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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:7.5pt'><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:black'>Well, he got a BA in
Economics from Stanford four years before I got a BA in Economics from Stanford,
he went to Thacher School in Ojai (a great school) which my children attended
and a grandson just was admitted as a freshman this fall. Other than that…I'm
just struggling with the Trinity River.<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:7.5pt'><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:7.5pt'><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:black'>Byron<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
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font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:7.5pt'><span style='font-size:22.0pt;
font-family:"Georgia","serif";color:black'>James G. Boswell II, 86, Owner of
Cotton Empire, Dies at 86<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'> </span></span></span><![endif]><span
style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";display:none;
text-transform:uppercase'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:3.75pt;margin-right:0in;
margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.25in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in;
line-height:16.8pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo1;border:none;padding:0in'><![if !supportLists]><span
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</span></span></span><![endif]><span style='font-size:9.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";
color:gray'>By <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/dennis_hevesi/index.html?inline=nyt-per"
title="More Articles by Dennis Hevesi">DENNIS HEVESI</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:9.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";
color:gray'>Published: April 9, 2009 <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>James
G. Boswell II, who inherited a huge expanse of farmland in the San Joaquin
Valley of California, then quadrupled its acreage to create a cotton-growing
empire, died last Friday at his home in Indian Wells, Calif. He was 86.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;
font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/us/10boswell.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper#secondParagraph"><span
style='color:#004276;display:none;text-decoration:none'>Skip to next paragraph</span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><a
href="javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/04/10/us/10boswell_CA0.ready.html',%20'10boswell_CA0_ready',%20'width=670,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')"><span
style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif";color:#004276;text-decoration:
none'><img border=0 width=190 height=260 id="Picture_x0020_3"
src="cid:image001.jpg@01C9B9C5.BED58550"
alt="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/04/10/us/10boswell190.jpg"></span></a><span
style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='text-align:right;line-height:8.25pt'><span
style='font-size:7.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#909090'>Matt
Black<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=caption2><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>James G. Boswell II on some of
his property in California. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><a name=secondParagraph></a><span
style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>He died of natural
causes, according to a statement from his family.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>It
was the boll weevil’s decimation of the cotton fields of Georgia that
sent Mr. Boswell’s uncle James Griffin Boswell, for whom he was named,
across the country in 1921. Outside Corcoran, a rural town in Central
California, Colonel Boswell (as the uncle preferred to be called) bought the
first of what gradually became 50,000 acres. In 1952 he bequeathed his cotton
fields to his nephew. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>James
Boswell II eventually expanded the family’s holdings to approximately
200,000 acres, including 60,000 in the Australian outback but not including the
20,000 acres in Arizona that he sold in the late 1950s to the Del Webb
Development Company. Those 20,000 acres were transformed, with Mr. Boswell as a
development partner, into Sun City, one of the nation’s first retirement
communities. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>“It
speaks to his incredible business sense that when his Arizona land was no
longer good for growing cotton he was savvy enough to grow houses,” Rick
Wartzman, the director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate
University in Claremont, Calif., said Tuesday in an interview. Mr. Wartzman, a
former business editor at The Los Angeles Times, is the author, with Mark Arax,
of “The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret
American Empire” (PublicAffairs, 2003).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>The
J. G. Boswell Company currently owns about 150,000 acres in California and,
according to Hoover’s Inc., a business analysis company, is the largest
producer of cotton in the United States. It supplies textile mills worldwide
and has annual sales of more than $150 million.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>The
company’s expansion has not been without controversy. Its vast,
well-tended lands and network of irrigation canals stretch across the bed of
Tulare Lake, which was once the largest freshwater lake west of the
Mississippi, four times the size of Lake Tahoe. Early pioneers encroached on
the lake to irrigate their farms, a process that Mr. Boswell’s uncle accelerated
as he bought more property. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Four
rivers feed Tulare Lake. The Boswells forcefully and successfully lobbied for
the construction of dams that largely diminished the lake, draining its bed for
more farmland.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>“He
re-engineered the landscape, much to the consternation of
environmentalists,” Mr. Wartzman said of the younger James Boswell.
“He was a titan with a lot of power in Sacramento and Washington. He
genuinely loved the land, and yet he left an environmental record that was very
mixed at best.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Mr.
Boswell also introduced techniques that became a model for large-scale farming:
lasers that ensured level fields for even water distribution; bioengineering of
new and pest-resistant seeds; computerized cotton gins with a capacity to
produce 400 bales a day — enough to produce 840,000 pairs of boxer
shorts, according to a 2003 article in The Los Angeles Times. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>“There
was an antiseptic cleanliness to the whole operation,” Mr. Wartzman said.
“He pushed the industry in terms of modernizing, from seed to field to
gin.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Born
on March 10, 1923, in Greensboro, Ga., Mr. Boswell was the son of William
Boswell Sr. and Kate Hall Boswell. When he was a child, the family moved to
California to join in his uncle’s enterprise. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>After
serving in the Army in the Pacific during World War II, Mr. Boswell returned to
<a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/stanford_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org"
title="More articles about Stanford University"><span style='color:#004276'>Stanford
University</span></a> in 1946 to complete his bachelor’s degree in
economics. There he met Rosalind Murray; they married and had three children.
She died in 2000. Mr. Boswell is survived by his second wife, the former
Barbara Wallace; his son, James, who now runs the business; two daughters, Jody
Hall and Lorraine Wilcox; and five grandchildren.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Mr.
Boswell was a complicated, reticent man. He saw himself as a cowboy and was
proud that he had lost two fingers in a cattle-roping accident. He golfed with <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/arnold_palmer/index.html?inline=nyt-per"
title="More articles about Arnold Palmer."><span style='color:#004276'>Arnold
Palmer</span></a>. He sat on the boards of <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/general_electric_company/index.html?inline=nyt-org"
title="More information about General Electric Co"><span style='color:#004276'>General
Electric</span></a>, the Security Pacific Bank and the <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/safeway_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org"
title="More information about Safeway Incorporated"><span style='color:#004276'>Safeway</span></a>
supermarket chain. He was chairman, president and chief executive of his
company from 1952 until he retired in 1984. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Mr.
Boswell did not like to talk about himself or his business.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>When
Mr. Wartzman and Mr. Arax were doing research for “The King of
California,” Mr. Boswell spurned many requests for an interview.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt'><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>“We
finally decided to appeal to his mortality,” they wrote in the book,
“a sales pitch he cut short like this: ‘You don’t seem to
understand. It won’t bother me in the least if I die and this story is
never told.’ ”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:gray'>Byron
Leydecker, JcT</span></i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:gray'>Chair, Friends
of Trinity River</span></i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:gray'>PO Box 2327</span></i><span
style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:gray'>Mill Valley, CA
94942-2327</span></i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:gray'>415 383 4810
land</span></i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:gray'>415 519 4810
cell</span></i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;color:gray'><a
href="mailto:bwl3@comcast.net"><span style='color:blue'>bwl3@comcast.net</span></a></span></i></b><b><span
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