Dillon S. Myer Oral History Interview, Chap V-VIII

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview donated to the Harry S. Truman Library. The reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word, although some editing was done.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of California and Dillon S. Myer and Jenness Wirt Myer, dated July 7, 1970. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to Dillon S. Myer and Jenness Wirt Myer until January 1, 1980. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of the Bancroft Library of the University of California.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with Dillon S. Myer and Jenness Wirt Myer requires that they be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

Opened July, 1970
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

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CHAPTER V

MATURING AS A YOUNG COUNTY AGRICULTURAL AGENT IN INDIANA

DSM: I resigned my position at the University of Kentucky effective February 1, 1916 and after a month’s training with three older county agents in Indiana, one week each, I reported to Evansville as a young inexperienced county agent on March 1, 1916.

I was fortunate in that I had been assigned to work for a week with Clarence Henry in Allen County who had been a county agent there for some time and with Cal Mclntosh in Green County, Indiana, and later with Roy Marshall in Gibson County which was just to the north of Vanderburgh County. I learned a great deal from all three of these men about the technique of county agent work which was not generally available excepting through experience and word of mouth from an agent who had had experience, because there weren’t too many agents in those days and there was very little on the record about the work of county agents.

Before reporting for duty at Evansville, I asked the county agent leader Mr. Tom Coleman what
I should do. He said "Go down and go to work. You know as much about the job as I do." So I was on my own in a strange country, but I soon found friends.

The township trustees who were also the county school board or the county board of education rather were responsible for the approval of the county agent. Most of them were quite helpful once I had been approved and was on the job. They helped to arrange meetings for the purpose of getting acquainted.

The county superintendent of schools, Mr. Floyd Ragland, was a real friend and supporter. He was a valuable advisor to a young upstart of twenty-five years who was assuming to advise farmers regarding the problems of crops, livestock production and marketing, and the establishing of 4H Club program.

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In those days there was a requirement that $500 be raised locally in the county to provide for office furnishing before Purdue University would recommend a county agent for the job and before putting in state and federal funds to help pay the county agent’s salary. In the case of Vanderburgh County the Evansville Courier, which was the leading newspaper in that part of the state, took on the task of helping to raise the money through small subscriptions from farmers and others and I think actually put up about half of the $500 themselves in order to meet the requirement of the $500 fund.

The office which was assigned to the county agent was in the courthouse just next door to the sheriff’s office on a main corridor and across from the County Clerk’s office. It was well located and quite satisfactory, from the standpoint of giving a new county agent a chance to get acquainted with people, because of the easy access.

The office, of course, had to be equipped throughout. We bought desks, chairs, typewriter, files, tables, and all of the accoutrements of a normal office plus some bookcases that I had made by a carpenter or cabinetmaker and a bulletin rack which would hold thirty-two bulletins which lay flat in a pocket which was tilted so that they were easy to see and easy to read. This provided the kind of bulletin distribution center which helped get people acquainted with what literature was available in the various agriculture fields.

I also had purchased a number of text and reference books in the various fields that I thought would be helpful. I laid in a supply of Purdue and U.S. Agriculture Department bulletins for reference work. I found that all of these things came in very handy later because there were many times that I needed to look up information which I did not have at hand.

I found one small publication from the University of California that was written by B.H. Crocheron who was Agriculture Extension Director in California, on the subject of county agent work in Humbolt County, California. This publication was the only one of its

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type that I know of in existence at that time. Director Crocheron had described in simple language
and quite completely the everyday work of the county agent in a California county, including a description of various types of method demonstration which taught people how to do things with their hands or with equipment; also result demonstrations which involved getting the cooperation of some good farmer to plant crops or to carry out certain practices that would end up in the kind of results that could be brought to the attention of people through a meeting at a later date, to view the results or to discuss the results. He also discussed the use of farm visits, and office calls, project meetings, general meetings and other techniques that had been used by the county agent in Humbolt County.

I found this publication tremendously helpful because as I have pointed out earlier, excepting for the contact I had had with the three county agents that I had spent some time with before I came on the job in Indiana and some general knowledge that I had gathered during the two years while I was in Kentucky I had no very specific information regarding the job of a county agent. This particular bulletin gave me the idea that I should map out a program of my own and I began to lay plans for various types of projects which I thought were adaptable to Vanderburgh County and made plans for carrying out these projects.

More About Kentucky

DSM: I would like to revert to my experience at the University of Kentucky briefly. I found that during my experience in county agent work that the knowledge that I had gained as a specialist in the Agronomic field, especially my work with wheat varieties and with fertilizer plots and with the soy bean varieties which I had charge of under the general

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supervision of Ed Kinny during the last year I was in Kentucky, was highly valuable because the soy bean crop was new and not generally familiar to farmers throughout the country.

My Only Scientific Publication

DSM: Also I have forgotten to mention the fact that the only scientific publication that I ever have been a party to was published while I was at the University. On my first visit to Lexington to be looked over by Prof. Roberts and Prof. Kinny, we had taken a trip over the farm and on the way back we walked through a small five-acre alfalfa field where we found many dead alfalfa plants. Upon examination we realized that there was a disease that was causing this trouble.

After I arrived on the job I signed up for a course in Plant Pathology under Prof. Gilbert in the Botany Department and we discussed this particular disease. After some discussion Prof. Roberts suggested that we make this a project of my course with Prof. Gilbert and that we prepare a bulletin on it. So as a result we proceeded to do so.

Prof. Gilbert had some knowledge of German and I had had a little, very little. We found that about the only literature in the field which had to do with the particular disease that we found in the alfalfa field was German literature. So night after night we went out to Prof. Gilbert’s office and I would help to look up the meaning of words as he found that he didn’t quite know the meaning and he did the translating thus we hammered out a translation of the publications that we found in this field and I think we did a very good job of it.

Following that then Prof. Gilbert did some laboratory work and checking out the microscopic

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work and so on that needed to be done and since I was traveling occasionally around the state I did the field observation work and the contacts throughout the state as to the spread of this disease in alfalfa and clover. As a result we came up with a publication entitled "Stem Rot of Clovers and Alfalfa as a Cause of Clover Sickness" by A.H. Gilbert and D.S. Myer.

The particular disease that we had found was known scientifically as Sclerotinia Trifoliorum. This was a fungus and the name came from the fact that they were resting bodies at a certain stage in the life cycle of the disease known as Sclerotinia. They were a dark blueish or purplish type of nodule that we found in the alfalfa field when we first discovered the disease at the University of Kentucky.

I got so interested at this particular stage in this particular disease as well as in plant pathology generally that I considered going to Cornell University and taking graduate work in this field with the expectation of becoming a specialist in the field. I’m very fortunate that I decided not to do so because I realized later that I never would have had the patience or the continued interest in doing the careful scientific laboratory work that was necessary in order to be a top plant pathologist.

However, this was a worthwhile experience and it did stimulate my interest in the field of plant diseases and plant problems, and led me to do a good deal of reading and research in this field which was helpful to me in my county agent work.

Soil Fertility Theories

DSM: There is one other phase of my work at the University of Kentucky that I found helpful after I left the University and got into county agent work. There was a wide difference of opinion among

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scientists throughout the world on what was causing some of the problems in the field of soil fertility. There were about five different major theories extant at that time and each of the folks who had developed a theory were very adamant in their belief that they were right about what was causing problems in the reduction of crop yields.

One of them concerned the lack of fertilizer elements and particularly the lack of phosphate. Prof. Hopkins at the University of Illinois was a great advocate of the use of rock phosphate in its natural state, simply ground rock phosphate, when applied with clover and legume crops turned under would do very well in the black soils of Illinois and consequently he had a tendency to ascribe most of the ills of crop production to lack of phosphates.

On the other hand, Dr. Bolley of the University of North Dakota who had the problem of trying to find the answer to their so-called Flax Sickness, learned that through crop rotation they could continue to grow flax, provided that they did rotate crops over a period of four or five years and not put the same crop in the same soil year after year. As a consequence of his studies in this field he began to insist through his writings that the limitation on crop production and the lowering of yields was due almost entirely to plant disease.

Prof. Whitney of the Bureau of Soils and Chemistry in Washington had developed a so-called toxic theory in which he insisted that the growth of crops in the soil had over a period of time gradually thrown off a toxic substance and that it was this toxic condition that was causing reduced yields. He felt very strongly about his theory.

A scientist at the Rothamstead Experiment Station in England had developed an amoeba theory in which he said that there was a type of amoeba in the soil that was seemingly on the increase after crops were grown for a number of years that caused the trouble.

My own Prof. George Roberts believed that there were various reasons for reduced crop yields depending

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upon the type of soils and their condition. He was an advocate in areas of clay soil in particular of the use of acid phosphate instead of rock phosphate and of other mineral fertilizers in areas where they were needed. For example in muck land he felt potash should be used but not necessarily in clay lands. He felt that on clay lands if you grew legumes and the land was properly limed, if it needed lime, to grow legumes normally about all you would need was phosphate because the legumes would provide the nitrogen and there was generally ample potash in the soil that could be made available if it had the right treatment otherwise.

So the argument went along. The fertilizer companies, particularly the Federal Chemical Company at Louisville were very very adamant that mixed fertilizers should be used. In other words they were very strong for selling something like 2-8-2 which was two percent of nitrogen, eight percent phosphate and two percent potash or a 4-8-4 or a 4-10-6 or something of that kind and they were against the idea of the use of a single element of mineral fertilizer.

I lived in the midst of this battle for a couple of years and read everything that came before me in regard to it. So when I got on to the job at Evansville I was pretty well prepared for the arguments which were current and I knew something about the type of fertilization that seemed to be required on the various types of soil that we had in Vanderburgh County because of my knowledge of the detailed experimental worked had been carried on with the various soil types in Kentucky. Some of these soil types were quite similar to those that we had in Vanderburgh County.

Prof. Roberts had established soil experimental fields all over the state to supplement what they were doing at the college at Lexington because the blue grass soils in the Lexington area were very high in phosphate, were highly fertile if properly handled and were quite different than the so-called mountain country of the east and the pennyroyal country of the western part of the state. So he had established

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these various fields and I had been conversant with the results. This was all very helpful.

In addition to that, in my association with my roommate John Carmody, who was a horticulturalist, I learned a great deal about horticulture. When I found that I was going to take on a job where I may need to have wider knowledge I didn’t hesitate to use the opportunity to learn about a lot of practical things that I had forgotten about or which I had never learned.

The same thing was true in the field of animal diseases with my veterinarian friends and regarding modern poultry production from my friends whom I lived with or associated with, men who were poultry men. The experience as an instructor and as assistant at the experiment station for two years was worthwhile, therefore, from the standpoint of my technical training for county agent work.

Back To Vanderburgh County: Getting Acquainted

DSM: In addition to the early meetings in the county which were arranged largely through the township trustees for the purpose of getting acquainted with the farmers in the various communities and having them get acquainted with the new county agent. I used the opportunity when I was not otherwise occupied to get into my car and drive out through the various areas of the county, keeping my eyes open. These drives were made for the purpose of getting acquainted with people.

If I saw somebody over in the field and they weren’t too busily occupied, if they were stopping for example to rest the horses or if they were having a little tractor trouble, I would pull up to the side of the road and go over to the fence and introduce myself as the county agent and very often in

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those early days they would say "Agent for what?" and I would have to explain that I wasn’t selling automobiles or farm machinery. Then I would explain briefly what the county agent’s job was, the fact that I was the new agent, and made many acquaintances in this way.

I also kept my eyes open to learn more at first hand about the farming operations, the type of practices that were being utilized, the type of equipment that farmers were using, type of crops that were grown, and the methods they were using in the cultivation and harvesting, and various problems of crop handling, as well as the kind of livestock, and how they were equipped to handle livestock, etc., etc,

I found these drives highly valuable and informative and after a while, of course, I got to the place where there were certain stops that I nearly always made because there were key people in nearly every township or community as I began to get acquainted who were interested in my work. A stop for a short visit with them very often led to another lead about something that maybe should be done, or I would pick up information about the reaction of various people in the community toward the meetings or toward the demonstrations that were being carried on, and various subjects that would come up that were helpful to me.

I found that it was highly desirable that I store up all the detailed information that I could, not only about the farming and farming practices and what I could see for myself or what I could learn from them, but about the people and their attitudes. I remember one day, for example, driving along the road and seeing a chap by the name of Jake Walker cultivating corn with a disk cultivator. He was doing what they called barring out in those days. I was sure he was cutting off many corn roots so I climbed over the fence and followed him, when he wasn’t looking, for one row through and when I ended up at the end of the row I had two hands full of corn roots. He turned around and saw me and said "Where did you get those?" and I said "You cut them off on the way through." It was this kind of thing that

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helped me to bring to the attention of farmers certain lessons that I was trying to bring to them.

As a matter of fact, we suggested shallow cultivation not too close to the corn plant in those days. They had been in the habit of cutting in as close as they could and cutting off most of the young roots. I remember one old gentleman when we talked about this particular problem, Mr. Mitchen, who said he thought it was a good thing for corn roots to be pulled and jerked around like that; that it was good for them and I said "What do you think would happen if somebody went into your entrails and pulled them around and jerked them around like you re talking about with the corn roots?" and everybody laughed. They got the point very quickly.

Making An Impression By Demonstrating Know How

HP: Would it be possible for a man to become a county agent who had not had the kind of farm experience you had?

DSM: Well, a county agent had to be well trained. If he had not lived or was not reared on a farm, he had to have some kind of farm experience. I have known a few city boys who have become county agents but they are always handicapped a bit because there were certain things that didn’t come as natural to them as they did to some of us.

I was asked many times to do certain practical things. For example, if I stopped by some place where they were cultivating corn and trying out a new cultivator somebody would look at me with a grin and say "Why don’t you take it for a round or two." I was always delighted and I would climb onto a cultivator and take the team through the field and show them that I knew how to handle a team and cultivator and it always helped.

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I remember one day out in Armstrong township where Henry Kissel lived, there was a chap by the name of William Hepler who had bought a new Tower cultivator. The Tower cultivator was different than the normal cultivators in that it didn’t have the shovels of the type that most of the cultivators had but it had knives. It just happened that when I was a kid I grew up with a Tower cultivator. Ours was a walking type but I knew how to adjust them, then we got a riding one before I left home so I learned to use it.

