Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 11, Number 9, DeMotte, Jasper County, 16 January 1941 — Page 2

GENERAL HUGH S. JOHNSON Saus:

UMutf J WNWVntc*

Washington, D. C. ‘OPPOSITION* THINKING A favorite lawyer’s trick is to give his own version of what his worthy opponent “thinks” and then tear his self-constructed straw man to pieces. That is being done daily in the current debate on foreign policy. Those opposing our rapid approach to a virtual war alliance with Great Britain, are said to “think” that no combination of powers will ever attack us and, no matter who wins, we can do business with them, so why risk offending Hitler and provoking him to fight us. What duck soup that is to argue down. These truths are self evident: that it is to our great interest to see Britain win; that the hateful destruction of. England embitters every American heart; that force rather than honor and good will now rule the world and that we hate that as we hate Hitler who has been foremost in advancing that hellish condition; that we are in great danger and that our only course is swift preparation for invincible defense; that we are not so defended now and that the preparation is lagging shamefully. Any advocate of what is rushing us to a war alliance —who denies the sincerity of these opinions of others as a basis for his argument, is beclouding the real issue—the dreadful question of peace or war for America. There can be only one question in the troubled heart of every true American—what is it best for us to do to safeguard the present and the future of our own country? Is 4 it best to engage now in a tw*o ocean war with a one ocean navy? Is it best for us to send, or threaten to send, our armed forces to seize the Azores, the Irish harbors, the tip of West Africa and Singapore—to plunge into warlike operations all the way from the Str&its of Dover to the Straits of Malacca and, conceivably even further—through the Mediterranean and Red seas to Greece, Egypt, the Dardanelles. Calcutta and Colombo? Short of this, is it best to take the intermediate step leading straight and inevitably to this course by putting our overseas shipments into American bottoms and, with a convoy of cruisers, attempt to buck the line of a legitimate blockade? Is it best now to undertake to finance another nation in a new world war, when we are already staggering under a mountainous burden of debt and confronting a near necessity of doubling it as a necessity in our owrf defense? These are real and basic issues and not at all the ill-considered or emotional conscious or deliberate obstruction of them by attacking the patriotic integrity or plain sanity of the people who raise them. Furthermore, let this be faced: If our defense is so wholly dependent on Great Britain as w'e are now told —if she is now fighting' our decisive battle which, if lost, loses our freedom—then the course advocated by those who say we should contribute unlimited material resources, but no blood, without regard to any of the considerations raised here—if these things we are told are true—then that advocated course is the most futile and pusillanimous ever followed by an honorable nation. If they are true, we should have been in this war a year ago with everything we have. Surely there is a question of truth here that deserves debate. The whole of our future is at stake on the wisdom of our answer. • • * * OVERNIGHT OFFICERS The army is not making the best use of its trained, officer personnel. The war department quite properly and necessarily encourage tens of thousands of civilians to take appointments as reserve officers. Nat* urally, some of them were rank amateurs as soldiers and the bulk jof them held lieutenant's commissions. Now we are calling thousands of them to active duty. When they join for duty with troops they have to earn their advancement but when they come in on staff assignments, it is becoming a very different matter. A little personality plus, sometimes,political drag, works for many of these neophytes what many years of service don't work for a regular. New captains, majors and lieutenant-colonels are being created out of reserve subalterns who haven’t a year of active duty. At the same time, men with complete military experience and education, who have resigned or retired or are World war veterans returned to civil life, get a deaf ear when they volunteer to be recommissioned and recalled to active duty. It is demoralizing to officers on the active list of the regular army. We should as readily condemn the selection of an amateur officer to look after their welfare as an amateur doctor to look after their health, especially if there is a reputable specialist available. Exactly the same thing happened at the beginning of the World war, until General Pershing got his independent command in France and began to send the misfits wholesale to the reclassification center at Blois —or “Blooey” as the soldiers called it

Washington Digest

Secretary of Agriculture Is Experienced Farmer Progressive Farming Methods Won Him Medals; War Causes 'Class Feeling' to Decline in England.

