A blizzard swirled into Longmont as Dick Tanaka’s then high school-age daughter knocked on doors, and she figured bad weather motivated her boss to pick her up and take her home.

Debbie (Tanaka) Williams had been canvassing neighborhoods for a Colorado nonprofit foundation against big banks and other powerful special interest groups.

“But my boss told me it was something else, something serious, and when I got home it was surreal,” she said.

That afternoon in 1989, Boulder Creek Farms foreclosed on the $3 million mortgage Tanaka Farms held on 1,000 acres five miles south of Longmont and forced the family to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy and liquidate assets, according to Times-Call reports.

Frank Tanaka started farming in Colorado after he immigrated from Japan in 1907. After his death in 1953, four of his sons — Dick, Rocky, Sam and Bobby Tanaka — built it into an empire that once ranked as one of the nation’s largest family-owned vegetable farms with 5,000-plus acres, divided roughly between family-owned and leased land in Boulder and Weld counties.

Then the empire fell.

Debbie (Tanaka) Williams, now 43, said that after the auction she and her family of four crowded into an aunt’s two-bedroom Longmont apartment. But by 1992, her dad got back to farming — the only thing he said he knew how to do, she explained.

Dick Tanaka repaired old, broken-down equipment, borrowed money from friends, and secured a small bank loan before moving them out of his sister’s apartment to an apartment on Longs Peak Avenue in Longmont. He farmed a small plot near the southwest corner of East County Line Road and Colo. 119 then, and his produce sold well. By 1995, he successfully bid on leasing the family’s current Boulder County Open Space farm with some Erie acreage that closed Oct. 31 after its final season.

On Nov. 19, the Tanakas again will sell everything.

A vast collection of tractors, wagons, forklifts, skid-steer loaders, cultivators, trucks and more now line fields recently harvested of pumpkins and long leased from Boulder County at the southeast corner of U.S. Hwy. 287 and Colo. Hwy. 52 near Longmont.

Other items — platform scales, a chili roaster, onion sorter, air compressor, drill press, etc. — will go on the block, too.

Dick Tanaka got back into farming at that intersection in the mid-1990s until his death on June 27 at 83 of a stroke complicated by pneumonia.

Until 2015, the family operated a market in Longmont on the east side of South Main Street near Quail Road, before moving it to a shed near their residence at 10760 Mineral Road for the final harvest. They sold the usual summer vegetables along with 10 varieties of chili peppers, six varieties of squash, five varieties of pumpkins, three varieties of cabbage, American and Japanese eggplant, artichokes, beets and more.

“This was our livelihood. Dick worked so hard with all of this equipment to get crops out of the field. Watching it go at the auction will be like losing him again,” his widow, Charlotte (Konishi) Tanaka, 76, said.

Yet, the auction invites a curtain call to honor Dick Tanaka, a farmer inducted in 2013 to the Colorado Agriculture Hall of Fame, a farmer who kept an eye on the sun rising all his life.

A hardscrabble startup

The first page of his story as the son of Japanese immigrants opens with his birth on Dec. 28, 1932, at the Denver Union Stockyards — the place noted on his birth certificate. Tragedy struck two years later when his mother died after delivering her ninth baby — a loss that eventually forced his father to farm out all of the children to Japanese friends and family.

Poverty dogged them, Debbie (Tanaka) Williams said.

She remembers her dad holding a .22-caliber long rifle they found in storage and telling her how he needed to shoot squirrels when he was just 8 years old to help feed all of his brothers and sisters. They also often ate soup made from the butcher’s pig tail scraps and crackers with jam to survive.

“That explains why he even years later refused to eat jam. It just reminded him of those hard days,” she said.

To make matters worse, as a toddler Dick Tanaka stuck his tongue in a pan of tofu that his mother had set out to steep in lye. Though she quickly put his whole head in a bucket of water, the lye burned off part of his tongue and caused him to grapple with a lifelong speech impediment, Charlotte Tanaka said.

“He had a lisp. And he couldn’t pronounce ‘l’ or ‘r,’ which is why he could never pronounce my name,” she said. “So, he called me ‘Mom,’ and I’m not sure what he called me before Debbie was born. Maybe he didn’t call me by name then.”

Charlotte Tanaka played “A Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash at her husband’s funeral because he related so much to that song — understood the hurtfulness of being teased for being different.

“He was a soft-hearted man, a man very sensitive to the underdog all his life for that reason,” she said.

Bright spots in Dick Tanaka’s youth included loving sports and every year playing three of them on teams for Erie, where he grew up in a small, two-bedroom home until his dad split up their farm family.

He graduated in 1952 from Erie High School — then a one room school that included the lower grades at the southwest corner of Lookout Road and North 115th Street. Shortly thereafter, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served from 1954 to 1956 after completing basic training at Fort Ord in California. He shipped out to serve in Germany and France.

After that, the land called to the young man, and he put down roots to farm it in the Longmont area for the rest of his life.

Dick Tanaka’s niece, Jere Fukai, of Arvada, acknowledged the hardships that marked so much of his early life.

“But he endured those things with dignity,” she insisted. “He never complained or blamed anyone. And the whole family moved through life that way. They didn’t dwell on what they couldn’t change. Instead, they had faith in putting one foot in front of the other, in working hard, and earning things back.”

Legacy with fellow farmers

Over many years in the farming business, Dick Tanaka’s reputation spread to other farmers and wannabe farmers, Wyatt Barnes, owner of Red Wagon Organic Farm in Longmont, said.

