When There’s No Place Else To Go First Love Ranch A Safe Place For Those Who Need To Turn Their Lives Around

Jimmy Lynn Swindell had no place to go.

The Amarillo, Texas, native was addicted to heroin and had spent half his life in prison for committing crimes to support his habit.

He was in the Yakima County Jail, waiting to go back to the penitentiary for violating parole, when another inmate told him about First Love Ranch in 1989.

The ranch takes in the so-called dregs of society and helps them turn their lives around. It operates solely on donations and doesn’t charge those who come for help.

“I came here with no intention of staying here,” Swindell said with an ironic smile. “I was going to be here one night and as soon as it was dark, I was going to be gone.”

Now, 5 1/2 years later, he’s the foreman and oversees all the male residents.

“If not for the ranch, I’d either be dead or you’d be paying thousands and thousands of dollars to keep me alive,” said Swindell, 51.

Doug Earp, who founded the ranch in 1988, calls it “kind of a life-restoration, Walton family-type center” that helps people break their cycles of addiction and abuse.

It’s a registered non-profit organization but receives no federal or state funding mainly because of its Christian-based teachings, Earp said.

There’s nothing fancy at the ranch, which houses as many as 100 people at a time. Single residents live in segregated dormitories and there are small apartments and trailers available for families. The furniture looks like it came from garage sales or the Salvation Army.

The women cook communal meals, using ranch-grown resources and whatever’s been donated. One former resident joked that she thought Christians were vegetarians her first few weeks because there was no meat for meals until a farmer donated a cow.

Money’s always tight, but Earp said he’d always been able to scrape together the $28,000 annual mortgage payment until last November. The ranch faces foreclosure if it can’t make the payment by the end of April.

Earp is hoping for a miracle.

“This has been a juggling act for six years,” he said. “The amount of money this places saves taxpayers is hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. If it weren’t for the ranch, Jimmy Lynn would be in the penitentiary at a cost of $50,000 a year. And I’ve got three like that right now.”

The ranch gets lots of food donations from area churches and farmers. The residents also raise between 300 and 600 calves and care for the ranch’s 168 acres.

While most of the ranch’s 50 current residents are from Washington, people come from around the country.

Kathy Nutley, 38, of Burgaw, N.C., moved in after a close relative died in 1988, quitting her job as a caseworker for the North Carolina Department of Social Services.

She said she didn’t know how to cope with the grief.

“As long as I live, there will never be a peaceful time in my life that I don’t owe to them,” Nutley said of her year at the ranch.

Residents are required to attend Bible study each afternoon and a morning devotion service. Other than that, they do their chores and concentrate on working through their problems, Earp said.

A former heroin addict himself, he knows what they’re going through.

He started a street ministry for troubled youths in 1981, shortly after he moved to Yakima. That grew into two safe houses - one for men, one for women - that he operated until he was able to create his dream: a safe haven in the country for anyone in need.