# 402, March 26, 2006

COLUMBUS: The college basketball tournament took a peculiar bounce. Anybody that put money on George Mason for the Final Four, I want to hear from you. They’re in there with Louisiana State and Florida and a team that used to consider this annual championship their birthright, UCLA.

Two weeks ago I facetiously picked Duke to win it all. None of the other No.1 seeds got in either. Coach K has invited the other three (Memphis, Connecticut, and Villanova) to a little round-robin of their own next weekend in Durham. There’s no trophy, but he promised the coach of the winning team a new Chevy.

We’ve got 11 Million illegal immigrants living here, and about 10 Million of ’em were out marching this weekend. A lot of ’em were in California carrying Mexican flags, but did you notice, not a one of them was marching south. They may wave the flag, but they know which side of the border they want to be on when they do the waving.

They say America should welcome them with open arms (and open wallets) because in this country “Everybody is an immigrant”. Well, everybody marching may be an immigrant, but let me remind you of something I uttered a few years ago, “My ancestors never came over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.” “Now I hope my Cherokee blood is not making me prejudiced. I want to be broad-minded, but I am sure that it was only the extreme generosity of the Indians that allowed the Pilgrims to land. Suppose we reversed the case. Do you reckon the Pilgrims would have ever let the Indians land? Yeah, what a chance! What a chance! The Pilgrims wouldn’t even allow the Indians to live after the Indians went to the trouble of letting ’em land.” (Radio, 1935)

I know they mean well, most of ’em, and we need a bunch of good workers to immigrate every year to make up for the lack of good workers among the ones already here. But let us figure out how many we need and let ’em in legal. Not just how many, but what skills they need. Bill Gates says he needs to bring in 10,000 computer engineers from China and pay ’em $100,000 a year. The only way to get them here now is to fly them to Mexico City and sneak ’em across the river at El Paso.

If a rancher plants the best grass seed and spreads generous amounts of fertilizer so his cattle have the best pastures in the county, it don’t mean the neighbors can rightly cut his fences and put their cattle in where they can graze along side the owner’s.

If you happened to be in a different part of Los Angeles on Saturday, away from the marching, you might have noticed the Will Rogers State Park up at Pacific Palisades got a face lift. Kinda like Phylis Diller, the old home place has been restored to look like it did in 1935. And it probably cost about the same. There’s a lot of the 180 acres still in need of some work (as any farmer can tell you, the work is never done), but I hope you stop in for a visit the next time you’re in California.

The Los Angeles Times wrote a wonderful story and you can read it at:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-will21mar21,0,5374019,full.story?coll=la-home-local

Also here is another story, about son Jim’s barn at the ranch: http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=24149

Yours,

“Will”