Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 15, Number 26, DeMotte, Jasper County, 11 May 1945 — Country Cured [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Country Cured

by HOMER CROY

©W.N.U. SERVICE

THE STORY THUS PAR: Amos Croy and hli wife settled on a farm In MU* ■ourl where Homer was hern. Homer was the Srst Croy to (0 to high school and college. In New York he worked en a woman’s magazine, wrote a novel, and a play. His father and mother both died and Homer mortgaged the farm to help out a relative who was In serious trouble. He then wrote a dealer training dim which brought In enough to pay off the mortgages. Homer published and sold for a profit a magazine for authors, he served with the Y.M.C.A. in World War I, wrote radio version of "Show Boat" and worked with Chic Sale and was secretary of Authors League. He continued with his novel writing.

CHAPTER XXIV Men were posted In the wagons to drive for the women, a starting gun was fired, and slowly—interminably It seemed to me—the wagons Inched across the field. Those women knew bow to strip ribbons, pick up downcorn, and keep on the throw board. They were the farm women I had known all my life—tanned, shapeless, amazingly capable, equal to any emergency, overworked and underpaid. At first glance, however, they didn’t look like women, for most were in overalls, with men’s hats pulled down over their hair. They were there to work and that was exactly what they were doing; regularly, in a sort of rhythm, the ears of corn beat on the throwboards. But the women were feminine after all, no matter what their cover-alls said. For a quarter of them were wearing high-heeled shoes. If my mother had come out to the field in a pair of high-heeled shoes, I’m sure Pa’d ’ve sent her back to the house. Times change and conditions change. But people don’t; for these women were as my mother was—except for the item of the shoes. Sometimes it seems to me, people are the one constant factor in the whole scheme of things. When the gun went off the second time, the women climbed into the wagons and the wagons started for the scales where the corn would have to be weighed; and the gleanings, too, and the overlooked com. One woman, before she would allow herself to be driven through the cheering lines, brought out her lipstick. I am glad Pa never saw a Women’s National Corn Husking Contest. He had stood up under many things, but a lipstick in a cornfield might have proved too much. I asked one of the winners what she was going to do with the money. It was going into a college fund, she said. Then glanced proudly at her son she had by the hand. The contest was held near a farm owned by former President Herbert C. Hoover. I had never been on his farm, so now we drove to it and I walked across it, thrilled to have such a distinguished fellow farmer. W'hen I saw the condition the farm was in, I knew it was just as well he had stuck to politics. Once, at the behest of his political guides, he had come back to make a speech, just as Farmer Willkie had gone to Elwood, Indiana, to show what a callus-handed son of the soil he was. Mr. Hoover's fellow farmers came to see one of their kind.* The crowd became so great that Mr. Hoover adjourned to his front porch and started to talk to his friends. His friends were more friendly than he knew, and crowded on the porch. Suddenly there was a noise, and a shock, too, and Hoover and his friends and the porch went down. There was a scramble but, after a few moments, Mr. Hoover was able to right himself and went on with the alarming condition of the country.

