Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 127, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 May 1919 — Page 1 Advertisements Column 3 [ADVERTISEMENT]

McCRAY" SALE MOVES PEN OF GEORGE ADE. Kentland, Ind., May 24.—George Ade, Indiana’s playwright, humorist and writer of fiction, has written one of his famous short stories showing the difference between the Indiana of today and that of yesterday. It was prompted by the annual sale j>f Hereford cattle near this city this week by Warren T. McCray at Orchard Lake stock farms. One hundred and nineteen of the animals of the famous Fairfax strain sold for $436,350. Mr. Ade, who was a guest at the banquet held here in connection with the event, said that sometimes he claimed to be a farmer and sometimes a playwright. “In ' New York they call me a farmer, but here at home they call me a playwright,” he said. “I am in a peculiar situation, for this is about the only place in the world where I can call myself a farmer and fail to get away with it.” His story follows: In Any Direction. “When I was a boy in this county, an explorer could start from anywhere out on the prairie and move in any direction and find a slough. In the center an open pond of dead water. Then, a z border of swaying cat-tails out to the upland, which was spangled with the gorgeous blue and yellow flowers of the virgin plain. “A million frogs sang together each evening, and a billion mosquitoes came out to forage. Chills and fever entered into the program of every life, but those who chattered did not blame the female mosquito. They thought that they were being swatted by the hand of providence. “The smudge has gone and quinine is no longer a staple. The sloughs have .gone, and after years of tile drainage, and the leveling process of cultivation, the five-acre pond on which we skated, is just a gentle swale in a dry and tidy field. “Thirty dollars an acre is no longer a boom price. Offer the man two hundred and you fail to interest him. “Geese and brant, mallards, red heads, prairie chickens and quail—so plentiful that the hunters brought in wagon loads, are no longer here. We used to tire of quail pot pie, and long for meat from the butcher’s.

Right at Home. ' “This is not Saskatchewan or Oklahoma that we are describing. This country of croaking frogs and black mud and myriad flocks of wild fowl is right here at home. “It was only a few ticks back on the long clock of eternity and yet it was an era of melodians and cardboard mottoes and clumsy vehicles and stick candy striped with cinnamon. Why, of Course. “Do you remember the small town of the seventies? It was garnished with mud, bordered by wooden sidewalks and dimly marked against the night by coal oil lamps. The general store was a congress of odors emerging from open crates and barrels-. The front of every cubical house was a sealed tomb, with lace curtains mercifully screening the funeral furnishings of an uninhabited front room. “Against this picture, I set the sophisticated county seat of today. To begin with—pavements and curbs, and hard sidewalks —because we learned twenty years ago that these, and not literary clubs, are the primary essentials of civilized existence. The motor cars whiz by each summer night—an endless procession under the arc lights. The shop windows are expositions of decorative art. The house, shaped likfe a cube, has grown wings and borders, and has a roomy, vine-draped veranda. “When I motor past the old corners out in the country, the never ending surprise is to find these people who camped out among the swamps a few years ago, and led a sort of skillet and ax existence, now placidly using their kitchen cabinets, cream separators, phonographs, telephones, tractors, pumping engines, threshers, that feed the sheaves, *and stack the straw and measure the grain—running water in the kitchen, and a bath tub upstairs, R. F. D. boxes arid whole flocks of flowers. The Question. “If the boys of today are going to look down from their biplanes in 1950 and observe a further and equally amazing transformation as compared with 1919, then, the question is—how far do we go before we slow up? " “We have seen miracles even during our brief visit to Indiana. We can remember when SSO was the top price for a bull—even a bull that combined all of the breeds known to this region. ~ “We have no copyright on these wonders. You have s marveled at them back in your own homes. You know that the farmers and stockbreeders are going to become aristocrats of production. Only a short time ago, the poor agriculturist who did a little feeding on the side, was rated as a scrub, a canner, a cull, a second, a discard—a pelter. “Grasping this opportunity to work in a slight advertisement for a relative,' I conclude by expressing the firm belief that the husbandman of the future will be rated as a Fairfax.” ....

Connie Mack’s chief hope in the American league scramble lies with Prexy Johnson. If the latter will turn the league upside down and run it backwards, Connie has a chance with his hirelings. . -