(Released by Western Newspaper Union.) WASHINGTON. - Rough - hewn seems to be the word I’m after. I sat in office of the secretary of agriculture, a big empty-looking room, and thought of a new axe biting into a log. Chips were flying. Then, there was the cut, clean and fresh. Then another. And another. Not smooth, machine edge, such as a new saw makes with the regular lines the teeth leave across the surface. But a I good straight job, the. mark of each blow, surely placed, across the grain, clear through. That’s what I was thinking about as I talked with Claude Wickard, the big roundi-faced, homely fellow, a little awkward behind the mahogany desk but not awkward, I felt sure, standing up in a farm wagon, reins in his hands, confident and solid, his feet * apart as the wheels bumped over jthe field. Not so much at home but sure of what he was after behind the desk, the way he was that night when he called the meeting in the little Indiana schoolhouse, a kerosene lamp that hadn’t been cleaned for a long time sputtering beside him,; 14 or 20 farmers sitting in front of him as he organized the; first Farm Bureau meeting in his I community—the first one he ever attended, too. COMES TO WASHINGTON That scene, as he described it, stuck in my mi|nd because it seemed to be the turqing point in his career, or perhaps the first milestone on the road that at last took him reluctantly away from'the acres that had been in the Wickard family since the 1840 s and brought him

CLAUDE WICKARD Rough-hewn is the word.

down to Washington—into the government where he has been trying to put into practice the ideas he thought would be good for other farmers and other acres from Maine to California. Claude Wickard first came to the capita] in 1933 to become assistant ahd later chief of the corn-hog section of the Triple-A. He was made secretary of the department of agriculture last August when. Secretary WalJacje resigned to run for vice president. But his heart is still back in Carrol county, Indiana, where his 71-year-old father and two men are runningihis farm. Corn and hogs were on Secretary Wickard’s mind when I talked to him the other day, and, it was corn and hogs that brought him to Washington in the beginning by way of Des Moines, lowa, but it really goes back further than that. The schoolhouse meeting, I spoke of, was the milestone, but the day he told his father he was going to college was really the beginning. In those days —and it isn’t so long ago because Wickard is only 47-t-a lot of farmers thought that all a boy would get in college was a lot of darn-fool ideas. Only one of the Wickard’s neighbors had been to college, but Purdue university was only 30 miles away and the idea percolated. Young Claude went and when he was graduated (agricultural course, of course) in 1915 he was ready to take over the farm. Twelve years later the Prairie Farmer named him as a Master Farmer of Indiana. That was the only thing he boasted about in the half-hbur conversation I had with him.

Spain Needs Cotton

Receipts of raw Cotton in Spain during the three months beginning August 1, 194(j), totaled about 50,000 bales all of which was Argentine cotton ekeept for 2,100 bales of American, according to information received in the office of foreign agricultural relations. These quantities represent little more than half of normal requirements for the three-month period so that the shortage of raw materials is still acute.

