Cancer Cluster - McFarland, California

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Monday, December 1, 1997

A Labor of Love for Boys of McFarland

Racers sought 6th state title, running for their families, coach and for

poverty-battered town.

By MARK ARAX, TIMES STAFF WRITER

FARLAND, Calif.-ÎLike so many dreams that come and go here, this one began

with the harvest under a brutal sky.

It was a late afternoon in August, 103 degrees outside, and the boys from

the McFarland High cross-country team had been at it since 5 in the morning.

They had spent the day in long sleeves and bandannas working without words

alongside their parents deep in the fields. They were spread across farms

for miles around, but the toil did not vary.

GENARO MOLINA / Los Angeles Times

Members of the McFarland High School cross-country team train by running

through an orchard.

They stooped and crawled. They knelt under vines powdered with sulfur and

climbed high into trees. They cut, pulled and snapped. Up and down, row

after row, the boys lugged the yield of the San Joaquin ValleyÎgrapes,

peaches, plums, nectarines, bell peppers and watermelons until the crew

bosses called it a day.

And now the sun was setting and the fields were silent, and they were going

back into the orchards, this time in running shoes.

They stretched their calves and hamstrings under a big hay barn at the edge

of town, 15 long-distance runners in T-shirts and shorts. Their tall,

blue-eyed coach, Jim White, was spooning out drops of a herbal " voodoo

juice " to rub away the aches.

" How long do we go, White? " one boy asked.

The group looked up from the exercises, awaiting his verdict.

He was seated atop a worn bicycle, his rickety ride through the fields, and

he smiled a wicked smile.

" Until I get tired. "

Summer after summer, the footprints hardly change. McFarland High's dream to

bring home a state championship begins the same way: The families from

rural Mexico finish another day in the fields and hand over their

fleet-footed sons to Coach White, aka Blanco. And they watch as he leads

the boys back through the fields, to championships and other miracles, too.

With runners drawn from farm worker families too poor to buy racing shoes,

the McFarland High cross-country team has won five state titles in a row, a

feat unmatched in any sport by any high school in California. They've beaten

the rich kids from Carmel Valley and the surfer kids from Laguna Beach.

They've beaten prep schools, suburban schools, Indian reservation schools

and the big boys from L.A.

Now a new season had come, and the campesinos were gunning for No. 6,

running not just for their families and the coach pedaling alongside them,

but for this town battered by poverty and mysterious childhood cancers.

They ran past the alfalfa and kiwis and the smelly dairy with its 300

Holsteins and the ditch water silted green, first a jog and then a sprint.

One mile, two miles, four, six and eight. From a distance, their stampede

hardly a patter, they looked something like angels kicking up dust in the

middle of the almond trees, floating on a brown cloud.

They ran 10 miles and then jogged back home. Over the next four months,

through summer heat and winter fog on the road to last weekendÉs state

championship meet, they would train 1,500 miles. They'd have run more if

White had asked them.

This is the story of a season with the boys from McFarland High, their quest

to reign once again as the unlikely champs of California cross-country. It

is a journey extraordinary not only for their athletic achievement but for

what they had to overcome to even be in the race.

In a town where so much has changed so quickly, the team's remarkable

success is one of the few things people can count on. The old McFarland, a

thriving little community pierced by Highway 99 on the outskirts of Kern

County, has vanished. Gone are most of the Dust Bowl refugees and the small

businessmen and farmers who built Main Street and the Pentecostal churches

under mulberry trees.

The new McFarland, population 8,011, is something closer to a village

transplanted from south of the border. Nine in 10 residents are of Mexican

descent. One-third come from the village Huanusco, in the state of

Zacatecas.

Families squeeze six and eight children into two-bedroom houses. Roosters

peck at front porches, and laundry hangs from ropes strung tree to tree. The

sons of farm workers who want no part of the fields, the Myfa Boys and

Southsiders, fight over a pitiful turf.

Though it sits at the edge of America's richest farms, McFarland is one of

the nation's poorest cities. And for two decades, it has been plagued by

cancers striking its children. More than 20 youngsters, many the offspring

of farm worker families, have been diagnosed with the disease since 1975 -

three times the normal rate. Seven children have died.

Government scientists have failed to link the cancers to pesticide

contamination or some other culprit lurking in the fields. The mystery has

left McFarland in a strange limbo, its main industry neither damned nor

vindicated. To many townsfolk, the boys who work and run in the fields are

seen as a kind of redemption.

" The cancer cluster ain't the only thing we're famous for, " city manager

bristled, pointing to five California silhouettes on the side

of the gym. " This is the home of the state cross-country champs. And now

they're going for No. 6. "

Until a decade or so ago, when Coach White hung his first championship

banner, none of this would have been possible. The men of dirt-poor Huanusco

would arrive in McFarland in April and leave for Mexico in October, after

the last raisin had been turned. There was no time for the young ones to

attend school most days, much less become champion runners. Before they knew

it, they were gone.

Now a historic shift is remaking McFarland and other rural communities in

the state's heartland. Many migrants have stopped migrating. The reasons are

almost entirely economic. Over the past 10 years, despite numbing poverty,

they have patched together enough earnings to buy houses, bring family from

Mexico and carve out full-time lives here.

The transition from illegal migrant to legal neighbor has given the children

the chance to learn English, become the first in the family to graduate from

any schoolÎand play sports along the way. It has brought home the hope that

the grip of the fields might one day be broken.

And yet the little these families have managed to scratch out would not be

possible without the wages of their children, field workers as young as 8.

So the children run in two directions, tugged by the duty to work beside

their families and by their dream of breaking away.

All summer long, the team's finest runners, chica, 18, and

Arambula, 17 " the two s " as they are known here. worked and trained in

the fields on five hours of sleep. They had grown up near each other in

Huanusco and now were good friends quietly competing to be the best high

school long-distance runner in the state. For now, chica was the faster

one.

Once school started in September and the season began, both boys picked and

pruned only on weekends. They struggled to learn English in time for

graduation, knowing it could be the difference between getting into college

or not.

Arambula was ahead of chica in language class. So much so that when the

fancy recruiting letters came from Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, NYU,

Arambula hoped that one of the letters might really lead to something. He

saved them in his dresser drawer, beneath the Mexican flag. chica

tossed his letters away.

Their 56-year-old coach was so committed to seeing that they had every

chance at a different life that he blurred all lines between work and home.

The boys were family and when they knocked on his door at all hours, White

answered. He never stopped digging into his own pockets to help them. His

wife, Cheryl, and three grown daughters would have it no other way.

" White ain't white, " one boy explained. " He's Mexican. "

A season with the McFarland High Cougars as they trekked up and down the

state in an old school bus wasnÉt about fanfare. There were no cheerleaders

doing back flips as the team's top five runners pounded a grueling 3.1-mile

course and strained to cross the finish line before the top five runners of

other teams. There was no homecoming queen caught between the letterman's

jackets of the two s.

McFarland's road to the championship was something more: The work that

constantly beckoned; the herbal potions and vitamins that White administered

to the weary like some shaman; the two boys from the same village 2,000

miles away who would run their last high school race not knowing where it

would end footprints in or out of the fields.

Part II: August Heat Only the Beginning of Season