LITTLE ROCK — One winter, Carl Farler proved just how frugal he could be when instead of buying fly-tying fur for fishing lures, he decided to get creative.
“At the time they had ... a white Persian cat, and he’d go around the house after the cat collecting cat fur...,” said his daughter, Sandy Farler-Hoyt.
In order to get a variety, he took it a step further.
“He would get off the road and cut different hair off of the roadkill ... that was just him,” his daughter said with a laugh.
Farler of Mabelvale died Saturday at Saline Memorial Hospice in Bryant from brain cancer.
He was 81.
Farler, who grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky, was the second youngest of 16 children. When Farler’s father died from typhoid fever, his mother had to send about five of the youngest children to Louisville to live and attend school at the Masonic Widows and Orphans Home, said his son, Tom Farler.
“It wasn’t a real easy life,” his son said. “He was probably real fortunate to go to the home.”
Farler later became a Mason, like his father.
While at the home nine months out of the year, Farler was exposed to culture, from dancing to movies.
After serving four years in the U.S. Air Force, fate and failure to find a job in Kentucky led him to Ohio. In August 1954, Farler saw his future wife, Betty Farler, through the window of a clothing store where she worked and asked her out.
After three dates, Farler asked her to marry him.
“She said, ‘Yes, if you’ll tell me your last name,’” Farler-Hoyt said.
The couple married Dec. 24, 1954.
After earning a doctorate in agricultural economics in 1971, Farler became a state economist with the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service, writing state and federal agriculture policies. In 1980, Farler was an economic ambassador for the extension service in southern Europe for six weeks and learned about agriculture in various countries including Egypt, his daughter said.
In 1986, Farler became a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, where he taught for the next nine years.
“He just loved teaching and helping young people,”his son said.
However, Tom Farler said his father “always had an ulterior motive” - moving to Monticello meant more opportunities to hunt, sometimes with the students.
“He just loved being out in nature, getting away from people and the rat race,” his son said.
An avid fisherman, Farler enjoyed catching everything from smallmouth bass to trout.
Once, while Farler was backing a fishing boat into the White River, a friend didn’t hold the rope and it floated away. Even though it was a cold January day, Farler, then about 79, swam after it. A woman at a nearby house called rescue crews after seeing the boat and a “body” in the river, Tom Farler said.
True to his financially conservative nickname “Squeaky,” Farler refused to get into the ambulance after rescue crews got him back to the launch site.
“He said, ‘I knew they’d charge me, so I refused to get in there,’” his son said.
A lifelong learner and family man, Farler showed he cared in many ways, from teaching his twin grandsons how to waltz for their prom to giving each grandchild a tree to plant, his daughter said.
“He told me a couple days before he died ... ‘You know you’ve got to leave this world better than when you found it, and I think I’ve done that,’” Farler-Hoyt said.
Arkansas, Pages 12 on 06/26/2012