I stopped by the house and Mrs. Hepler said "Oh, Will’s back in the back field and they are trying out a new cultivator." Well, I met him about half way back and he was in a bad sweat and a bad humor. I said "What’s the trouble?" He said "Oh, that God damn cultivator. I’m going to toss the damned thing into a fence corner and forget about it." I said "What is it?" He told me. "I said "Is it back there?" He said "David is using it." David was his oldest boy. I said "I’ll go back there and see what David is doing and see what I can do about it." When I got there I found that the cultivator was as completely out of kilter as they could possibly get it.

They had the blades every-which-way and it took me about a full round, stopping every little while to use my wrench making some adjustments until I got it so it would function. When I got back after making a full round and after making probably a dozen stops and making some adjustments here and there, it was doing very well. The soil was a little too wet to cultivate, but nevertheless it did work. So I said "Get on, David, and let’s see you take it. Now don’t you touch it, you just use it this way." So he did and they were just delighted with the fact that somebody knew how to handle it.

I got in touch with the salesman and said "You don’t have any business selling a new piece of equipment into any community like this and then going off without spending some time to see that these people know how to use it."

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It was this kind of thing that added zest to the job because you knew certain things that nobody else in the community knew and you were able to demonstrate them and I got a thrill out of it.

Field Demonstrations And Dealer Cooperation

DSM: In addition to the other activities in the county, we had a number of demonstrations in the use of ground limestone for the correction of soil acidity so as to secure better stands of clover. We also had fertilizer demonstrations using acid phosphate for increased crop yields. After we had received some results in this area I arranged for a meeting with the fertilizer dealers in the county as well as from surrounding counties.

I explained to them that I didn’t believe that most farmers needed a so-called complete fertilizer which means fertilizers which have nitrogen, phosphate, and potash but if they raised clover or other legumes to provide the nitrogen and if their soil condition was such that potash could become available, there was plenty of it in the type of clay soils which existed in most of the county. Consequently the limiting factor was phosphate.

So I explained to these dealers that we were going to recommend the use of what was then generally considered the best phosphate fertilizer because it was readily available. That was twenty percent acid phosphate which meant raw phosphate rock treated with sulfuric acid to make the phosphate more available.

In addition to some of our local friends who had already attended the meeting with the seedmen that we had earlier, a chap by the name of Garrison who was the regional or area representative for the Federal Chemical Company of Louisville, Kentucky,

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came to the meeting. After I had explained what we were proposing to do and why we were doing it and asked their cooperation in handling acid phosphate, Mr. Garrison spoke up and said "Well, Mr. Myer, these people won’t handle acid phosphate. Farmers are accustomed to a complete fertilizer and the dealers will want to handle a complete fertilizer. There is no use talking about it." So I said "All right Mr. Garrison, suppose we leave it to the dealers." So I put it to a vote and of course they wouldn’t vote me down and three or four of them said they would be glad to handle it. Mr. Garrison was very unhappy because of the prospect of diminished profits but we had won.

Among those in attendance was an elderly gentleman by the name of John Schlensker, a good old German from out in the north part of the county, who had never handled much fertilizer but he had been handling one car load a year for a group of farmers in that area for a number of years. So after the meeting was over he ordered a car load of acid phosphate from the Welch Chemical Company of New Albany, Indiana. He got a letter back saying that they couldn’t ship a full car load of acid phosphate. They would have to ship half a car load of 2-8-2 which was two percent nitrogen, eight percent phosphate and two percent potash versus twenty per cent phosphate.

So he brought the letter into my office and said "What will I do about it?" I said "Mr. Schlensker, if I write a letter on plain paper would you sign it?" He said "Yes." So I wrote a letter playing the part of Mr. Schlensker. I said that I was not interested in any 2-8-2 fertilizer. I wanted a car load of acid phosphate and if they couldn’t ship it please let me know immediately because I wanted to order it from another company. This incidentally was the company that he had been dealing with for years. Well, he got his acid phosphate and he came in as tickled as a boy with a new pair of boots after it rolled in.

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Several months later after I had moved into Purdue as Assistant County Agent Leader, I had a meeting up in northern Indiana on the farm of Warren McCray, who was a cattle breeder and later was the Governor of Indiana and of his brother-in-law George Ade the writer. During one of the breaks Ray Ellis, who was the general manager of the fertilizer company in New Albany who had gotten this letter came around and shook hands with me and he said "Dillon, how is your friend John Schlensker?" I said "Well, the last time I saw him he was fine. He’s a nice chap." He looked me straight in the eye and said "You wrote that letter that John Schlensker sent me, didn’t you?" I said "Ray, John Schlensker got his acid phosphate, didn’t he?" He said "Yes, damn it."

Sometime after this incident I was visiting in one of the surrounding counties and came upon a chap who was serving as agent for the New Albany company and we got to talking about their business and I said "Do you sell much mixed fertilizers now-a-days down in the pocket, in the area surrounding Vanderburgh County?" He said "Yes. We sell it every place excepting Vanderburgh County and thanks to you we sell acid phosphate in Vanderburgh County." Which was, of course, what I had hoped to hear.

Other than the activities of the 4-H club members in pig clubs, poultry clubs, and in a few cases calf club members we had very little work in the field of livestock production other than meetings on dairy rations; however we also organized a cow testing association which I have mentioned elsewhere.

This was an association of twenty-six members that hired a tester who came around once a month to test their milk for butter fat, weigh up the volume and then figure what the production of each of the cows was for the month.

Some of the folks who signed up in the cow testing association were amazed and surprised at how good the records of some of their cows were.

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War Gardens And Aphids

DSM: During April of 1917 which was the beginning of my second year as county agent, World War I broke out and with it came war gardens which were recommended generally.

It so happened that during the spring and summer which followed we had the worst infestation of aphids that I have ever known. Most of the war gardeners were growing potatoes and their young potato vines became covered with aphids which are plant lice that suck the juices out of the plant. I had literally, it seemed to me, hundreds of office calls, people coming in or calling up asking how to get rid of aphids.

I learned something out of this experience. At that time there were three different remedies for aphids. One of them was whale oil soap which was made into an emulsion, another one was coal oil emulsion which was mixed with whale oil soap and if you didn’t get it just right you would burn the plants. A third one which had come onto the market fairly recently was a product called Black Leaf Forty. It was made from tobacco. It had very high nicotine content and came in a small bottle. When properly diluted in water it was quite effective.

I began to tell people about the three different remedies. I came to realize after watching their faces and watching them linger a bit that they were frustrated. They left in most cases not knowing what to do. I realized that many of them wouldn’t do anything because they couldn’t make up their minds. So as a result of this experience I began recommending only Black Leaf Forty and there was no problem from that time on because they could go to the drugstore and buy a small bottle with the directions on it.

This taught me a lesson regarding all kinds of remedies of this kind. If there was more than one, from that time on, I picked what I thought was

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the right one, and didn’t even mention the others because I found that people don’t like to make a choice. They like to have somebody make up their mind for them.

Another wartime idea that was widely advertised, that I had many questions about, was growing strawberries in barrels. The process was simply one of filling up the barrel with soil, boring holes about six or eight inches apart all around the barrel and sticking strawberry plants into the holes. This of course appealed to many city gardeners who didn’t have garden patches big enough to grow a garden so I had many many calls asking about how to grow strawberries in a barrel.

Interest In The County Agent’s Politics

DSM: Shortly after I arrived in Evansville I learned that the Democratic party had made a clean sweep the previous fall in the elections and they had cleaned out the courthouse of all Republicans with the exception possibly of the County Superintendent of Schools.

Of course they didn’t know the politics of the new county agent. This was something that was very important to some of the folks who were hangers-on around the courthouse so I was questioned time and again and various approaches were used to learn my politics. They tried to slip up on me by such questions as whether I had joined the torch light parade the night before when one of the parties was having a parade and that sort of thing.

Finally a chap by the name of George Wegel who was a Socialist and a loud mouth Socialist who lived out in Knight township, came into the office one day. He and I had learned to know each other pretty well and we bantered back and forth and kidded each other.

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On this particular day he came into the office and went over my office with a fine tooth comb and asked me what everything in the office cost including the typewriter, the desk, everything that we had that we had purchased. He stayed quite a long time.

Not too long after he left I went across to the clerk's office to buy some stamps which I usually did when I needed stamps. A beautiful young girl, Miss Schindler, who usually waited on me, got my stamps for me and then she looked up at me with her beautiful smile and said "Mr. Myer, the people around here are wondering if you are a Socialist?" I said "What do you think?" She said "I don’t know." I said "Well let’s leave it that way. You just tell them you don’t know."

So far as I know they never did find out what my politics was at that time because I didn’t tell them and I didn’t even register for the primary. I voted in the general elections but not in the primaries.

Newspaper Experience And Relations

DSM: As I have mentioned previous to the establishment of the office of the county agent the county was required to raise a minimum of $500 for the purchase of office supplies, equipment, etc. by voluntary subscription. The Evansville Courier, which was the major newspaper in the county and in "the Pocket" which included about six counties, had helped to raise this money and had probably put up at least half the money in order to assure that the $500 was available. Sometime after I had arrived on the scene I had been introduced to the editor but I had done very little else about keeping any contact with the paper.

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One day Fred Trueblood who was the managing editor called me up and asked me to go to lunch with him, which I did. After we were settled at the table he said "Young man, I would like to remind you that my paper the Evansville Courier helped to raise the money to get you to come here and we expect some cooperation out of you in providing some rural news for the paper." My response was that I wasn’t looking for publicity and I didn’t believe that I needed any. Then he really jumped with both feet. He said "Let me tell you something of the facts of life. You do need it and you need it very badly. Not only that; you are going to get it and you are going to help get it."

He explained to me that they had recently started a farm page once a week which came out on Friday and he wanted the assistance of my office in providing local copy for the farm page, seasonal items, and anything that was of interest because up to that time they had been using practically entirely the "boiler plate" from some source or other. "Furthermore" He said "we would like to have you either call up or drop into the office after your meetings throughout the county and report on the meetings, how many were there, what was discussed, things of interest to the paper, and to the rural community." So I promised that I would be glad to cooperate.

As a result the farm page at times became practically the county agent’s page. I can remember a few times when I had five columns right across the top of the farm page. It happened to be at times when seasonal items were important and the paper didn’t hesitate to use them.

Furthermore, I found it most interesting to stop by the Courier office after night meetings in particular when the paper had been pretty well put to bed and was about ready to go to press. The city editor would assign somebody to take my story which usually didn’t take very long, and then I would light my pipe and sit down among the reporters who were hashing over the day’s news.

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I became a member of the staff in a sense. This was a great experience. It was an experience that I never had had. I knew nothing about the inside workings of a newspaper up until this time and needless to say I got a great deal of good support out of the paper. When somebody would propose that we have a meeting out in their community and I would say "Do you want to send out notices?" They would say "Oh just put it in the Courier. Everybody reads the Courier.“ And they did. That’s the way we advertised our meetings. So Fred Trueblood’s visit with me proved to be well worthwhile.

Early Meetings

DSM: Before leaving the subject of Vanderburgh County I want to pay tribute to a gentleman who was a real help and a real sponsor of my program. I think I mentioned earlier that the County Board of Education was the board that had to approve the recommendations of Purdue University as to who came in as county agent. The County Superintendent of Schools, of course, was the executive officer of that board and supervised the schools throughout the county. At that time there was a very wonderful gentleman by the name of Floyd Ragland who was county superintendent. He went with me to the various stores to introduce me and to help me select my office equipment in the beginning.

Furthermore he went with me on several occasions to meetings in the country during the first two or three months and then on the way home in the kindest and nicest manner possible he gave me the kind of criticism that I needed very badly as to how I should talk to farmers. He found that I hadn’t realized that having taught two years in the College of Agriculture at the University of Kentucky that instead of talking about ground limestone or just plain burned lime, I was talking about calcium carbonate,

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calcium oxide, and using other chemical terms which were quite well known by students who had taken chemistry but were not well known by farmers. This is typical of the type of thing that he pointed out to me and I’m sure that any success that I may have had in the county in my speeches was largely due to Floyd Ragland and his very kindly approach in helping me to orient myself to a new situation.

Since I was the first County Agricultural Agent in Vanderburgh County and since I was a young man of only twenty-four years of age at the time I started my work there, it became very important to use all of the techniques available to me to become acquainted and to find ways and means to gain support and respect for the services which we had to render. Much of our time, of course, was devoted to meetings of various types including community meetings, farm tours, demonstration meetings to show the results of crop treatment or to show how to mix insecticides or for some other reason.

Of course, the use of the press which has already been mentioned became a highly valuable medium, and farm visits to individuals in the community who became standbys as advisors, and as demonstrators and services provided through office calls.

Learning The Importance Of Remembering Faces And Names

DSM: The first office caller that I had was a chap by the name of Homer Pierce who lived right out in the edge of the county almost into the adjoining county on a rather poorly drained heavy clay farm. He came in to ask me how to get rid of cattle lice, which as far as I knew did not exist up to this time. I had to admit to him that I didn’t know but that I would find out and asked him the next time he was in town to drop in and I would have the answer for him. So

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I wrote to Dr. Craig who was the head of the veterinary department at Purdue University and got the information back promptly.

Two or three weeks later Mr. Pierce came swinging into the office again. The minute he stepped through the door I said "Good morning, Mr. Pierce." I thought the man was going to faint, he was so taken aback that I remembered him. He wasn’t used to being remembered it seems. He couldn’t quite get over the idea that this was a wonderful thing. This response on his part alerted me to the fact that it was highly important that I remember names, remember people, and that I learn to call them by name.

As a result, the young crippled lad who came to work for me as a stenographer and I teamed up to work out a system that would be helpful in remembering people. I recorded every farm visit that I made, why I stopped there and what we talked about put it on a file card and filed it away alphabetically. I did the same thing if any thing of importance happened in the way of requests for information at meetings, and we did the same thing for office callers.