By BAUKHAGE

National Farm and Home Hour Commentator

THE KANKAKEE VALLEY POST

WINS STATE MEDALS Soil building brought him state medals later for success in increasing crop-yields and hog production. It also got him a request from the State Farm Bureau organization to get busy and organize a unit in his community. There wasn’t any farm organization in his county then. He was supposed to go to the county seat and learn how to do it but he was too busy with his chores to get away so he just called a meeting m the schoolhouse and told his neighbors what he thought ought to be done. , r ~ “I guess I sort of overstated what we could do,” he said to me as he repeated the anecdote, “some of the fellows asked me afterward where all the reforms I talked about went to ? " He smiled that wide smile of his. Some of these ideas worked out. And the Master Farmer, in 1932, was chosen tty the three rural counties that were his district to go to the state senate. The next year he was chosen Indiana delegate to the National Corn Hog conference at Des Moines. Alll this time the farm was his chief preoccupation, was then as it still is, his only source or income besides his salary. OFFERED POSITION The conference had hardly started when A. G. Black, whose room was on the same floor jof the hotel as Wickard’s, buttonholed him. Black was then head of the Corn Hog section of the Triple A. He wanted an assistant and he wanted Wickard for the job and wanted him right away. It seemed a pretty important offer, but it also seemed impossible. You can’t lock up a farm like a city flat and walk off with the key in your pocket. But Blhck was persistent and after a mental and physical struggle, the Master Farmer mastered the situation, and with many ja backward look set off for Washington. He managed to kepp in pretty close tduch with Carrol County while he was Corn Hog boss, but now it’s harder because a secretary of agriculture is kept very busy. And right now Secretary Wickard wants to see mdre hOgs—all over the country—than there are. He’s worried about the pig crop report heard so much about late ly ancr the last word he had to say to me, while a secretary was pulling his sleeve for his next appointment, was on this subject: “People don’t understand what I’m after,” lie said as I rose to go, “when I say the farmers ought to hold back some of their breed sows and gilts now because pork is going to be higher later on. I had quite a time with three cabinet! ladies. (He chuckled.) They thought all I was worrying about was the price of pork chops. , What we want to do is to try to take the peaks and valleys out of farm prices ahd jif the farmers save some of their hogs for breeding now, they’ll gelj more money for them later and it will tend to keep the price level stabilized.” That’s Wickard all over—file practical farmer who has learned to think. |

ENGLISH FARMERS WORK UNDER FIRE “I farm in Wiltshire myself,” said Anthony Hurd, a British farmer, telling about conditions lin England while the bombs were dropping, ‘‘soo acres, and we average 45 bushels of wheat to acre. In the 14 years I’ve been farming there has never been am easier harvest.” Farming Has been revolutionised in England. In the first place, like it or not, class feeling separated England into groups. The farmers (not.the “gentry” were a proud folk, but still not of the “upper classes”) have taken a n|ew role in English life. They were given a big job, the outworking of that job is going to help kill the class system. Listen to my Wiltshire friend again: “We were asked particularly to get another 2,000,000 acres under the plow in the United Kingdom and convert that amount of permanent grassland into crops of wheat, oats, barley, potatoes and so on, which yield much more food per acre. That has been done. We have produced a big extra tonnage of cereals, particularly oats and barley —possibly as much as 1,000,000 tons extra—more potatoes thpn usual, and more roots and fodder crops for dairy cows and other live stotk.” * * * Great Britain and Germany are competing for Spanish favor. The Nazis have agreed to purchase aroynd 7,873,000 boxes of Spanish oranges and 1,260,000 boxes of mandarins, according to information received by the office of foreign agricultural relations. This is about half the 1940-41 Spanish exportable surplus as estimated by the Spanish government. The British government is also reported to.be negotiating for some of the fruit but no agreement has been reported.

A Record-Breaker

By MARTHA NEWBERRT

(Associated Newspapers.) WNU Servicf.

A NNABEL’S smart new shoes not ** only pinched her tired feet but they were putting spurs to her temper, while the overheated and crowded street car in which she was attempting to stand only egged on her rising wrath. j When the car came to what Annabel felt must be its eighty-sixth jolt she catapulted bodily against her next-door neighbor. “Crack!” 4 Undoubtedly she had broken something and when a sharp, irritated vbice breathed in her ear, “You clumsy little fool!” she was sure of it. With flaming face she turned in time to see the broad back a young man push through the crammed car. i • “How dare he!” Hastily boring her way through to the front door of the bar, Annabel alighted, only to see the angry young man striding far ahead. By the time she had reached Oak street he had vanished around the corner and out Ojf sight, Annabel Drew did n:>t own red hair for nothing! Suddenly, she spied what proved to be the remainis of the article she had accidentally broken, thrown away, she supposed, by its irate owner. Gingerly she picked it up, then uttered a joyous squeak as a broken phonograph record and the owner’s name came to view. It was fully a half-hour later that Annabel, hugging a new duplicate of the broken record, rang the bell of an imposing stone residence. In her haste Annabel had not changed her little new tian shoes—shoes that were beginning to make her limbs and whole body;ache;.thus when she found herself face to face with the object of the visit she stood in: silent misery and pain, for the good-looking young man facing her held her tongue-tied for the moment. “Well, what can I do for you, young lady?” His voice was refined, but Annabel resented the smile that lit up his face. “In‘the future, slit*. To curb your temper!” she had uttered these words Annabel felt numb with fejar. “Really!” came the somewhat flippant reply. Then the storm burst.