The porch is still there, in about the fix the speech left it in. When I got back to New York, I went to the Dutch Treat Club, and there was my neighbor. I went to him, after he had finished lunch but was still sitting at the table, and said: "Mr. Hoover, I’m going to say something to you that no one else in this club has ever said." He glanced at me, evidently wondering what to make of this approach. I said, "I walked across your farm in Missouri a few days ago." Now he did look with interest. ’’Well, how is it?" I told him just what I had seen. That it was in poor condition; the outbuildings were falling to pieces, the house needed painting, the fences were down, the gullies were washing and the soil itself was overcorned. Even, I said, one side of his cave had fallen in. He asked questions and I told him just how the farm impressed me. Then he wanted to know if I would be interested in buying it I told him that I did not think I would. After I left, he went on smoking; but more thoughtfully, it seemed to me. Maybe it had dawned on him that he hadn’t been cut out to be a farmer. All visits are not so glamorous; there are plenty of hard, practical problems to solve. And so Spide and I and Lloyd stand on the south side of the barn and try to work them out. How much land should go in wheat? How much in com? How much in rye? This is complicated by the fact that the government must always be reckoned with. We will be paid so much for raising this; and so much for not raising that. It takes a bit of figuring. As we walk across the farm, I see a corapicker at work. It is not on our land, but in a few days one will be snatching off the ears on our land. I think back to the days when my father shucked corn and my mother came out and helped him, and that night poured tallow in the cracks in his hands. And I think back to the days when I husked, too—surely the hardest work in the world. The land doesn’t yield as it did then. Fertilizer is going on it—something my father never dreamed of. And there are a million bugs and insects busy at the com and at the land, pests he never heard of. The vast fertility of the prairie soil has been depleted. But it’s still black loam, still the finest comland In the world. We have dinner. Nellie sits in the chair nearest the kitchen, where my mother used to hop up. Spide only bows his head, for the Logans are Catholics. I think of my father sitting in Spide’s chair, and a choky feeling pushes into my collar. A little disappointment about dinner, for the cooking isn’t as good, and the food isn’t as good, as I remember it. After all, there’s nothing to season food like a couple of plow handles. After dinner, house problems. Every room must be inspected. A new ceiling will have to go into this one. But Nellie’s son-in-law, who lives in Omaha, 1s a plasterer. “When his vacation comes we’ll invite him to see us,” says Nellie. So that’s taken care of. Why l this is the very room where my father used to fall asleep over his livestock paper. The very one where I used to read the farm papers. What does the farm boy of today read? Well, he reads the farm weeklies and semimonthlies (Wallaces’ Farmer is still going strong)

and he listens to the National Radio Hour and to the market prices as they come in over the Midwest stations. The mail-order monthlies are all gone; but there has come to take their place a plague of cheap movie magazines and radio guides and comic supplement magazines detailing the adventures of Superman and his kind. And the hired man, today, instead of having pictures of race horses pinned on his wall, has Poses of Beautiful Art Models. Sometimes I wish the mail-order magazines hadn’t gone their way. We look at the bathroom. The nondecaying wallpaper has about decayed. So that goes down on the list. It is a single duty bathroom; merely a bathroom and nothing else. I am asked by my curious city friends what a woman on a farm does when she wants to be alone. The answer is simple. She does as

the women have done for three quarters of a century. Goes to an arrangement in the back yard, or in the edge of the orchard, designed for that very purpose. Naturally in winter time there are certain problems to solve. But she solves them and never once thinks of herself as underprivileged. That Croy bathroom means something to me, for it was the first in all the neighborhood. People came as if to a shrine. I turn to Nellie and say: "How many bathrooms are there in this neighborhood?” She and Spide count it up. On the ten farms nearest ours there are two bathrooms. They still go out back. And that’s today in the black loam section. We go upstairs to the northwest bedroom and my heart goes flutter. This is the room where I had my panel of “Six Famous American Authors." There’s where the old Barlock used to repose; on the wall was a picture of Victor Hugo and right under it I read “Les Miserables.” “Homer, the roof leaks,” says Nellie. This Is the room where I packed my telescope with the mousehole. How long ago that was! Yet how recent. I remember my mother said: “Homer, I wish you didn’t have to go off to the city with a bole in your telescope.”