This young man who served as secretary had worked over most of the county before he was crippled, as a member of a threshing crew, so he knew a lot of people that I didn’t know. So if he sensed that I didn’t know somebody’s name he found ways and means to slip me a bit of paper having the name of the person on it so that I could begin calling him by name. The response was usually very very good. My secretary used to come by a long table where I usually sat down across from the caller and he would act as though he was using the table to help him along to the files. He would put his hand down and leave the slip of paper where the person across the table would not notice, because he was busily occupied in asking questions.

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Get Acquainted Meetings

DSM: The first few weeks we were there we determined to have a meeting in every community if possible. The township trustees who were the members of the Board of Education which had approved my appointment, generally arranged these meetings and the meetings were for the purpose of letting them see me, the new county agent, to tell them something about what we hoped to do in the way of providing service to the farmers of the county, and for me to have the opportunity to get acquainted with my constituency. After a short talk outlining the duties and the responsibilities of the county agent and what we had hoped to do for them, we always had a question and answer period.

One of the questions that invariably came up during that first spring was the question as to whether or not it was better to plant potatoes in the light of the moon or the dark of the moon. I usually would tell them that my Mother would know the answer to that for sure but I was not quite sure and I was sure their own experience maybe it was as good as mine.

Finally after four or five of such meetings at one in a very German community the chairman of the meeting was a chap by the name of Mr. Kirchof . Mr. Kirchof when that question was asked leaned over to me and said "Ask for a show of hands of how many plant in the dark of the moon and how many plant in the light of the moon." I did just that and they were split almost fifty-fifty. He looked at me and winked and I used that technique time and time again afterwards because they all thought they were right and it answered the question and there was no comeback because everybody was willing to argue among themselves which was right.

When we used to kid my Mother about her belief that the moon affected crops she said "Well, the moon affects the tides, why shouldn’t it affect the growing of plants." And we just closed up because we just didn’t know. I don’t know or didn’t at that time; whether they have learned anything about it in the meantime I am not sure.

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We had one very interesting community which was just over the edge into Posey County, the adjourning county. The community lapped over into Vanderburgh County. The name of the community was St. Phillips, a Catholic parish, a very rural one. Shortly before I arrived on the scene they started having meetings. The county agent from Posey County attended all of their meetings and he informed me that we were to take turn about. They met once a month in the parish house and they had a priest by the name of Father Verse. About two hundred people turned out at every meeting and they practically hung on to every word that was said. I don’t think I have ever seen a hungrier group of people for information then these people were.

They had been isolated for years and after one of the meetings that I attended Father Verse invited me over to his manse to chat a bit. And I said "Father how do you explain getting all of these people out and the interest that you have developed here?" He said "Well, when I came here I found that the priest who had proceeded me had been here for forty years. He never encouraged meetings of any kind, excepting meetings of the church and as a matter of fact he discouraged it and I realized that it was a very backward community and that they needed all the help they could get in modern agricultural practices. I came from up near Notre Dame. I was associated with a community where I learned a good deal about agricultural practices so when I first came here I invited the county agent from Mount Vernon to come over and talk with us. The first meeting was on poultry. We decided to have meetings once a month and you can see the results."

In all my experience I don’t think I have ever had a more appreciative or a more satisfactory audience. They would literally keep you on the floor for hours if you would allow them to, asking questions. They were just that hungry for information.

Father Verse was quite an unusual man and this was a very very interesting experience for me.

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The county agent’s office was on the main floor of the courthouse and as a consequence it came to be the hang out for all the newspapermen who covered the courthouse beat. Occasionally we had rather a rough group because they would come over to get over their hangovers in my office.

A chap who covered my particular office was named Bullock. They decided to put out a special edition of the Evansville Courier and he asked me to write a story about the agriculture of Vanderburgh County. I said "All right, "Bull", I will do so if you won't change it or write a lead on it." He said, "All right." But when the paper came out the lead that he had written said "Myer says that all of Vanderburgh County will be within the city of Evansville within fifty years," and of course I got laughed at around the county but nevertheless Bullock was about right because as I drive back through that part of the country nowadays, fifty years later it appears that he was not far wrong.

The Soy Bean Story

DSM: The introduction of soy beans into Vanderburgh County is a very interesting story. As assistant at the Kentucky Agriculture Experiment Station in Lexington and during the time I was there, I taught during the winter and spent all my time on experimental and research work during the summer. The supervision of the variety test for soy beans, as well as the wheat research program, was turned over to me to supervise. So I became quite well acquainted with the soy bean, which was not very widely used nor widely known throughout the United States. The seed that we had included about twenty varieties. They were all imported.

HP: From where?

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DSM: Mostly from China and Japan.

HP: Is that so? I wonder how it all started—I wonder how the United States finally did realize the soy bean’s worth?

DSM: The Bureau of Plant Industry was sending people out all over the world looking for new plants and interesting plants. This was one of the most interesting jobs that they had in the Department of Agriculture.

They started, as a matter of fact, importing new plants before the Department of Agriculture was ever formed. The Patent Office was the agency used if they found something interesting in those early days. So the Bureau of Plant Industry had supplied the seeds for these variety tests.

There was an Agronomist by the name of Morris, who was supervising this program. He visited us two or three times in Kentucky and I went over the program with him. So I got quite well acquainted with the early, the medium, and the late varieties and those that had more seed available.

When I got to Evansville, in Vanderburgh County, Indiana, I found that many of the soils had become so acid that they weren’t producing good crops of clover. They needed a legume in the interim that would help produce nitrogen as well as provide a change in rotation. So I started recommending soy beans.

At that time about the only soy beans that was on the market was a variety called Mammoth Yellow. It was a very late bean and normally in that area it didn’t mature at all. It would get frosted before the seed would mature. It was a good bean if you wanted to plow it under because it grew up very high. That is about all they had, so I started recommending a bean called Hollybrook and two or three others, medium varieties, that would mature in that area.

It didn’t occur to me that the dealers would not have them. I should have known it but I didn’t think

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it through. One day I came by a farm owned by Billy Erskine. Billy was a slow; talking, awfully nice guy and one of my better friends. He said "I ran into a chap the other day that is awfully mad at you." I said "What’s his name?" He said "Owen Monroe," and I said "Where is he?" He said "At the Heldt Seed Company." I said "What’s he mad about?" He said "I went in and asked him if they had some Hollybrook soy beans and he looked at me and said 'Who in God’s name is recommending this variety of bean' and I said 'the County Agent'. He said 'let me show you something', so he took me to the back of the store, up a few steps and showed me a great big bin of Mammoth Yellow beans and he said 'We haven t sold one peck of these beans since this County Agent started recommending other varieties and we’re stuck.' "I said "I guess Id better go in and see him." So the next day I did go in to see him.

I went in and introduced myself to Owen Monroe and He said "Come with me." He just turned on his heel and went back and took me up some steps to show me this bin. He said "See what you’ve done?", and I said "Yes, I do and I’m very regretful and it’s a mistake on my part and we’ll see if we can’t do something about it." He said "What can you do?" I said "Well, I would like to have a meeting of the seed dealers of the county. Would you come?" He said "Yes I'd come but I don’t think anybody else would come." I said "Would you help me by giving me the names of the various seed dealers that you know about?" "Sure", he said. So I got a piece of paper, sat down and listed a group of names.

We sent out a notice calling them to a meeting and told them in the notice that we wanted to talk about the soy bean crop, securing the soy bean seed of the type adapted to that area. About five dealers came; one was a wholesaler and about four others. I apologized for what I had done and said "What Id like to do is to settle on two or three key varieties that we can use in this area; one early, one medium, and Mammoth Yellow if someone wants to turn the crop under. But there won’t be many people who will want to do that, so I think the medium one will be the major one because it will mature here."

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Usually by the time the beans are harvested for seed the leaves have already dropped off but if a farmer is going to turn it under he usually does it while the plant is still green enough that the whole crop becomes humus. However, the bean was increasingly valuable for seed, because it was beginning to be in demand.

I said "I’ll tell you what I’ll do, if you will make a deal with me. I’ll locate seed supplies for you, tell you where you can get them, if you will stock them, and do one other thing. Some of these supplies may be a bit short and you may not be able always to have them in stock and if you don’t, I would like to have you suggest other dealers who might have them. I’ll keep informed about who has the beans and who hasn’t." About three of them agreed. Owen Monroe was one of them. By golly, we put soy beans on the map! It wasn’t more than a year until the Pratt Brothers, who had a seed supply store, were shipping them in by the car load.

HP: Because the soil really needed them, and the farmers realized it?

DSM: The farmers needed a new crop and soy beans were almost entirely free of insect damage and disease. Because it was a new crop in the area.

HP: Was it used exclusively for feed for cattle?

DSM: Well in those days it was generally used for seed.

The beans could be ground and mixed with other feeds for it was high in protein and high in oil.  Actually it was a little too high in oil, and it wasn’t very digestible unless it was ground. The farmers in Vanderburgh County because of the fact that we were sort of out in the forefront, could sell them as seed, you see, to other people who wanted them.

HP: In other counties?

DSM: Yes. It was a good market for seed of these key varieties. The upshot of it was that we put soy

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beans into Vanderburgh County and even down in Union Township where they had never grown anything but corn and timothy; timothy on the hills for the horses, and corn in the bottom lands. They started growing soy beans, because it was a good seed crop and they began to have a good market for it.

HP: What made the soil acid that it required the rotation?

DSM: The gradual wearing out of humus and the lack of replacement of humus seems to develop a kind of toxic acid condition under those conditions and the soil gets tough and hard-packed and the beneficial bacteria don’t function well.

HP: And the soy beans did correct that?

DSM: Well, soy beans would grow in that kind of soil where clover wouldn’t.

HP: Would it also do anything to rehabilitate the soil?

DSM: Well sure, if they turned them under for humus replacement it helped a great deal to rehabilitate the soil.

The upshot of it was that two or three years after I left there, I went back to Purdue and was talking to Keller Beeson, who was at that time the extension Agronomist. Keller had just been down into the "Pocket" of which Vanderburgh County is a part, and he said "I think you ought to be very proud of the fact that southern Indiana and the "Pocket" today is one of the outstanding soy bean production regions in the United States." Of course, at that time they were beginning to spread out into the Illinois blacklands and other areas, I said "Yes, I am proud of that fact." So this was the major new crop that we introduced.

Of course, at the same time we were doing this, we were recommending the use of ground limestone to get the soil back into shape where they could grow clover; particularly for the dairymen and others who needed hay and fodder of that type for their cattle.

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HP: The limestone, what does it do? Sweetens?

DSM: Limestone sweetens the soil. It developed an alkaline reaction which helps to sweeten the soil so that the bacteria can develop so that clover and other legumes can store nitrogen and do the job that they are supposed to do.

HP: Is that part of the country still growing essentially what it was growing fifty years ago?

DSM: I haven't been back to Vanderburgh County to check on their crop production during the last twenty-five years or more. I’m pretty sure that they are still growing corn down in the bottom lands and probably soy beans. Not quite the way they used to do but I’m certain they are still producing corn and beans for the market.

Part of Vanderburgh County that used to be good farming land is now under houses. The city of Evansville has spread out and is taking up a lot of territory. The suburban area has developed out into the county, yet there still is quite a lot of farmland. They are undoubtedly growing hybrid corn nowadays on the farms still in operation in Vanderburgh County.

Hybrid Corn

HP: When was hybrid corn introduced?

DSM: Hybrid corn actually got under way along in the 1920’s but there weren’t enough seed producers producing hybrid corn. It wasn’t widely used until after 1950.

HP: What are the advantages of hybrid corn?

DSM: Hybrid corn is uniform. You can look at a field of hybrid corn and know that it is hybrid because it looks like you could put a level on the top of it

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when it is growing. When it tassels out, it is just as level as it can be.

HP: Every seed grows at the same rate of speed? Is that it?

DSM: That’s right. Each seed has the same genes, exactly. Also, it is possible to select, from their pure line, types that have a stiff stalk and do not fall over in wind storms. The big factor, in addition to that, is that it is higher producing. Hybrids for some reason or other—true in livestock generally speaking as well as in crops of corn—are more productive then the mixed genes of a normal crop that is selected out of a field. Do you know how hybrid corn is produced? Let me tell you briefly about it for it will give you a better understanding.

In order to produce hybrid corn specialists take a certain type seed corn; they will grow it for several years, maybe for four or five years; self-pollinate it and prevent any cross pollination at all, until they get what they call a pure line. Very often a pure line in a corn crop, when they actually get a pure line, may not be taller than two or three feet. It’s a little bit of a stunted plant with stunted ears. Then they pick that particular pure line and cross it with another pure line. They don’t allow cross pollination excepting with the two pure lines which produces a hybrid. The resulting hybrid seed produces a vigorous and beautiful crop.

HP: Maybe one is selected for rigid stem.

DSM: That’s right. They try various combinations and then they pick the ones that are best adapted to the area.

The way they cross pollinate these pure lines, after they get to the place where they want to cross them and develop a hybrid seed, is that they have boys go through and detassel one of them. The tassel carries the pollen, the seed, the male part of it. They detassel one type maybe every two or three rows where they planted that type of seed, and leave the other type to supply the pollen so that the whole field will be pollinated by exactly the same pollen, and you’ve got your hybrid.

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They detassel one pure line so it won t pollinate its own and the other type will provide the pollen. Then that seed is the hybrid seed and may be planted just one year. It is necessary to buy new seed again the next year.

HP: Why?

DSM: Because it begins to split up and divide up into various types.

HP: It goes back to its origins.

DSM: That’s right. It’s a throw back. You can grow corn from it but you aren’t sure you re going to get the kind of uniformity that you are looking for from a hybrid.

HP: You can’t use it as seed corn.

DSM: That’s right. You don’t use it. You can but you don’t.

HP: That’s interesting. I’m trying to apply it to human beings. Whether the birth rate of a very inbred community finally goes down, as corn; doesn’t produce as much. I don’t know.

DSM: We haven t carried this question of pure lines and hybrids in humans very far. We do know that there has been an understanding on the part of people throughout the years, that people who are closely related should not marry because very often they produce cripples or various kinds of deformity. The reason for this is, for anybody who knows anything about genetics, quite obvious. If there are any weaknesses at all, in the genes of the strain, you intensify them and it begins to pop out with all kinds of problems. Now if you have all strengths and no weaknesses then you get a strong line.