Never had Annabel been so eloquent. Never had a lecture on how a young man should treat a lady in the street car been so well delivered. Then, with a final gasp and “There’s your old record!” Annabel fell into the nearest etiair after laying her parcel on a nearby table. "I’m afraid you are ill!” cried her companion in alarm. The kindness in his voice caused tears to stream down her pale cheeks, tears that commenced a friendship that swiftly ripened into love as the days s-ped by. 1 It was a crisp, -bright winter’s day that Jim Ray slipped a sparkling diamond on one of Annabel’s slender fingers. “And to think, Jim, that I once thought you were just an old grouch.” . “But I was never that, dear!” “Well, you did call me a clumsy little fool!” “Never!” came the emphatic reply- “ Why, Jim Ray—you—you—” “Wait a moment,” interrupted her fiance. “That was my secretary you bumped into on the street car!” Annabel turned away. “I am really sorry, dear. 1 should have told you in the beginning, but I was afraid of scaring you away. You know, sweetheart, it was love at first sight with me, and, Annabel, you know, you are just too lovely for words when you are angry.” Suddenly she turned and threw her arms about his neck. “Jim!” she whispered quietly, "I’m—l’m a base deceiver, too!” “What do yoU mean!” cried Jim excitedly. “You’re not married!” 1 “Don’t be silly, Jim. You see, I’ve known all the while who you were. Your secretary apologized to me after you had given him a good lecture and I made him keep it a secret!” “You little minx!” exclaimed Jim happily. “Now, vqung lady, you’ll just have to marry me next week!” “Don’t you think that is a bit suddeh, Jim!” “Sudden!” scoffed her fiance, “for a record breaker!” With a chuckle Annabel raised her smiling lips and sealed her acceptance with a kiss.

Sunrise in West

The thing 1 that always baffles American cruise passengers passing through the Panama canal is to see the sun rise from the Pacific at Panama City and set in the Atlantic at Colon. The reason is that the canal runs from the northwest at Colon to the southeast at Panama City, and, although Panama City is on the Pacific, it is east of Colon, which is on the Atlantic. Ships’ officers have the most difficult time explaining this, and w hen a passenger asks whether the ship is proceeding east or west, and the steward correctly replies i that she is moving either north or 9outh, an argument is certain to ensue.

Here’s a Change From Old Stand-Bys: Cereal Cookies; So Tasty, Low in Cost

DID you ever hear; of a “cerealia?” No, it's not a breakfast food. It’s the festival that the ancient Romans staged every year in honor of Ceres, Goddess of the Grains. You can have a cerealia of your own; a Cookie Cerealia, for when it comes to turning out those batches of cookies, there’s nothing that adds so much taste and variety at such a low cost as the well-known morning cereal. Nice part about making cereal cookies is that the cereal is already cooked and tested in the manufacturer’s ovens. All you need do is mix it in according to directions. But nicer still are the gorgeous-tasting delicacies that you can produce from just ordinary, every-day corn flakes and the like. Sort of a change from the old stand-bys, the sand-tarts and ginger snaps. ! , Even the names of these cookies sound good: Bran Butterscotch Cookies, New Zealand Corn Flake Hermits, Peppies, Peanut Butter Macaroons. Happily, nohe of these call for expensive ingredients. Bran Butterscotch Cookies. 1 cup butter 1 Cup all-bran 2 cups brown sugar 3 cups flour ) 1 egg 2 teaspoons baking piowder Crearrl butter; add sugar gradually and beat until light and fluffy. Add egg and beat well. Stir in all-bran. Sift flour with baking powder and work into first mixture, a small amoiint at a time. Knead and shape into rolls about IV2 inches* in diameter; wrap in waxed paper, covering ends so that dough will not dry out. Store in refrigerator until firm. Cut into thin slices and bake! on ungreased cookie sheet in moderately hot oven (425 degrees F.) .about 10 minutes. ; Yield: dozen cookies (2 inches in diameter). Note: One tablespoon water or milk may be added to dough if it is difficult to shape into rolls. New Zealand Corn Flake Kisses. V 2 cup butter j 1 teaspoon baking 1 cup sugar poiwder 1 egg l 2 teaspoon salt 1.1/4 cups flour j 1 cup finely cut dates 1,2 cup corn flake crumbs Cream butter and sugar thoroughly ; add egg and beat until fluffy. Sift flour with baking powder and salt; add to first mixture along with dates. Mix well. Roll one teaspoon of mixture in corn