My mind races away to St. Joseph where I saw my second streetcar and I think of something that happened, later, when I came to have as a friend the man who invented the electric streetcar, Frank J. Sprague, and he told me this streetcar line was the second in the United States. We go into “ ’Renzo Davis’ ” room. Two sacks of shelled com are on the floor. "We don’t dare leave our hybrid at the bam,” says Spide. "Mice.” "This room should be papered,” says Nellie. From room to room we go, and from place to place, then outside. The kitchen foundation is getting weak in the knees; we’ll have to have the cement man out. We go into the basement under the parlor, and I think of the time my father got the acetylene gas craze and had a machine installed in this cellar room. The machine was supposed to dump pockets of carbide into the water and make gas for our lights. One night the machine didn’t work and Pa told me to take the lantern and go down and see what was the matter. I came into this room, opened the machine and peered into its depth, aided by the lantern. Suddenly there was an explosion and I was knocked as flat as a doily. In the back yard, behind the "new” house, is the house where I was bom. If there are any chickens in it, I’ll wring their necks. Thank God there aren’t In the floor is the augurhole where I used to see the water drain off and wonder where it went; and under the clock shelf is the very nail where our Hostetter’s Almanac hung. And a little left is the wall where Pa kept the International Harvester calendar, with circles around the dates when the cows would freshen, x Then to the henhouse. The roof leaks. I don’t know why it is, but henhouse roofs always leak. Put that down, too. We have supper and that evening the neighbors come in, the boys and girls I’ve grown up with; and with them their children. And, here and there, a grandchild. It just doesn’t seem possible. But there they are, staring popeyed as if I was Rip Van Winkle. We talk about the weather and crops, just as we used to; and how the schoolteacher is panning out. Then about what the government says we’U have to do next. That’s all new. And puzzling. But on the good side. Our farmers like what the government is doing. We have a sort of procedure to go through. After we’ve talked about local things, it is my place to tell them about New York. Not one in the room has ever been in New York, except one boy who saw it when he was a soldier. And none of them ever hope to see New York. They want to know what kind of house I live in, and when I tell them I don’t live in a house at all but in an apartment, with no front yard and not a sprig of grass, they shake their heads. I’d better’ve stayed on the farm. When I tell them that six feet from my front door is the front door of a man I have seen only twice, they put it down as some of my imaginings. After all, he wrote "West of the Water Tower” and only half of that was true. When I tell them that certain people in Connecticut live on five a.cres yet call themselves farmers)' it makes them smile. But when I tell them that all the work these city

“farmers” do is to dress up in fancy clothes on Saturday morning and walk around with a pair of vineclippers in their hands, it makes ’em laugh right out. They say they would like to see a city farmer in his fancy clothes try to ring a hog. Well, so would I. Probably the hog’d have a good time, too. Once, when I told them that the Mayor of New York had ordered a “cow put in the zoo so that New Yorkers could see one, they said I was going too far. They know about the tall buildings, for they’ve seen them in the movies; but the subway is different When I tell them that the train I go to Washington Heights on, runs three miles under the ground without stopping, they glance at each other again. Well, let him talk. His father and mother tried hard enough. After my "lies” are over, the conversation again swings back to neighborhood matters. Mysteriously Nellie and Opal get up and tiptoe out and there is a clinking in the kitchen. Refreshment time; pretty soon we are eating ice cream and homemade cake. Not ice cream made on the back porch, in a saltwater freezer, but fetched out from town. And not as good, either. The children are getting restless. It’s half-past nine. Why, we haven’t been up that late since Grandpa died. After a while they’ve gone and the house seems lonely and emptyjust as it did when I was a boy. A train whistles in the distance and an. exquisite agony lays hold of me. And now, as I lie in my old room, I think: Some day I’ll be no more, and when that day comes I*d like to have my ashes sprinkled en the farm. The next day we go in to trade, but now it takes only a few minutes to clip off the six miles. What wouldn’t I have given if old Dave had had six cylinders? It’s a farming town, the guidebooks say, then add: "Industry—none.” They’re • little off, for there’s the lightningrod factory. A dozen people employed there, counting, of course, the office workers. You’re nobody if you’re not proud of your home town. We have some "names” that we’re proud of—men who were born in the county and who have distinguished themselves. There’s George Robb Ellison, judge of the Missouri Supreme Court. Remember I mentioned a boy who went to Harvard and came back with a feather-edge haircut? Well, that was George. And there’s Merrill E. Otis, Federal Judge, Kansas City. (He’s the one who sentenced Pendergast.) Dale Carnegie, the writer and lecturer. Ed H. Moore was bom in our county and lived there all his early days; then went to Oklahoma and beat Josh Lee and became United States Senator. (Should never have left Missouri.) Forrest C. Donnell became Governor of Missouri. Yep, one of our boys. Have you heard of Dawson City, British Columbia, near Alaska? Named for one of our boys. (TO BE CONTINUED)

We go into "Renzo Davis,” room.