One of the ways they have improved certain breeds of livestock throughout the years, is by what they call inbreeding. Breeding a cow to her son, for example, if he is a good bull; and the same

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way with hogs, and other animals . And yet you can carry that to the place where you begin to get a reduction in vigor. In human beings, I’m sure, that if you have had an incestuous situation inbreeding, you would be likely to get reduction in virility and in stamina as in livestock.

Wintertime Meeting In Scott Township

DSM: We had a very interesting wintertime program that was worked out in Scott Township. This was one of my best communities. We started having meetings there about once a month, and when it came the fall of the year somebody suggested that we schedule meetings on one particular day a month.

We would meet about nine o'clock in the morning and have lunch at the church. The ladies would bring enough to lay out a wonderful lunch. And then we carried on till about four o clock until it was time to go home to do the milking and other chores.

HP: Did the wives take part in these meetings?

DSM: Yes. The wives also took part in these meetings because they wanted to come and they wanted somebody to meet with them who knew something about Home Economics. So among the various people that I learned about in Evansville, who were willing to spend some time on it, I found four or five people who were willing to help and who were well trained enough to do it and I would take them out there with me.

HP: You mean in Home EC?

DSM: In Home Economics, or somebody who had developed certain interests in such things as sewing or table setting and in all kinds of things that the ladies

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were interested in. Some were people who were teaching Home Economics in the Evansville schools.

HP: But there was no program for the women’s phase of farming at that time.

DSM: There was no Home Demonstration Agent at that time but shortly after I left the county they got a Home Demonstration Agent.

There was some Girl’s Club work, 4-H Club work including canning and sewing clubs. These for the most part were supervised by school teachers who were busy during the winter teaching school but had some time during the summer. We found enough money to pay them a small stipend for their expenses, and their time in handling the supervision of clubs.

Going back to Scott Township. What we did out there with the men and with the women was quite interesting to me. They were looking to me, of course, to provide the program and I said "No. I’m not going to do that. You people are going to participate in this program" and I said "What kind of subjects do you want to talk about?" Somebody said "Well, we would like to know something about seed corn and seed corn selection."

I said "All right. The first meeting then, I want each of you to bring five or ten ears, I don’t care whether it is five ears or ten ears, of the kind of seed corn you would select to plant. Then I will expect you to defend your position to the other people." Well they came and they started to talk about seed corn and of course after a while if they asked my opinion about this, I would take out a set of ears that I thought was the type that was adapted to that area and explained the reasons for my choice. But they went on from there and they talked about all kinds of corn problems; planting, time of planting; cultivation; insect and disease control; and all that sort of thing. And we would spend the whole day. It was amazing.

Toward spring, I remember, one of the young Dutchmen of the group, Chris Volkman, a good farmer, said "Let s talk about potatoes the next time." This was along about February. I said "All right. Each of

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you bring a half dozen or a dozen potatoes to the next meeting." They didn’t know what I was going to do when they brought them. But when they got settled I said "Chris, how do you cut potatoes for planting?" They cut potatoes by dividing them into pieces having an eye in each piece, at least one eye. Chris dug for his knife and he started in to cut potatoes and he didn’t get through with the first potato before they all began to dig for their knives. And they had the darndest argument about how to cut potatoes. I just sat back, of course, and listened and watched.

HP: The fact that you don’t just use the eye is the other part that you cut for the potato is that for nutriment?

DSM: That’s right.

The part of the potato other than the eye provides nutriment until the plant gets rooted and established. This is what supplies nutriment to the young plant and if you dig up the old potatoes you will find nothing much left but the peeling or the husk. It has all been utilized and dried up, rotted out because the young plant has taken the moisture along with the nutriments out of it.

Well, this was the start. Of course I kept leading them on. "What time do you plant potatoes, Chris?" Then they would argue about the time to plant and again control of potato bugs, control of diseases.

HP: Would they come to a consensus?

DSM: Yes. They were usually able to agree. Once in a while you would find something, such as their method of cutting potatoes, which may be somewhat different, but of course they wouldn’t change. But at least they had a good time arguing about it.

So we went on. We had a whole meeting on potatoes, I learned as much about potatoes as they did, because I didn’t know too much. I had planted potatoes and I had grown potatoes as a kid. That’s the way we made our first real money, my brother and I as I have told you. But the meeting was fun.

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At one of these meetings they wanted to talk about dairy rations and how to balance rations. I wasn’t very good on this. It had been a long time since I figured balanced rations.

HP: What did you do when you needed some help? Did you go to Lafayette?

DSM: Of course I had reference books for this kind of thing. And I boned up and I thought I could do it but I got stuck. Well, there was one young chap in the bunch, John Whitehead, who had been to Purdue for a short course and he knew all there was to know about balancing a ration by the method that I was trying to use. So he started making suggestions and I said "John, come take this piece of chalk and you go ahead with this." He went ahead with it and I sat back and just grinned like a Cheshire cat and they looked at me and said "Is he doing it all right?", and I said "He’s doing fine. He’s doing just as well as I could do it." I didn’t have to disclose my ignorance. But they had a wonderful day talking about dairy production, dairy feeding, and the kinds of feeds that were available.

HP: These meetings would go on just in wintertime?

DSM: Just in wintertime.

Summer Time Meetings

DSM: They had meetings usually in the summertime too but they usually were evening meetings.

I remember one meeting we had right in the midst of threshing time. Somebody from Purdue, I think Fred Shanklin who was one of the club supervisors at Purdue, recommended that I get a chap by the name of Doc Frier to come down and show a set of slides. He said "He has a wonderful set of slides that will interest these people."

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So I scheduled him for right in the middle of threshing and they said "We’ll be threshing and we’re going to be busy and I don’t know whether we can get there or not." I said, "All right, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll come out and help you thresh that day if you will come to the meeting." They said "All right." Of course they had a gleam in their eye.

So I put on my coveralls, went out, took a team and a wagon and threshed for four or five hours. They tried to cover me up and used every trick possible on me and got the biggest bang out of it. I had done this sort of thing at home and I knew how to do it and I could load a load of wheat as well as any of them. So I worked like Hell all afternoon.

HP: Then went back and held the meeting?

DSM: That’s right. Then we got cleaned up and went to the meeting and most of them went to sleep! This was the most god-awful, boring session that I had ever sat in on. I was ashamed of it afterwards. But the technique that we used in getting that meeting was one of the things that interested me. It interested them. They enjoyed it even though they all got sleepy before the meeting was over.

HP: I’ll bet. They had probably gotten up at dawn.

DSM: Sure.

A Return Visit After Twenty Years

DSM: It was in that community that they held a banquet celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of extension work and the first anniversary of the organization of the first Soil Conservation District in Indiana. They invited me back as the main speaker, and we held the banquet in the same community house at the church.

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Bluegrass Church, they called it, and people at that time came from all over the county. I had boned up a week or two ahead of time and listed all these people down the various roads and I only missed two of them as they came up to say hello. I'd look over somebody’s shoulder and recall the names as they approached. This was a lot of fun.

HP: How can you do this? People really change so much in twenty-five years. I can’t imagine how you could

DSM: Well, it had been about twenty years since I had seen any of them, but it was no problem with me once I got the names listed. Of course, I knew most of these people so well because they were old buddies or they wouldn’t be coming to this banquet. Some of the younger ones did look older and some of the oldsters also looked older, of course. But they would come up with a boyish grin on and they all looked a little younger then they actually were.

Women On The Farm

DSM: There were some women farmers in those days. The chap who was one of the main lawyers in Evansville, who had been born and brought up on a farm out in the northern part of the county, had some sisters who lived on the farm. He lived in town and went out there occasionally but his sisters ran the farm. They probably were my best customers when it came to questions.

They were interested in asking questions about anything that came to their mind that they were not sure about. I think they were a pair of "old maids," as I remember it. One of them was a teacher and she was quite interested in lots of things. This is the only farm that I can think of that was operated entirely by women.

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But I learned one thing, among many other things, while I was there. I came to this conclusion: that the boss in farm families, and I’m sure it is true in other families, just about fifty percent of the time was the woman.

HP: In making decisions on how money was to be spent?

DSM: In making all kinds of decisions that dealt particularly with the budget the women often made the decision. I learned this when I was trying to organize a Dairy Herd Improvement Association. In those days it was called Cow Testing Association. I thought they needed one, so I went out to sign up people. It required twenty-six members because there were twenty-six working days in the month. They hired a cow tester to test their milk for butter fat and to keep records of the production one day a month. It cost a bit of money.

HP: To test their milk for butter fat, or what?

DSM: Butter fat and production generally. It was a method of weeding out the herd to determine which were the cows that would produce the most and that were the better breeding stock.

I learned that one of the men in the area had a wonderful herd. It wasn’t a pure bred herd but was an excellent grade herd. His brother and others were quite anxious to get him in, but I couldn’t convince his wife. But he finally did come in and he was in the top list in the state of Indiana, with two or three high-producing cows, time and time again. Of course they were delighted later. She was the one who was holding the purse strings, and holding out.

HP: What was her resistance? Do you know?

DSM: She was careful about the budget and I just couldn’t sell her on the idea that this was an important thing to their business. We finally did, but it took a long long time. Well, I got to thinking about it. Thinking about the people I was dealing with and I came to the realization that on many, many things the lady of the house, if she was a strong character, very often was the boss of the house.

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It was true in my family. My Dad was a strong-minded chap and he did things that he wanted to do, but when it came to the business end of things on the farm Mother was in some respects a better business manager than Dad was. He always consulted her. Dad was away so much that she very often was running things.

HP: Did this include the decision as to what crops would be put in?

DSM: Not necessarily that. If new crops were planned or if they are going to change the pattern Mother would be consulted. Just like signing up for a Herd Improvement Association: it was something new and different and they were going to gamble a bit, and the women helped to make the decision.

HP: What sort of questions or information, do you recall, that these two women who ran the farm wanted from you?

DSM: The women farmers mentioned earlier asked questions about time of planting; the kinds of crops they should be growing; and if they were dealing with a new crop with which they hadn’t had experience, they were interested in checking at every stage about how to seed, the time of planting, the time of harvesting, and marketing; almost every phase of the crop program.

HP: Did they come in to see you or consult you by the telephone?

DSM: They would usually telephone and ask me if I was out that way to stop by, and I made more farm visits with them, I think, than I had office visits. Their brother came in occasionally to bring a question because he had been out there and said the girls wanted to know so and so. So the next time I was out that way I’d stop by.

HP: Sometimes I think women have reluctance to go to the courthouse. All those hangers-on around there and that sort of thing. They might not have wanted to come to the office in the courthouse.

DSM: I’m sure that these women did chores such as milking and taking care of chickens and gardening and that

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type of chores close around the house, but I don’t think they drove tractors, or handled the teams in the field. I think that was done by somebody else.

There were women on farms young and old who went out into the fields and helped and in those days they wore the same kind of dresses they would wear around the house when they helped in the fields excepting one young lady I knew who wore jeans and was as good as any man I ever saw about a dairy. Agnes Hoeing was a dairy club girl and she practically handled the milking, the handling of cattle and all of the farm work while her father went to meetings and did a lot of things that he wanted to do.

I had a very interesting experience with her. We ran a special car to Purdue to their short course and had people from three counties.

HP: You mean a railroad car?

DSM: Yes. We chartered a sleeper and took a bunch of club kids. The county agent from Warwick County brought some older farmers and their sons, the same in Posey County so we made up a full car load. The only girl in the Pullman was this young lady that I mentioned above. These boys were not worrying too much about what they said and they horsed around after they got into the berths. We had a terrible time keeping them calmed down and remembering that there was a girl on the car. It worried some of the other agents more than it did me. I’m sure that Agnes had heard enough of this sort of thing so that I don’t think it bothered her. She came out bright and pert the next morning.

HP: Do you happen to know whether she married a farmer?

DSM: No. I don’t know what became of her. She was a husky young German girl and she probably married a farmer but I don’t know.

I don’t actually remember any women In Vanderburgh County who were farmers in the sense of doing their own farm work. I have seen this happen in some other places but I never saw it down there.

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Four H Club Work

HP: I would like to know about the 4H work; how new it was when you were doing it; whether you had responsibility for that along with other things, and all about it.

DSM: Four H Club work was one of my most rewarding projects. It was completely new to Vanderburgh County. They had none before I came there. They had very little Four H Club work in any of the counties until after they got a county agent. Four H Club work was one of the earlier types of extension work.

There were men in two or three different states who claimed that they started Four H Club work. One was a extension director by the name of Graham in Ohio. He was teaching in Springfield, Ohio, and had started home projects of the type that were later included in Four H work. A chap by the name of Benson out in Ames, Iowa, started corn clubs, and then George Farrel in Massachusetts claimed to be the pioneer. All of these happened to come along about the same time, about 1905 to 1908.

The Smith-Lever Act was passed in 1914. They had county agents before that but they were financed partly by Sears Roebuck or some other big institution and the local county. After the Smith-Lever Act was passed federal appropriations were available to the states based upon the rural population. These federal funds had to be matched by state appropriations and county funds. The counties usually provided office expenses but seldom put up money for salaries; although some of them did. It was only after the Smith-Lever Act was passed that Four H Club work began to spread out across the United States.

HP: How did you tackle it? It’s certainly a different phase because of working with youngsters.

DSM: There was a club department in the extension service with three or four specialists.

HP: You mean at Purdue.

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DSM: At Purdue. They were specialists in this field. I talked with them before I went onto the job. Then, as I remember it, Fred Shanklin who was one of the members of the staff, came down and spent several days with me going over the possibilities and meeting with some people who were prospective leaders.

HP: Did you work through the schools?

DSM: Yes, in part. We began to write up the possibilities in the papers. I had some individual club members that I supervised personally scattered here and there over the county who weren’t really in clubs at all. They were doing home projects which I supervised. We had some clubs which were supervised by one of the teachers in the school in that area.

In Perry Township, for example, we had a chap by the name of Ed Grossman who had a number of club youngsters in three or four different types of projects—youngsters who had poultry projects and members who had pigs as their home project, and we even had some girls in a canning club. We usually got some help from one of the county girls in helping in the meetings.