“His fields were amazing. They were perfect. Straight lines. No weeds,” he explained. “… Toward the end of his life, it was a little hard to talk with Dick on the phone. But one day I just brought my employees who wanted to get into farming over to meet him. I was a little worried about what he would do when we dropped in. But his face lit up. He was pretty happy to talk with them, pretty happy that people still wanted to learn more about farming and happy to share his trade secrets.”

Another Longmont farmer, Dave Asbury of Full Circle Farm and Rocky Mountain Pumpkin Patch, was in his 20s loading trucks with wholesale vegetables when he met Dick Tanaka.

Asbury called him “a prince of a man” for his kindness, generosity and helpfulness.

“He was so poor as a child, and everyone knew it. Only had one pair of shoes, and yet he was like no one you would meet again in this lifetime,” Asbury, 57, said, pausing to collect himself several times. “He was just that person, someone as close to Buddha as you could be. … And when I met him, it was the height of the season, when he had everything coming in, and I was just amazed at the bounty and beauty of his place.”

Juan Salomon, 61, also of Longmont, in 1978 started working as one of three supervisors over 120 men at Tanaka Farms during its heyday. Then, 15 forklifts scurried around moving pallets between warehouses and semi-truck trailers lined up around the clock to haul freshly picked vegetables across the country, Salomon said in Spanish as his wife, Margarita Salomon, 57, translated.

Even toward the end of each harvest, crews kept busy loading 22 pallets of onions daily. One pallet held 25 50-pound burlap sacks, Juan Salomon said.

“Dick sensed the soil. He loved the fields, and that love for the earth is what made it productive,” he continued. “He farmed by instinct, just knew the dates and the times to plant and pick without keeping notes.”

The two men communicated for 16 years at work — both before and after the bankruptcy — through broken English and Spanish, body language, and time-tested trust.

Juan Salomon believes their trust grew like the crops because of how Dick a treated him and fellow employees.

“He told us to be ready to go out into the fields at midnight if need be due to frost to cover the onions. But he wouldn’t just stand by when that happened. He would work along with the men at the same pace,” he said. “And Dick took care of us with housing, cars, loans, meat and more.”

Now, Juan Salomon works as a warehouse overseer for a vegetable wholesaler in Aurora, Margarita Salomon said.

“But my husband had a good friendship with Dick, and he felt free and secure in that role because of the trust they had in each other,” she said. “Now, he feels more like a bird in a cage. … My husband has teary eyes talking about Dick.”

The farmer behind the farm

The emotional connection so many of Dick Tanaka’s employees, proteges, friends and family members feel toward him might be surprising given the usual Japanese-American reserve, Charlotte Tanaka, who grew up on a dairy farm in Platteville, said.

“In our generation, and in past generations, emotions didn’t come into the picture for the Japanese. I was taught not to cry or hug or kiss. Generally, we were very reserved — never even held hands in public,” she said. “But Dick was not like that.”

Their older sisters set them up, and they watched the Clint Eastwood western, “Paint Your Wagon,” at a Denver drive-in movie theater on their first date.

Three months later, on their Jan. 11, 1970, wedding day, she and 200 guests waited 20 minutes for both the groom and the reverend at what is now the Tri-State/Denver Buddhist Temple.

“I was so nervous. And I had no idea where they were. For all I knew, Dick was being consoled by the reverend,” she said, chuckling.

Instead, Dick Tanaka — ever passionate about sports — and the reverend arrived late after together watching the final quarter of Super Bowl IV between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Minnesota Vikings as televised live from New Orleans.

Then, the groom in his tux could move on to marry her.

They began their life together as a farming family by touring onion fields in Oklahoma on their honeymoon, she said.

They brought up two children, Debbie (Tanaka) Williams and Wayne Tanaka, 41, who now lives in Long Beach, Calif. Their daughter and her husband, Rory Williams, 44, live in Erie with their two children, Robert, 9, and Grace, 6.

Tanaka farm equipment auction What: Farm equipment auction of Dick Tanaka Estate hosted by Greeley-based Kreps Wiedeman Auctioneers & Real Estate Inc. Where: 10760 Mineral Road (southeast corner of U.S. 287 and Colo. 52), Longmont When: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily preview starting Wednesday. Auction starts at 10:30 a.m. Saturday To view auction items online, visit http://www.k-wauctions.com/myweb/Tanaka.htm

Neither of the Tanaka children as adults went into farming.

But Debbie (Tanaka) Williams remembers the boom time before the bankruptcy forced the family to sell their corn picker.

“The corn picker then looked like it had giant teeth. And when we rode on it, it was like it gobbled up the corn to fill our wagon, and then it left the field shaved down to the stubble to be ready for the next year,” she said. “The harvest fascinated us as kids.”

Charlotte Tanaka said that her husband’s many years of such hands-on labor brought arthritis to those joints prematurely.

Even as a newlywed, she remembers tightening bolts for him on equipment because he couldn’t close his hands fully. Buttoning shirts eventually became impossible, too, and he wore shirts with snap buttons and high-top pull-on Red Wing boots in middle age for that reason.

Yet, he never got too old or uninspired to drive his pickup truck out to the fields to squat down and sit on his heels. He tickled the land then, dusted it off with his right index finger.

Many people who knew him, in their mind’s eye, still see him this way.

“He would spend hours out there doing that in the spring, especially when the seeds hadn’t broken ground when they were supposed to,” Charlotte Tanaka said. “And when he found them growing, he would say, ‘There’s hope!’ He always said that. ‘There’s hope.'”

Pam Mellskog can be reached at p.mellskog@gmail.com or at 303-746-0942.