[bold]RAINBOW FARM REMEMBERED[/bold]
Twenty-two years ago this month, two gay cannabis activists – Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm – were gunned down by police on their property Rainbow Farm in Vandalia, Michigan, after a five-day siege that some refer to as “The Waco of Weed.”
Originally from Elkhart, Indiana, Grover Thomas Crosslin loved weed from an early age. Tom (as he preferred to be called) started getting high with his brothers when he was just 14, and cannabis quickly became a normal part of their family life.
[quote] “Since the time I was born, there’s never been a time when marijuana was not in front of me,” recalls Tom’s nephew Boss Crosslin Jr. “I remember being at my grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and my father, Uncle Tom, Uncle Larry, and Aunt Shirley — they’d go out to the garage to smoke before dinner. That was normal to me…that's how I grew up.”
In 1971, Tom Crosslin dropped out of high school and got a job at a car wash. One day, when his boss tried to stiff him for his pay, he extorted what was owed to him using a gun borrowed from a friend — a stunt that earned him a six-month jail sentence. After being released, he briefly joined a bike gang and married one of the female gang members…but broke it off after a couple of years when he realized he was more attracted to men.
Crosslin became a blue-collar jack-of-all-trades and entrepreneur: worked all kinds of jobs, including truck driving, flagpole installation, and even steeple jacking. But what he seemed to most excel at was real estate development — purchasing run-down properties, fixing them up, then selling or renting them out at a profit. At its height, Crosslin’s company owned around 20 properties and employed a crew of around 80 people — mostly divorced or down-and-out guys, some of whom were also gay.
After construction jobs, Crosslin would often hold cookouts on the properties—feeding and getting high with his crew. It was through this construction company that he met two of his closest companions, both of whom were also gay: Doug Leinbach, a bank manager who handled fixer-upper properties, who became Crosslin’s dear friend, and an easy-going young crewmember named Rolland “Rollie” Rohm, with whom he fell in love.
When Tom met Rollie in 1990, they quickly connected and began a romantic relationship. Though the two men were very different — Rollie, a slim, quiet, longhaired hippie, and Tom, a burly, bearded hothead nearly 20 years his senior — by most accounts, they complemented each other quite well.
Though barely 17 when he met Tom Crosslin in 1990, Rollie Rohm had already been married and fathered a son (Robert) with an older woman. Exercising a fatherly influence, Tom introduced Rollie to marijuana (which enabled him to get off the Ritalin he’d been taking for years) and eventually helped him gain full custody of Robert.
In 1993, Crosslin sold one of his many properties and used the proceeds to purchase an overgrown 34-acre corn farm (and the adjoining 20 acres of woodland) 30 miles north of Elkhart in rural Vandalia, Michigan, for just $35,000 cash. The couple spent many months renovating the dilapidated farmhouse, and within a year, had taken up residence there full time.
During one of those long days of working on the house, the couple was relaxing on a hill when a beautiful rainbow appeared in the sky. During that week, they allegedly saw several more rainbows and took it as a sign: they decided to name their property Rainbow Farm.