HP: How did you get kids interested in this?

DSM: We aroused interest through the schools, through the parents and through the teachers. I would go out and talk with them in the schools.

HP: Was it put to them as a source of possible spending money or what would motivate them to raise chickens or a pig?

DSM: Well, I don’t remember that we used the profit motive much. We presented it as an interesting program in which they had an opportunity to learn something and to have a project of their own, with some prospect of getting some income out of it although that wasn’t true with the sewing and canning clubs for the girls. Mothers encouraged them to do this sort of thing because they were interested in having the youngsters learn.

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With the boys the prospect of having pigs and the opportunity of at least winning prizes and to have poultry to sell or to have a dairy calf that grew up into a cow that they would own was important. This work was interesting. I had some boys in pig club projects and three or four who had a corn project. They had an acre or more of corn of their own that they handled, supervised, planted and carried all the way through including harvesting.

HP: Which phase of your county agent work did you find most interesting?

DSM: I think as time went on I had the most pleasure out of the club work. It was fun watching these youngsters come along and develop. I remember one case, the chap by the name of Homer Pierce who was my first office caller lived way out in the north end of the county and he had a boy by the name of Elmer. Elmer joined a pig club and I visited him regularly. He had three pigs as his project.

HP: What would you visit him for?

DSM: Oh, I visited him to see how he was getting along, whether he was having any problems in the way of parasites or other things that ought to be taken care of such as lice; whether or not he was maintaining a good ration; whether the pigs were growing well and to give him encouragement, and a pat on the back. This kid came along very nicely, and I remember quite clearly after he had gone through a year and had sold his pigs I dropped by there to see his father, and he disappeared when we were out in the barnyard for just a very short time and the first thing I knew; I heard a bicycle bell ring and I looked around and here came Elmer on a bicycle. He had bought it with his pig club money. You never saw a kid prouder of anything in his life than he was of that bicycle. It was his own, he had spent his own money for it and he was just as proud as punch.

HP: How old was that boy?

DSM: I think he was about eleven or twelve years old.

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HP: They were very young kids.

DSM: Yes. Most of the club members were young. Two or three were in their teens, fourteen or fifteen. Most of them were anywhere from eight years to twelve years of age.

Interesting Adult Demonstrations

DSM: I got a great deal of satisfaction out of seeing the results of the demonstration programs we had with such things as soy beans, limestone, fertilizers and others. We had demonstrations here and there with people who would leave strips not limed, and we would call meetings and show the neighbors what was happening.

I got a great deal of satisfaction also out of the hog cholera control program that we put into effect that I will discuss later.

We had one demonstration that turned out to be the sort of thing that you look back on with great pleasure. One day a chap by the name of Haas, a German, who was a school teacher out in German township—I think there was only one or two families with English names in the whole township—came in wearing a derby hat that had turned green, and the rest of his get up was of the same vintage. He said "I’ve got a brother-in-law who wants to grow alfalfa. I wish you would come by and see him. He lives just above me." I said "What kind of land does he have?" He said "Well, I don’t think it’s too good but I wish you would go out and talk to him." So we talked awhile and I said "All right, I’ll stop by and see him."

This brother-in-law s name was Cornelius Roeder. He was a widower and he had eight youngsters; some of the girls were teenage but most of them were younger. I stopped by to see him and he took me over and showed me a little five acre patch that was on a hillside,

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not too steep, but there it was. Clay soil that needed about everything. I looked it all over and I said "Well, I think I can get alfalfa for you if you will do everything I tell you to do." He said "I will." So I said "Do you have any stable manure?" "Yes" He said "I have some." I said "I want a good coating of stable manure, most of it to go on before you plow and then a top dressing after you plow before you seed. I want you to inoculate the seed before you plant because there hasn’t been any alfalfa in here before but I’ll see that you get the inoculations. That’s no problem."

HP: I don’t understand inoculation.

DSM: Inoculation was necessary to provide the growth of bacteria that would develop the nodules on the roots of the alfalfa plant which is the nitrogen-fixing mechanism of all legumes.

HP: An injection?

DSM: Well what you did was to take this little batch of inoculants that you had made up in the laboratories from alfalfa roots. This is put with water and sprinkled over the seed so that it is covered with enough of it so that when it is planted it had been inoculated with bacteria enough to assure the development of the nitrogen fixing nodules on the roots.

HP: And the plant seed absorbed this? Did you have to puncture each seed?

DSM: No, no. It didn’t have to absorb it. It carries the bacteria into the soil with the seed. It was there when the roots were ready to pick it up. Once alfalfa had been grown and gotten inoculation started in the soil there was no problem.

So I said "I will get that for you but you will need the lime." He said "All right. Where do I get the limestone?" I told him and how much to put on. I said "I want you to put on at least a ton per acre and two tons would be better. Then you should apply two hundred pounds of acid phosphate fertilizer per acre which would mean half a ton for the five acres. It would be better if you put on three hundred or

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four hundred pounds, since you haven t been fertilizing." He said "All right. You tell me how much." I said "Well let’s make it three hundred pounds." So he did. He used his manure, he did exactly what I told him to do. He planted it in August as I recommended.

HP: In August?

DSM: It was well started before fall then it came on well the next spring. I said "One other thing I wish you would put in a little strip or two of sweet clover which will be a good preparatory crop for alfalfa later because the roots are thick and though they are not as deep as alfalfa they are big and they help to open up the soil and prepare the ground for alfalfa."

HP: Put it right along side of the alfalfa?

DSM: Right along side. I got him to leave a strip up at the top without any lime or fertilizer. It was just a drill row through.

HP: Just the soil as it was?

DSM: That’s right. Then the rest of it was planted to alfalfa and then on the lower part of the patch he put in three or four drill widths of sweet clover. Well, he did everything I told him to do and he did it just right. He got a beautiful crop of alfalfa and the sweet clover was all right too. He wasn’t so much interested in that. So the upshot was that I was a great man in his eyes and in the eyes of the kids and from that time on every time I stopped there I was referred to as the "alfalfa man." Nothing else.

Cornelius Roeder had a cave and in it he had five barrels of wine. Every time I stopped after he got the alfalfa established to visit with him he would say before I left "Now we will go and have a drink on the alfalfa." We went through the same process on each visit. I nearly didn’t get home the first time this happened because he would take a common tumbler, the kind used in those days, and say "And now we’ll taste each one and then we’ll drink the one you like best." And he would fill that tumbler up about two-thirds full for a taste and I would have to drink five of

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those "tastes" and then have a full tumbler for a drink. Well, I began to get smart after the first time. The first time I didn’t leave immediately and by the time I got home I was really floating.  So from that time on I never stopped there unless I was on my way home and I didn’t linger after I had had my drinks. I went right on home and parked the car. This went on every time. He would have been mad if I hadn’t joined him in the cave so we did it. Anyhow he was a great demonstrator and of course, people from all over the township knew about Cornelius Roeder and his alfalfa.

He had another brother-in-law by the name of Hahn who wanted to grow soy beans. This was the way things spread. So I helped him get his soy beans, told him about inoculations for soy bean seed because they had never grown them in that area and made other suggestions. He got a wonderful crop of soy beans. We had a meeting on his place to show off his soy beans. He was a proud man.

This was the sort of thing that cracked the community wide open in the kind of areas where these old German folks lived who were so conservative. They loosened up and the new county agent was accepted.

HP: Did you keep notes and did you make reports to anyone on this?

DSM: We had to make monthly reports on our activities including these demonstrations and then we had an annual report every year. I have been tempted to go down to the National Archives here in Washington to see if they have the county agent reports of Vanderburgh County on microfilm after fifty years. It would be interesting to find out.

Armstrong Township And Henry Kissel’s Hog Cholera

DSM: The various communities in Vanderburgh County had their own particular characteristics. Some of them were

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a little bit hard to get opened up, so as to gain the confidence of people in the community. One of those was Armstrong Township. For the most part the first meetings we held in each one of the communities was arranged by the township trustee who was a member of the county board of education, which had had the responsibility of approving my appointment to the job as county agent. The township trustee in Armstrong Township was a chap by the name of Joe Martin. He was rather slow and he told me on a number of occasions that he wasn’t sure that people would come out to a meeting even if he called them. He said "We don’t have any very good meeting place." Finally after some urging he arranged a meeting in an old warehouse which was right close to the railroad that ran through that area and next door to the general store and the saloon which was the most important social center in the community.

We arranged to have this meeting in the early fall. It was chilly. I think it was probably as near a flop as any meeting could be. After the meeting was over one of the men came up to me and He said "You know Mr. Myer if we met over in the saloon we would be a lot warmer. There would be a lot more people who would be interested in coming." I said "All right. The next time we have a meeting we will have it in the saloon."

But before the next meeting came around one of the deputy sheriffs by the name of Jake Slager came by my door one morning, stepped just inside, and he said "Myer, I was out in Armstrong Township yesterday and I ran into Henry Kissel and he said he wanted to see you. He’s having trouble with his hogs. He’s got some sick hogs." I said "Jake you know darn well that Henry Kissel didn’t ask for me. He doesn’t know me from Adam. I’m sure he’s never heard of me." Jake said "Oh yes he has. You go out there; he needs you." So I said "All right, I’ll go out but I don’t think he sent for me." Well, the next day a young chap who occasionally hung around the office and liked to ride out into the country with me and I went out to see Henry Kissel.

When we got there, here was this elderly German, aged around sixty or sixty-five, with the kind of

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paunch you would expect a good old German to have. He was so hard of hearing you had to yell at the top of your voice to get him to understand what you were saying and I was sure that when I introduced myself and told him I had come to look at his hogs that he was skeptical. He kept eyeing me and looking me over when he thought I wasn’t looking. So we went out and looked the hogs over and sure enough they had hog cholera. There wasn’t much question in my mind about it. He had five hogs that were down and about to die. He had three or four more that were a little dopey but hadn’t gone down yet but most of them out of the forty that he had were still on their feet and looking good. They were ready for market.

So after I looked them all over I said "Now what you need is a veterinarian, you don’t need me, and you ought to get either Dr. McConnell, or one of the veterinarians out of Evansville to come out and vaccinate your hogs." I went over this I suppose six or eight times during the hour or hour and a half I was there to be sure that he understood and to drive home the necessity for vaccination. I told him that even though he got a veterinarian he would undoubtedly lose the five hogs that were down and quite ill and that he might lose the three or four others that were not down but ill. Possibly Dr. McConnell might decide to vaccinate the three or four ill ones and he might save them.

After we had gone over and over this we got into the car and started back to town. When we got down the road a little piece this young lad who was riding with me said "Do you think he will do it?" I said "I have no idea but I just hope he will." Well, I didn’t see Henry Kissel again or didn’t hear from him until our second meeting in Armstrong Township.

We had our meeting in the saloon and we were standing there talking. Four or five people had gathered around me and were asking questions and all at once I saw somebody coming through this group knocking people to the right and to the left with his elbows and right up to me.

It was Henry Kissel. He slapped me on the back and almost knocked me on my face and said "Young man,

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after you left I didn’t think a damn thing about what you told me. I didn’t think I was going to do anything about it. That evening I was sitting there reading the paper and I thought by Gott I’ll do it.  I told the boy to hitch up the horse that we were going over to Cynthiana and get Doc McConnell. And we did. We drove to Cynthiana and we saw Dr. McConnell, and he came over the next day. He looked them hogs over and he said the same damn thing you said. He said I would lose some of them and I might lose three or four more but he could save the rest of them if we vaccinated them. So I said 'Go ahead'; so he vaccinated them hogs. Those that you said would live are still alive and well and by Gott, young man, if these other hogs live I never will forget you."

Well, this was the biggest thing that happened in Armstrong Township to gain the confidence of the farmers who were at that meeting and of the community because Henry Kissel was a good old standby. He had a good farm and he was a good farmer in the eyes of those who were his neighbors and he was my man from then on.

I might add that Henry Kissel never had a sick cow, or a sick horse, or a sick animal of any kind after that that he didn’t call me up and ask me to come out. I would say "Henry, there isn’t any use my coming out. You call Doc McConnell. He’s the man who knows about sick animals." "No," he’d say "I want you to come out and look at them. Then if you want me to get Doc McConnell I’ll get him." So I would drive out that way and I would look over his cow or his horse or his animals and say "I think you better call Doc McConnell." He would say "All right." So he would call Doc McConnell without further argument.

I would like to go back just a little bit to give a little background on hog cholera. Hog cholera was quite prevalent in those days. It was the early days in the use of hog cholera serum for prevention of cholera and many of the veterinarians had had no experience in handling it.

The extension staff at Purdue had among its members a Doctor Kigan who was a veterinarian and

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who had developed a technique for dealing with the hog cholera problem. He told me about it before I went onto the job in Evansville. So one of the first things we did was to arrange for him to come down and I called a meeting of the veterinarians in the county and in the surrounding area. Only five or six of them came. Some of them were not interested but one of them was Dr. McConnell, whom I have mentioned, who lived in Cynthiana, Posey County, but did some of his practice over in Vanderburgh County. Another one was one of the good veterinarians in Evansville and these two gentlemen agreed that they would do what we requested.

What we had requested was this: that if they were called out because of hog cholera they would report it to me so I could report it in the papers to warn people to vaccinate their hogs in that community and to take care that they didn’t have it carried over to them from a neighbor. In the meantime I would keep a list of the veterinarians who agreed to do this and when somebody asked me whom to get I would give them the names I had of the veterinarians who were cooperating. Two gentlemen said they would cooperate, and we cleaned up hog cholera all over Vanderburgh County as a result of this technique. Henry Kissel was one of our key demonstrators, of course.

Army Worm And Grasshopper Control

DSM: One of my most interesting experiences had to do with a call for some help on controlling army worms. Union Township was the one bottom land township in the county, where the farmers generally depended entirely on corn as a cash crop because they depended on the flood waters in most of the township to bring the top soil down from up river and deposit it as the flood waters went down. Throughout the years they had been getting pretty good fertilization from the sediment. However, the top soil which was being brought down at

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this stage of the game was getting poorer and poorer because the hills had been washed off above and a good deal of it was clay soil and they needed some changes down there.