Bjr ~ Hip n / t :V ' y v\ * "Mm "WBmBSBk ■■■ \ -aM K8l' : :• v I -Ha Ju : <v % BgaL 1 1,1111 ■ - /. if ■iiiMmßir *• rr,' • iirSwEJBBH More flavor in every taste! More vitamins and minerals in every glass! Year-round sunshine, fertile soils and scientific care put a wealth of “extras” in California Navel Oranges. They’re seedless! Easy to peel and slice or section for salads and desserts. Ideal to eat out of hand! Those trademarked “Sunkist” on the skin are the finest produced by 14,000 cooperating growers. Best for Juic e-and Every use! Buy a quantity for economy. mi. Botfywood "-MUmy CBS 9tatUm»-6,1S PM, MST-Mon., WmL, FH.

flake crumbs and flatten down on greased cookie sheet. Bake in slow oven (325 degrees F.) about 20 minutes. Remove from pan while warm. ;. T Yield: 3 dozen cookies* <l% inches in diameter). Mincemeat Hermits. a j cup butter l ! a teaspoons cinnal1 3 cups sugar mon 2 eggs 1 teaspoon cloves (3 cup milk !4 teaspoon mace *4 cup albbran % teaspoon nutmeg 3> a cups flour 1 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking 1 cup mincemeat powder ■ * ' Blend butter and sugar thoroughly; add egg and beat well. Add milk and all-bran. Sift flour with remaining dry ingredients and add to first mixture; mix well and chill. Roll dough to about 34 inch thickness on- lightly floured board and cut into rounds. Place teaspoonful of mincemeat on one round, cover with secopd and press edges together, Bake on greased baking sheet in moderately hot oven (400 degrees F.) for about 12 minutes. Yield: 45 cookies (2 a 4 ipches iijt diameter). Peppies. 3 i cup shortening 4 cups flout 1 cup sugar *4 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 1 teaspoon Soda 1 cup molasses 1 teaspoon ginger 1 cup vitamin- 1 teaspoon cinnamon enriched wheat 1 1 cup souij cream flakes ' /’ j Blend shortening and sugar thoroughly. Add well beaten eggs, molasses and wheat flakes. Sift flour with salt, soda and spices; add alternately to first mixture with cream. Chill thoroughly. Roll to Va-inch thickness; cut and bake on greased baking sheet in moderate oven (375 degrees F.j) about 20 minutes. j Yield:" 2*4 dozen cookies (234 inches in diameter). Orange and Lemon Cookies, (Makes about 5 dozen cookies) 1 cup sugar 3>2 cups flour (sifted) \4 cup orange juice .■ 2 teaspoons baking >4 cup lemon juice powder 1 teaspoon lemon '2 teaspoon salt peel (grated) l a cup butter (melt--1 teaspoon orange ed) peel (grated) • ■ t Mix sugar and fruit juices well. Add grated peel, dry ingredients and melted butter. Stir well, Doug should.be firm enough to roll!. Roll very thin and cut with sandy cutter in various shapes. Bake on a' greased sheet in a moderately hot oven (375 degrees) for about 10 minutes, or until lightly browned on the edges.