alarmed by what she was reading, Heimlich got in touch with Adams, the ranch CEO.

“I asked Dan, ‘Is what this guy is saying true?’ He said, ‘Yes. But we’re evolved.’”

Heimlich decided to help Steve talk it out with Adams.

Their first conversation was a two-and-a-half-hour meeting on 23 March this year, which Heimlich attended as an observer via Skype. She observed that Adams’s attitude to Smith was sympathetic. “We were both blown away with what Steve was telling us. Every so often Dan would reach out and touch Steve’s shoulder.”

On 7 and 8 April, the three of them met in Amarillo, first at a coffee shop, and then the next morning for breakfast. At this point, she started to become concerned about how the ranch was going to deal with Smith’s allegations.

“I thought that meeting was his opportunity to say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do’, but I was getting nothing from him.”

At breakfast, she presented a draft letter suggesting the approach Cal Farley’s could take. These included investigating allegations of abuse, setting up a fund for survivors’ medical needs, and ensuring that information on their website and in their marketing material was “truthful and not misleading”.

Adams, she says, was uncomfortable. Most of all, he was resistant to the idea of going public with any it. “He thought that involving the media would not bring the men the healing they were looking for,” she says.

It got ingrained into me for a period of five years that violence fixes everything Arnold Wells

At the same meeting, Adams told Heimlich that the ranch was planning to name a new dorm after Lamont Waldrip.

For survivors, she says, it was a slap in the face.

In conversation with the Guardian, Adams acknowledged that abuses had occurred in the past, but also reaffirmed his stance.

“I can’t deny Steve or anybody else their experience,” he said. When asked if the behavior of staff at the time sounded like abuse, he responded, “absolutely, no doubt about it”. But he stressed that practices had changed, including the phasing out of corporal punishment since he took over in 1996.

“I knew Lamont. And there are guys today that had very different experiences with Lamont and admired and liked him. In his early days, I think he probably was way over his head in terms of knowing how to deal with all those kids … any time you have a system that’s scantily staffed, and not trained, abuse happens.”

Adams has no plans to change the dedication of the new building.

“I do think when it comes to honoring founders or former employees, that’s a collective thing, that’s bigger than me, it’s not arbitrary. I think [a public apology] can be disruptive, because I’ve got 260 kids out there that we’re working very well with, and we have a lot of younger people whose experience has been good at Boys Ranch, and a lot of families that count on us.

“I don’t say it’s hearsay and I don’t deny it. It’s not that I don’t believe it, it’s just that it’s past.”

‘I want somebody to stand up and say, Hey, I’m frickin’ sorry’

The men the Guardian spoke to say they have carried the scars of this experience for decades, as well as a sense that their lives have been misshapen by their time there. Many talked about extensive substance abuse, suicide attempts,

and incarceration among alumni.

Bill Varnado wants to be very clear that they’re “not looking for any monetary deal out of this. What we would like is an apology from those people for treating us the way they treated us.”

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Martin asks: “What did Boys Ranch take from me? I don’t know. My sense of security, my sense of self, my sense of being comfortable in my own skin.”

Arnold Wells says he’s still not sure he’s an “adapted person” in adulthood. “It got ingrained into me for a period of five years that violence fixes everything,” he says.

Ed Cargill says: “I want somebody to grow a pair of balls, stand up and say, ‘Hey, I’m frickin’ sorry’.”

For all the abuse Rick Smith endured, he is more concerned to talk about his brother, and the years it took him to live down what happened to him, and to get past his drinking and anger.

“Let me tell you, he’s just so proud he didn’t let it get him down. Because it was for a while, and he overcame a lot. He was headed for the wrong, wrong place.”

He’s skeptical that they will ever receive an apology. “It’s not gonna happen. Because they are committed to the hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank. They’re committed to that.”

And because of this lack of closure, he also doubts he and his brother will ever get over it.

“Steve and I will die. We’ll go to our grave and I’ll guarantee you it’ll be one of the things we think about when we take that last breath: how they got away with it.”