Right at the upper end of the township was a wonderful family by the name of Edmonds. John Edmonds was one of these very wonderful farmers who had good literature in his home, had a nice family and it was always a joy to go there and have a meal with them which I did a number of times. One day John came into my office and said "What do you know about Army worms?" I said "Why?" He said "We’ve got them." I said "What are they doing?" He said "Well at the moment they are marching right up through my timothy field and they are taking everything as they go except the stems." I said "I don’t know too much about them but I know where I can get the information for you." I had bulletins on insect control which included Army worms. So I informed him that the best thing to do was to make up a bran and arsenate of lead or paris green mixture which was sprinkled over the area to poison them. I gave him the ingredients which included just normal wheat bran, paris green and lemons which were used only for the odor in order to attract the worms. So he bought all these things and took them home. I said "I’ll be down tomorrow morning and we will spread it together."

The next morning when we got down to the patch where they had been eating up the timothy crop the day before there wasn’t an Army worn in sight. He looked at me and said "Where did they go? They were here yesterday because you could hear them eat." I said "I’m sure you could. I’ll show you where they went." I got a sharp stick and began to dig them out of the ground. The time had arrived, just the wrong time for me, for them to go into the pupa stage or the resting stage, and they do this by going into the ground and burying themselves wherever they happen to be at that moment. They go through the cycle there and they come out as moths which fly away someplace else and lay their eggs during the following season.

When John Edmonds realized what had happened and I explained the life cycle to him and just how

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this all happened he just nearly rolled on the ground. He laughed and he yelled and he hooped and he said "Young man, you have missed the opportunity of a life time. If you had come down yesterday and we had gotten this poison spread, I would have thought that a minor miracle had happened and I would have spread it all over this township. You would have had no more troubles because they would have thought you were a miracle man." So I said "All right. You know the answer now and you can spread the story around if you want to but there will probably be other opportunities."

The worms march in a row and they go right down the line. The line through the timothy field was as clear cut as it could be. They went right across the whole field, the whole big swath of them feeding as they went.

Several months later a new opportunity came to show our skill in insect control in Union Township. I had a telephone call from a chap by the name of Sam Bell who felt that they had no use for a county agent up to this time but he called me up and said "We’re in trouble." I said "What’s the matter?" He said "The grasshoppers are about to eat us up." I said "Did you have any trouble last year?" He said "Yes, they got about half of my crop last year." I said "Why didn’t you let me know?" He said "Well, I didn’t think you knew a damn thing about it." He was that frank about it. I said "All right. I think I can help you." So I went down and we used the same kind of poison bait for grasshoppers as we had planned to use for the Army worms. I told him what to get and I would come down and we would mix it and spread it. Which we did. The grasshoppers were just little fellows. They were just hatching out and they were thousands or probably millions of them. It was rather dry, hot weather. The corn was probably two feet high when we scattered the bait and they ate it. I went down a day or two later and found them piled up in the shady places dead and black as they could be or they were dying and blowing into the cracks in the field where the soil had dried out and had cracked open.

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So I said "Are you happy?" and He said "Yes. I think we have found the answer." I said "Can we get these other fellows around here to come to a meeting?" He said "No I don’t think so. They are cultivating corn. I don’t think they would stop." I said "Well, what about Sunday? What do they do on Sunday?" He said "Yes. They might come on Sunday." I said "All right. Let s call a meeting for about two o clock next Sunday afternoon and we will put out some more bait in the meantime. We’ll see if we can’t demonstrate to them how to control grasshoppers." This was late in the week anyhow. So we got the word out.

On Sunday afternoon I went down with my sailor straw hat and my bow tie. It was too hot to wear a coat. I sat down and backed up against one of his porch posts with my pipe and just waited. There was quite a crew that had gathered around the yard in little groups. We waited and waited and finally some body yelled out, "Well, what about these grasshoppers?" Sam said "Do you want to see them?" They said "Yes." He said "All right. Get into your cars." So we got into the cars and we went back to the fields where we had spread the bait. We couldn’t find any grasshoppers at first because they had all gone into some spots that were full of bind weeds where there was plenty of shade and had died. Some of them piled up there a foot deep. When I led them into that area they were sold. They knew something had happened to those grasshoppers. So we talked about them and what we had done about it.

We went back to Sam’s house and yard. I got out of the car and went over and sat down and lighted my pipe again and waited. Only half of the people had gone down to see what had happened. The rest of them were skeptical and didn’t even go. Finally one of the old boys who didn’t go said "Tell us about those grasshoppers. What did you find down there?" One of the men who did go said "Well, we found them all right. You never saw so many dead grasshoppers in your life."

This other chap said "Tell us what you did about it." So Sam said "Well, this is Mr. Myer the county agent and I think most of you know him. He is the man that gave us the information so Mr. Myer you tell them about it." So I got up and told about what we

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had done and why we had done it and what had happened. As a result a lot of them did what we had recommended. They saved their crops. Some of them who didn’t spread poison bait lost about half of their crop. In any case we had gained the confidence of a large number of people in that township and from there on we had no trouble. We could go in there without being kidded every time we went down as we had been originally.

They used to tell me when I first went down into that community "You better go up into the Hills where they need you. We don’t need you down here." But that was all past and that township, by the way, became one of the major soy bean growing townships and communities in all of Indiana after they got started with soy beans because they realized that they needed some change, and that their soil wasn’t as good as it had been once. They realized their deposit from the floods wasn’t as good as it used to be. So they began to grow soy beans and to market them as well as corn.

The Process Of Change

DSM: I don’t think there is a great deal of difference in human nature generally in their ability to resist change. I think there is something to the fact that the more isolated communities who haven’t had much contact with the outside world are more wary and more careful about taking in strangers. You really have to show them something that they can visualize in order to get them to adopt new practices. But I think this would be true in any area where they hadn’t learned to communicate nor learned to go to the source of information for themselves.

One of the great values, of course, of the Agricultural Extension work was that it was based on the demonstration idea rather than just going out and

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talking to people. There were two types of demonstrations. One of them was the so-called method demonstration. How to do things. How to make bran bait, for example, or how to can fruit, etc., etc. The other one was a demonstration as to how to grow things, how to produce, how to fertilize and so on which was a long time process. You had to wait for results but in time results did show up and then you called a meeting to show them what the farmer had done and why he had done it and what results he had gotten. I don’t think there is a great deal of difference in human nature. It would depend more on their environment and their traditions than any thing else.

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CHAPTER VI

COUNTY AGENT SUPERVISOR AT PURDUE UNIVERSITY AND A MOVE TO OHIO AS A COUNTY AGENT AGAIN

DSM: I stated earlier that I moved to Evansville March 1, 1916 at the behest of Thomas Coleman, County Agent Leader in Indiana whose office was at Purdue. At the time I took on the job I asked him what I should do and he said "Go down there and go to work, you know as much about the job as we do." So I did just that. After one year I received a raise of two hundred dollars a year from $1600 to $1800 which was a very important item in my young life.

During my first month on the job a promoter by the name of John Wallenmyer who served as the sealer of weights and measures in Vanderburgh County promoted or was putting on a farmers institute at Evansville and I was asked to help with the program. As a consequence I contributed two speeches during the institute on agronomic subjects. I was well versed in agronomy at the time because I had just come from Lexington, Kentucky, where I had taught agronomy for two years at the University of Kentucky. It so happened that Professor G. I. Christy who was Director of the Agricultural Extension Service at Purdue was present when I made my speeches and evidently he was impressed because sometime within the year after I had been on the job he called me into Purdue in the spring of 1917 and urged me to accept the position of Field Crop Specialist on the Purdue staff. He put the pressure on rather heavily for a couple of days during my visit to Purdue.

I finally told him before I returned to Evansville, that I would have to talk to some of my local leaders and others who had supported my work there and to think over the matter and I would let him know within a few days. I did talk with some of my supporters in the county and after talking with them

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I came to the realization that I didn’t want to leave county agent work at that time and furthermore they didn’t want me to leave which of course was gratifying.

In the meantime war was imminent. I wrote Professor Christy and turned the job down with the full realization that I might never get another offer from him. But much to my surprise in the fall of 1917, about six months later, I received another offer. This was a job as Assistant County Agent Leader at Purdue working with Thomas Coleman who had hired me in the first instance. I was reluctant to take this new position for two reasons. I was thoroughly enjoying my county agent work and furthermore World War I had been in progress for some time when this offer came and I felt that I should join the Army if I made a change of any kind. I told Professor Christy and Thomas Coleman just this.

Much to my surprise I learned that they without saying anything to me had proceeded to get me re-classified in a 5A classification, which meant that I was in a deferred classification. I was told that emergency agents were to be recruited and placed in all of the counties which did not have agents at that time and that the campaign to produce more food and save food for the war effort was to go into high gear and that my experience and ability was more important to the government in the job proposed than service in the Army. So I reluctantly accepted with the understanding that I could leave for Army service as soon as the emergency extension program for new agents was well established.

In addition to the job of hiring and training and supervising of new emergency county agents, I was put in charge of the increased wheat production campaign to secure a twenty percent increase in planting and production in Indiana. We gained our goal in the wheat production program during the few months of 1917 and 1918 that I was in charge.

During the first ten months of 1918 I found myself in quite an embarrassing situation, because

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I was not in uniform. I was in travel status most of the time. I traveled from one weekend to the next and on three or four different occasions I returned to Purdue, even though my schedule didn’t call for my returning, to tell Director Christy that I wanted to resign and to go into the Army. Each time he explained how much more important my work was than serving in the ranks. Each time he urged that I stay on until the first set of objectives were accomplished. This went on until signing of the armistice of November 11, 1918. Nevertheless, every time I saw a troop train full of men in uniform heading east and I was still in civies I felt that I was a bit of a slacker. Much to my surprise however, I was never accosted with such a charge during World War I or since.

I worked at the Assistant County Agent Leader Job from September 1917 to May 1, 1920. During this period, I traveled into and did work in all but six of the ninety-two counties of Indiana which meant that I had worked in eighty-six different counties during this fairly short period of time. I was training and supervising new county agents, meeting with boards of education, and with state war boards, making speeches, securing county appropriations, running the wartime wheat production campaign, and taking care of all the miscellaneous side issues that came up in connection with these responsibilities.

This wide variety of duties and experiences provided the opportunity to learn much about the job of hiring and supervising men, and the art of speech making and of course added to my knowledge of human nature, good, bad and indifferent.

I have already indicated that during most of the war period I traveled from the first of the week to the weekend. I was in the office on Saturday, on occasion, and then started out again Sunday evening or early Monday morning. In those days we were traveling on local trains. We had sleeper service only from Indianapolis to Evansville. The rest of the time you got in late in the evening, got up early to catch maybe a five o clock train to another county seat. I get tired even yet when I think about how

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tired I was at times. Those long hours, lack of sleep with the grinding work during this period was something that was required and something that we didn’t think too much about at that time.

We had of course a variety of type of people doing emergency work. Some of them were older agents who had not done too well earlier were rehired. I remember one case where one of the other supervisors visited a chap of this type and when he got back to the office our supervisor, Tom Coleman, asked him how; "Mac" was getting along and he said "Well, he’s so busy telling you how busy he is he doesn’t have time to do anything." We had one or two cases of this type. Mostly we had younger men shortly out of college who were eager, willing, and who on the whole were intelligent. They were doing a very good job.

There were a couple of older agents who were recalcitrant and who did not fit well into the situation. One of these was a chap who was known as Stephen Jim Craig who was county agent in Lake County, Indiana. He had graduated from the University of Illinois and he had an offer to return to Illinois and they had written to the County Agent Leader to ask his opinion about Craig’s services and abilities. We all knew that he was the type of person who did not work well in double harness. He didn’t fit well into the organization and we would all have been glad to get rid of him but we didn’t feel that the people who were asking for information should be misled.

When they inquired about him the County Agent Leader wrote a letter glossing over some of his irascible traits. When the assistant in the office called our attention to it one Saturday morning we all agreed that the letter should be revised and we proceeded to revise it. The mistake we made was that we didn’t take it up with Tom Coleman, the original writer, and the letter went off to Illinois. It did not occur to us that a copy was being sent to Stephen "Jim" Craig. When the copy and the revised letter came together Coleman was charged with being a double crosser. Well we had to face up to it. So we traipsed into the boss’s office when this came to light and frankly faced up to the fact that we had

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made a drastic error and that we had done something that we had no business doing without his approval. We made it clear that we were all very sorry about it and that we had all learned a lesson. I must say that he was a real gentleman about the whole thing. When he heard our story he just said "Let’s just forget about it and go back to work." I’m sure that his reaction was due in part to the fact that he had a bit of a guilty conscience about his letter. In any case his response was wonderful and those of us who were involved learned a lesson. I certainly did and I never made that kind of mistake again. I never after revised something that the boss proposed without getting the boss’s approval.

A Second Job As A County Agricultural Agent

DSM: The war was over in November 1918 and I continued on at Purdue throughout 1919 and the first four months of 1920. At one of the extension conferences in early 1920 Extension Director Ramsower and A. E. Anderson who was one of the county agents supervisors in Ohio approached me and asked me to consider the job as county agent in Franklin County, Ohio, of which Columbus is the county seat. This happened to be the adjoining county to my home county in which I had purchased a farm in early 1917 and I was anxious to be near by. I received an offer of $3500 a year which was quite a boost over what I was getting. Director Christy agreed to meet their offer but I decided that I had not had enough experience as a county agent and would like more, plus the fact that I was anxious to get back near my farm which I had purchased earlier. So on May 1, 1920 I took over the job as County Agricultural Agent in Franklin County at Columbus, Ohio.

I bought a new Dodge roadster for use in the county and settled in for more than two years as

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county agent. I found the job there much different in some respects than the first county agent job in Evansville, Indiana. First of all they had had a county agent previously in Franklin County and they hadn’t had in Vanderburgh County, Indiana. In other words I was breaking new ground in my first county agent job.

The fact that Columbus was the seat of Ohio State University and the College of Agriculture made expertise much more easily available to the up and coming farmers of the county. If they wanted to go to the University to talk to a specialist they could do so, and many of them made use of the service of a specialist directly.

The county farm bureau had recently completed a membership drive in which they had signed up about two thousand members at ten dollars per year and as a result they agreed to pay a portion of my salary. The key leaders were all hepped up over hiring a farm bureau purchasing agent which they did. This distracted from interest in my job. By the end of a year the collection of dues from farm bureau members was a very .real problem and membership had dropped so drastically that they couldn’t afford to pay the portion of the salary to which they had committed themselves and at the same time support the cooperative purchasing program which they wanted to maintain if possible. During this dilemma I was asked whether I wouldn’t be willing to reduce my salary by the amount of the farm bureau contribution which would allow them to carry the purchasing agent for a longer period. I replied that "I would not do so but that I would go one better namely I would present my resignation so that they would be free of any obligation to me." This was not acceptable to the board so the purchasing agent program was dropped.

During the more than two years the home demonstration agent and I supervised a large and active Four H club program for boys and girls which was probably our most important contribution.

Other activities for which I was responsible including an intensive poultry culling demonstration

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program particularly during the first year of my incumbency. We established wheat variety improvement demonstrations throughout various sections of the county and provided for the distribution of new and pure line varieties which had been developed by the Agricultural Experiment Station. We organized a cow testing association, which was later renamed the Herd Improvement Association, so that the dairymen of the county were able to determine the production of their individual cows as well as their herds.

The normal activities included consultations in the office, as well as farm visits, follow up on the demonstration program, supervision of the work of the Four H club leaders and the Four H club members.

A Move To My Second Supervisory Job As District Supervisor Of The Agriculture Extension Service

DSM: In the mid-summer of 1922 I was again approached by Director Ramsower of the Agricultural Extension Service and offered the position of District Supervisor of Agricultural extension work for the twenty-two northwestern Ohio counties. I accepted the job at a salary of $3800 per year with what I thought was a promise of $4000 for the following fiscal year.

In my new job I had the responsibility of all the extension work in the district of twenty-two counties. In addition, in lieu of a County Agent Leader which they had had previously, I was designated by the group of supervisors as the chairman of our supervisory group. This was my second supervisory job and I served in this particular spot from 1922 to 1933.

This provided my most extensive experience in supervision, including the training of new staff, recruitment procedures, liaison with the various groups of public officials, farm bureau members and

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extension committees. I was fully responsible for the selection and training of all new county agents in my district and for securing of county appropriations from the boards of commissioners for the local contributions and for the liaison with the extension committees and the farm bureau boards.

I also worked closely with the home demonstrations supervisors and the Four H club supervisors as well as the extension subject matter specialist who served my territory. We had a very close working relationship with all the people involved in the area. Throughout most of the each year I traveled into the counties four days a week and was usually in the central office on Mondays and Saturdays.

During my early tenure in this particular job I found that I faced some real problems. There was a necessity for changing the personnel in some of the counties because several of the agents had been hired during World War I as emergency agents and had carried over for three or four years, but were not particularly well adapted to the job in those counties. Complaints about the work of the agents had become increasingly common so I had to face the problem of making changes. It was during this period that I developed what I called a philosophy for firing people. It was a very simple one. I came to the realization that if we had somebody who was not well adapted to the job and not doing well, the best solution was to try to find what their interests and their abilities were and to try to find a job into which they would fit. This was usually possible. I made a number of adjustments by helping people relocate into other jobs and then hired new agents in their place. In one or two instances I was not able to do this, and I have always felt badly about the fact that I had to get rid of somebody when I couldn’t help him relocate satisfactorily into another spot.

My most satisfactory case in this respect had to do with the agent in VanWert County, Glen Rule, who was well liked and a wonderful chap but miscast in this particular spot. It took me several months to find out just what his real interests and his real

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abilities were. By happenstance I learned about what he would like to do. I was in his office one day on one of my regular visits. A farmer came in and during the interview that he had with the farmer I picked up a local newspaper and I found an article on the front page that was very well done. I waited until the farmer left and I tossed the paper over to him and. said "Who wrote this article? "He said "I wrote it," with a bit of a blush and I said "Why don’t you write like that all the time?" He said "Don’t I?" and I said "No, your reports are not written like that and I have had a number of complaints from our extension editor about the quality of your reports. Get out a half a dozen of your monthly reports and let’s take a look at them." So he did and we went over them carefully one by one. As a consequence he began to write the most interesting and well prepared reports of any of the agents in my whole territory. It was an outstanding switch.

In the meantime I asked him what his interests were. He said "Well, I’m interested in writing but I would also like to do some cartoon work. "I found that he was very good at pen and ink work. I encouraged him to send in some cartoons to the farm papers and he had two or three of them accepted. He also wrote some articles for the farm papers and had some of those accepted. About a year or so later I had an opportunity to make a recommendation for one of the agents to go on sabbatical leave and I recommended Glen Rule. The recommendation was accepted and he went to Cornell University and took a year’s work in journalism. Following this year of study he was hired as the Agricultural Extension Editor in Maine.

This was 1927. Several years later on, in 1935, I had the pleasure of hiring him again as a writer on the staff of the Soil Conservation Service in Washington after I joined that service. We needed two or three writers to prepare some additional publications which were badly needed at the time. He took on that job and stayed on in the Department of Agriculture as a member of the staff until he retired. He has been one of my most devoted friends throughout forty-six years.

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Supervisory Techniques

DSM: In my supervisory work I tried insofar as possible to teach by precept or example and suggestion where I felt adjustments were needed. The change in the type of reports which Glen Rule was submitting is a good example of this. One other example that comes to mind was the case of Francis Bell who was the county agent in Williams County, a snappy young man who was always on the go and had been sending in reports that had a snap to them and some of the specialists particularly the head of the poultry department resented. I was sure that the most of the things that he had said were not meant in the sense that they were taken, so I waited for the opportunity on one of my visits and said to him "Why do you write your monthly reports in such a way that you make people mad down at the college when you don’t need to do so?" He said "What do you mean?" I said "You get out four or five of your monthly reports, and sit down on the other side of the table and I will read these to you as they sound to E. L. Dakin, head of the poultry department and to other people who felt that you were being snipish." So we did just that. After we had finished reading the four or five reports to which he had listened carefully, He said "I understand what you mean and I’ll do better." He did. He began to write his reports in such a way that it didn’t rile people and at the same time provided the kind of information that was required.

We had regular monthly county agent conferences in the district. Many of these conferences had to do with the discussion of teaching methods, demonstration methods, agricultural problems generally, and occasionally we had specialists scheduled to come in and talk about the programs that they were handling. In addition to that we did things that were not directly related to the agricultural programs. In one or two of the districts we started reading books and having a discussion or group book reviews. Books by men like Walter Lippmann and others. This I felt was related to their jobs and that it was important that they

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have some studies of a broader nature rather then to spend all of their time on techniques in which they were fairly well grounded anyhow.

Watchful interest in the individual, looking and listening in the office and in meetings and in the field followed by tactful suggestion were the most important supervisory techniques that were helpful to the agents in my judgment. Timing was important in order to assure the right attention and at the same time securing acceptance. As I have indicated earlier, waiting for the opportunity to get examples and being able to teach by example and precept was much more effective than ,just talking in generalities.

Most of the new agents who were hired during this period were young, intelligent men but had only limited experience after college. Some of them were placed with older agents for a few months for training as assistant agents or as Four H club agents. Some had had two to five years of Smith Hughes Vocational training as agriculture teachers and most of these were flexible and open to suggestion. There were one or two older agents who were less flexible.

In one case at least I was resented as somebody who was interfering with his operations. It required much tact and a thoughtful approach in order to meet some of the problems that existed.

At the end of my first year I reminded Director Ramsower that it was my understanding that he had promised a two hundred dollar raise at the time I was hired. The Director hadn’t remembered it in the same way and I had to press pretty hard in order to get it. But I did get it.

A Crucial Decision

DSM: Some time later perhaps after I had been on the job five years or so, I received an offer of $5000

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a year, which was quite a bit higher than I was getting at the University, to become an area salesman for a large feed company. I decided after thinking it over that I would accept this offer in case the University didn’t meet it.  Director Ramsower at this particular time was on leave, taking his sabbatical at Harvard University and Mr. George Crane who was secretary was acting Director. George was sympathetic to my problem and took the matter up with Dean Vivian who was not directly responsible for extension but who was usually consulted. The dean didn’t approve of the increase in salary so there appeared to be nothing to do except to take the feed company’s offer. However George Crane said he would like to write Director Ramsower before any final action. This was done. Much to my surprise and pleasure he approved the raise in spite of Dean Vivian’s opinion.

I have always felt strongly that salaries should be flexible and they should not be controlled by what someone else was getting. This however was not the general view and it did make it rather difficult for the director to put somebody out of line with a raise above the income of the other supervisors. It did lead to some jealousy and tension which of course is always a thorn in the flesh of an administrator.

Facing The Problems Of The Depression

DSM: When the depression of the early 1930’s, came on we had a period when county taxpayers leagues were organized in many of the counties for which I was responsible. The county agent appropriations which were made by the county commissioners no matter how small were nearly always a target of that particular group of people. So we spent much time during this period fighting the loses of appropriations, which meant usually the elimination of the county agent in case the appropriation was not made.

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This came at a time when I had two very young daughters and worry and concern over the dropping of county agents with their young families such as my own led to concern and worry about my own security. After several months of concern about this problem and about the agents who were losing their jobs and their livelihood I attended a meeting in Crawford County, Ohio, at Bucyrus where we had been trying for many weeks to find ways and means of saving the county agent’s job by getting enough money together to provide for the local expenses. This particular evening it was decided that the battle was lost and it was not feasible to continue the program.

It so happened that the agent in this particular county had a young family. His youngsters were just about the age of my own youngsters and he was going to be without a job. This touched me very deeply so when I started home I decided that I must face up to the possibility that we might have to face a similar situation. So I decided that by the time I had covered the forty miles between Bucyrus and Columbus I would have completed an inventory of assets and decide what to do if worst came to worst.

I proceeded to determine which expenses should be eliminated first and in what order and the upshot of this inventory took us in my minds eye back to my father’s tenant house as a hired man on the farm with limited wages but with a garden, no rent and lots of fresh air and sunshine until things got better. Mrs. Myer thoroughly agreed with me on this approach so we quit worrying. This rationalization of our problem was most comforting and we slept better for some time.

A Bit Of Back Stage Lobbying

DSM: Along about this same period a new state director of the budget decided that the agricultural agencies

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of the state were getting twice the money they should have and he recommended a cut of fifty percent across the board on all agricultural appropriations including the extension service. Director Ramsower designated me as the strategist to fight this cut. We did this entirely by organizing groups in the counties to make tours to Columbus, county by county. This included extension leaders, Four H club leaders, members and parents, members of the farm bureau who made trips to the state Capitol to visit the Governor, George White, and their own legislators. We managed to schedule these tours so that at least one arrived each week day for a period of weeks.

The Governor finally got tired of this so when a group arrived and asked to see him he would send for the state budget director and introduce him to the group and announce that "This is the gentleman responsible, so talk to him." The result of our campaign was that we took a cut of about twenty-five percent instead of fifty percent. Our salaries were reduced by about twenty-three and a half percent. We would have done even better if the representative of the Agricultural Experiment Station had not agreed to accept this cut without consulting with us. During this whole campaign I never appeared before the legislature or the budget director or the Governor. All of it was done by people who were interested in the program and who had no personal responsibility directly for the program and they were not receiving any money out of the funds that the appropriations provided.

This period from 1922 to 1933 was an important period in my supervisory experience. I learned a great many things for sure while working with young agents over a period of years. It helped to fix in mind several techniques which were useful to me throughout the rest of my administrative life. During 1933 with the advent of the New Deal agricultural programs I was assigned the task of supervising the federal agricultural programs for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in the state of Ohio. I relinquished my position as district supervisor in northwestern Ohio.

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Adding To My Farm Experience

DSM: Throughout all this period and from early 1917 on in addition to my job I had another experience and another responsibility which was well worthwhile. I had purchased a farm in 1917 When I moved back to Ohio in 1920 I spent most of my weekends with my partner walking over the farm, talking over plans, keeping in touch with what was going on, and having a part in the management. This experience was also well worthwhile for the reason that it gave me a real interest in the problems of the individual farmer who we were serving and I learned a great deal about the practicalities and vicissitudes of the everyday farmer’s life. I seldom mentioned this when I talked to people who I came in contact with who were farmers but occasionally I got into an argument with someone who thought I was not a dirt farmer and it came in handy to let them know that I had also had some direct experience and a direct responsibility in practical farming.

I Met The Most Wonderful Girl

DSM: The most important thing that happened to me during this period and perhaps during my whole life was the fact that I met a young lady who came to Ohio State to serve as a specialist in the field of Interior Decorating, and as a Clothing Specialist in the Extension Service. I might not have met her had I been in some other occupation. Her name was Jenness Wirt and I met her in November 1923. We were engaged at Easter time and were married the following September on my thirty-third birthday. There is absolutely no question about the fact that Jenness has been a tremendous factor in my further development from 1923 up to the present time.

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In addition to her help and moral support which she has always amply provided, we developed a family which added responsibilities and which was an important consideration in the decisions that were made.

At the time I proposed to Jenness she said she was going back to school for a year which she needed to do to complete her degree. I told her that I had hoped to get a sabbatical leave during the following year and if she would wait we would both go to college because I wanted to get my Masters degree and she could finish her degree. Fortunately she agreed. As a consequence in the fall of 1925 we matriculated into Columbia University in New York City. She was specializing in the field of Fine Arts and received her degree in 1926. I was enrolled in Teachers College and I got my Masters degree in Education. I took several courses in Columbia College including courses in sociology, economics, and finance, subjects that I had felt the need of for quite some time.

During this year in Columbia we lived in one room. We had to skimp, of course, because we were not on full pay at the time, we found that we could get along together. It was a real trial run I presume. In any case we came through it and it was a well worth while interlude that added not only to our experience but to our abilities to do our jobs.

As a result of our marriage we have three very wonderful daughters and three very excellent sons-in-law and eleven grandchildren. As I look back and realize that I might have been a bachelor all the rest of my life I shudder to think what a drab existence this would have been as compared with the existence that we have had with our family and with the opportunity we have had to watch our children and our grandchildren develop.

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CHAPTER VII

THE COMING OF THE NEW DEAL AND A CHANGE OF WORK

DSM: We go from here to the period when my work changed in 1933 with the advent of the New Deal at which time I was assigned by the Director of Extension in Ohio to supervise the new agricultural programs which emerged from the Department of Agriculture and from the Agriculture Adjustment Administration which was more or less a separate entity for quite some time. This was new, very new.

One of the first jobs was to tell unbelieving farmers that they should market their pigs before they got to the place where they produced a lot of meat because of the over-production of pork. There was a great deal of criticism throughout many years of the program of "killing little pigs" but that was the first step in the corn-hog program, in which I was a participant. We had a lot of skeptics at that time.

The major programs that we had in Ohio which were initiated by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration were wheat, corn and hogs, tobacco, and to some extent sugar beets in northwestern Ohio. There was some interest in dairy and in some areas vegetable marketing and programs of that type. We had, in other words, most of the major national programs that were developed in some section of Ohio because of the varied type of agriculture. About the only major one we didn’t have was the cotton program because we grew no cotton in Ohio.

During this first year of the program in 1933 and early 1934 the corn hog, wheat and tobacco programs took up much of my time and interest. Yet it was necessary to keep up on all phases of the Agricultural Adjustment Program because we never knew when something new was going to be projected. Consequently I worked long hours. Most of the time I

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went back to the office and worked until ten or eleven o clock at night throughout the whole year and of course, on weekends.

The policies and rulings were made in Washington but within the limits of those policies and rulings we had full opportunity to carry out our work in Ohio using the methods we thought were best. We had a corn-hog committee which was appointed by the Washington office but they didn’t interfere with the work that I was doing. They served as advisors and had occasional meetings. We had one chap on the committee who felt that farmers should handle it entirely but he didn’t press so hard that it interfered with what we were doing at the University.

I remember one incident that stands out during this first year. Doctor Albert Black who was in charge of the corn-hog program called me from Purdue and said he was in Indiana and if we had anything to talk about that was important he could come by Ohio on his way back to Washington but it would mean a meeting on Sunday. I said "Come ahead, I have a lot of questions." We got the corn-hog committee together for a meeting on Sunday morning for two or three hours. I had twenty some questions already written out. We took about two hours to go through this list of questions and discuss them. Most of them had not arisen before so in most cases Doctor Black would make a note and say he would have to take it back to Washington to talk to the policy committee about it. So we didn’t get the answers on many of them. When I got to the end of my questions I pushed my notes back and said "Well, believe it or not that’s all the questions I have today." Al Black said immediately "I’ll bet by God by next week you will have just as many more."

After the early stages of the program I had begun to realize that in a State like Ohio where we had farmers who were growing wheat, were growing corn and hogs and maybe even in some cases tobacco, that we might come to the time where if they had inspectors or people from these individual programs doing the checking that we might have a good deal of duplication, because of the fact that one week someone might check the wheat acreage and the next the corn hog program,

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the next week tobacco and so on. This concerned me. In February of 1934 I went to Washington for three days to get a lot of questions answered that had developed in the meantime and which I didn’t seem to be able to get the answers on from correspondence or long distance telephone. Because of my concern about this compliance problem and the lack of planning on the part of the divisions for meeting the problem. I decided to see Chester David before I returned to Ohio. He was heading the Agricultural Adjustment Program at that time.

So on Saturday afternoon I waited in his office until three or three thirty without lunch. He hadn’t had lunch because he had been in a meeting. I finally got to see him and he listened to me for about ten minutes and I laid out the problems as I saw them and then he began to smile and without listening further He said "We don’t have many people down here from Ohio; why don’t you come down here and handle this for us." I said "I don’t want to be embarrassed by being offered the job because that isn’t why I came to Washington or why I came to see you. I simply wanted to pose the problem so that you could do something about it." He said "Well, I realize what you have said is true but nevertheless I think maybe something ought to be done about this," and he insisted. He called in Grover Trent who was acting in charge of the production division at that time because Victor Christgau was in the field. He asked Trent to take me back to his office and to see that I got a Form 57 and filled it out and that I made an application. Because he wanted me to come to Washington.

Well, I wouldn’t take the Form 57. He tried to put it in my pocket. I told him I wasn’t interested. The upshot of it was that I went back to Ohio. I reported to the Director what had happened. The proposal was that I come in for three months to get the program started. Nothing developed immediately excepting that there was a letter or two urging that I come on but I turned it down.

Along about the first of April, several weeks after I had been to Washington, we were in a meeting in Indianapolis on Dairy problems, the director and

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some of the supervisors and myself. It was a meeting of the leaders in the Agriculture Adjustment Administration program, a regional meeting and it included several states in the midwest territory. During the meeting a call came in for the director from Washington and he came back he called me out of the meeting to tell me that Chester David had called, and insisted that he send me to Washington to do this compliance job.

We discussed the matter and Director Ramsower finally said "Well, I think it might be a good experience for you and I think maybe you ought to go for the three months." It just so happened that my good wife agreed with Dr. Ramsower and she felt very strongly that I should go.

The Move To Washington

DSM: On April 12, 1934 I went alone to Washington. The family continued to live in Ohio until June and much to my surprise when I got to Washington I found that nothing had been done about setting up a Job. They set up a job as chief of a new compliance section in the production division and I was introduced to Victor Christgau who was the chief of the production division whom I had never met and who I found had not been consulted about this particular job. Furthermore I found that none of the division chiefs with whom I was going to have to work had been consulted and they were all against the idea.

So I spent about three months of the most frustrating time that I have ever had in my life trying to do something about something that nobody wanted done excepting the chief of the Agricultural Adjustment Program. I would bring in suggestions to meetings. They would be knocked down one after the other and it was really a very very tough period. Finally in a few of the states where the programs weren’t too

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complex; for example, in Iowa where the program was practically all corn-hogs and in Idaho where it was mainly a wheat program we did get some compliance men appointed who helped supervise compliance for all of the programs including the lesser ones as well as the major ones. The last six months of 1934 were somewhat easier than the first three months but it still was not easy.

In June of 1934 they asked that my leave be extended for another three months and the director agreed. I was on leave from Ohio State University from my job that I had there as a Supervisor of Extension. We rented a house for three months from people who were going to Rehobeth Beach for the summer and brought the family down in June with the expectation that we would be going back in September.

In the meantime Jenness had moved from the house we had been living in Columbus, Ohio, with the help of friends of ours the Clarence Fergusons (he later became Director of Extension at Ohio State University) while I was busy in Washington. She moved to another house. The family never lived in that house. She rented it for the summer to a couple who were taking graduate work. So in the fall then when a further extension of leave was granted we decided to give up the house. Jenness went back, packed up and had all the goods put in storage. We rented another furnished house in Washington. The upshot of it was that we stayed on in Washington for almost a year and a half on leave from Ohio State University which was a little longer than normal but they were very decent about it.

In January of 1935 the "purge" in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration took place. There was quite a division within the administration between some of the very liberal lawyers including Jerome Frank, and some of the others including my boss Victor Christgau who was on Jerry Frank’s side regarding methods. Finally Chester Davis decided that he had to do something about it so he fired a lot of people, including my boss.

Since I was on leave and this didn’t seem to affect my economic status too much. I found myself having

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meetings with people who were looking strained and upset who were still on the job and who had lost their bosses. Foolishly I kidded them and asked them once or twice who they were working for this morning and they didn’t find it a bit funny! After four or five days I realized that I was sitting all alone in a area with no production division which had been eliminated and had no boss. A day or two later I got a call from Chester Davis’s office. I went up to see him. He chuckled and said "Dillon, I hope your ego isn’t too badly hurt. Very frankly, we forgot all about you for a little while in the shakedown of things and we came to the realization that here you were and something ought to be done about it. How would you like to go to work for Howard Tolley in the planning division?" I said "I would be delighted."

Another Job Change

DSM: So I moved over to the planning division and worked for Howard Tolley who was another of my good bosses by the way. In that position I could continue to be in close touch and informed about policy within the administration. I had the opportunity often to meet with the top people in the AAA as well as with the Secretary in connection with program policy and of course with all the various divisions. I was there until September.

In the meantime one or two things of importance should be mentioned. One of them was the fact that the first draft of the proposed Soil Conservation Districts Act had been prepared by M. L. Wilson and Philip Glick and was circulated to various key people in the department for review and comment. Howard Tolley tossed it into my lap. I mention this because it became part of my life within a few weeks.

The other event that happened during this period was the Supreme Court decision that the Agricultural

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Adjustment Act was unconstitutional. So it required a complete revamping.

Another Proposed Move

DSM: In the meantime I had been asked to take on a job with the Resettlement Administration under Rex Tugwell as assistant to Dr. Gray who headed up the division of lands. At the same time I was offered the job as chief of a new division in the Soil Conservation Service to be called the Division of States Relations and Planning. This put me in a bit of a spot because Rex Tugwell was not only head of the Resettlement Administration but he was Under Secretary of Agriculture. I had to tell him that I would prefer to go to the Soil Conservation Service and he put the pressure on pretty heavily to get me to change my mind to come over to the Resettlement Administration but I stayed with my interest in the SCS.

So I told the SCS that I was willing to come providing that I could get the kind of pay and the kind of grade to justify my staying on. I was getting $6800 a year in the Agricultural Adjustment Program and the pay for chiefs of divisions in the Department of Agriculture at that time was $5600. I said I didn’t feel that I was justified in accepting the grade at $5600 but if they could get the grade moved the next step up to $6500 I would be interested. Otherwise I could live as well or better by going back to Columbus at a somewhat lower salary because it cost me less to live there than it did in Washington.

To make a long story short Milton Eisenhower, who had been assigned by the Secretary to help integrate the Soil Conservation Service into the department, worked most of the summer to get the Civil Service Commission to set up a grade that would pay $6500. He finally made it in early September and I’m sure that every division head in the Department of Agriculture

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were very happy and were ready to thank me for sticking it out because everybody else also got a raise. As a result of having won this little battle, on September 15th I moved over to the Soil Conservation Service as the chief of the division of State Relations and Planning.

This salary sounds incredible now of course but we have had tremendous inflation in the meantime, We lived pretty well on $6500 a year in Washington at that time.

Initiation Of Aerial Land Surveys

DSM: Before I leave the AAA program I should mention one or two important things that happened during the last several months that I was with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. One was the fact that I was sold on the idea of experimenting aeroplant surveys for use in compliance work. A chap by the name of Brown, who was a private engineer stayed with me until he convinced me that aeroplant mapping was practical. I got permission to experiment with this type of mapping in three different counties. One of them was a county in which Raleigh, North Carolina, is located. It had a lot of small farms, tobacco farms mainly; also a county in Minnesota; and one in Texas .

They took aerial photographs of the land, then by the use of equipment on the ground they could use measuring apparatus to delineate the different types of plots and come out with measurements that were more accurate than measurements with tape measures.

We were after the amount of acreage that people had planted to crops that were covered by the AAA program.

I found out in the meantime that in Soil Conservation Service, particularly Charles Collier who

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worked for the Soil Conservation Service, was working on the same problem in connection with soil surveys and he had gone much further than we had gone. I didn’t get my report on this aerial survey results completed until after I had moved over to the SCS but I sent it back to Chester David and indicated that I thought each of the division chiefs should see it. I’m sure that nobody saw it immediately because in the following spring I happened to be over in the department for lunch one day and Claude Wickard, who at that time was head of the corn-hog program came rushing up to me and said "We want to see you." I said "What do you want to see me about?" He said "We want to know about that aerial survey work you were doing." I said "You mean you haven t seen it?" He grinned, shook his head and said "No we haven t seem it." So I told him where it was.

I went around and saw his assistant and talked to him about it. They immediately went to work on it and adopted the practice of using aerial surveys in their compliance work. Within a year or two all of the compliance work involving land measurement was done by aerial survey.

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CHAPTER VIII

A BRAND NEW JOB IN THE SOIL CONSERVATION SERVICE

DSM: Another important development that came about very soon after I moved over to the Soil Conservation Service, the AAA was groping for an alternative to the Agricultural Adjustment law which had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. It happened that during my first week with SCS word came to me that a suggestion had been made by one of the newsmen that they take the very neat little act which the Soil Conservation Service had gotten passed authorizing the soil erosion and soil conservation work and rework it so it could serve as a vehicle for a rewrite of the AAA law.

When I learned about this I hied myself over to the department and immediately went into a meeting in Chester Davis’s office which I was allowed to do because I knew the Secretary. Sure enough they were rewriting the act regardless of its effect on SCG and were about ready to go to Congress to ask passage of the revised draft.

They not only incorporated the AAA program but they had done a great deal of mayhem to the Soil Conservation Act that we already had on the books. I made a plea that whatever they did that they simply add amendments to our act rather than change a word in the original language to accomplish a revision of the Agricultural Adjustment Authorization.

I was able to convince them that it was not fair that the act should be torn up and rewritten as they proposed to do. Chester Davis listened and then turned to Mastin White, who was the solicitor at that time, and said "Mastin, what do you think of this" He said "I think that Dillon is right. I think that not only can be done by adding additional sections to the act rather than interfering with the act as it now stands but it probably would make just as good if not a better one."

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So the meeting broke up at that instant because Chester Davis said "OK Mastin, get to the Hill as fast as you can and stop the action and let’s rewrite it." It was just that close. So my experience in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration stood me in good stead when I moved over to the Soil Conservation Service.

I neglected to mention that one of the other things that I was called upon to do during the last few months with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration was to serve on a committee of which Milton Eisenhower was chairman. We had a representative from the Forest Service, a representative from the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, and myself representing Dr. Tolley. The committee’s job was to write a program for the integration of the Soil Conservation Service into the Department of Agriculture. The service had been set up originally in the Interior Department and it was a matter of trying to write a program that would not hurt the SCS and at the same time would more or less satisfy the Bureau of Plant Industry, the Bureau of Agricultural Engineering, the Bureau of Soils and others who thought they ought to be doing that job.

Origin Of The Soil Erosion Service In The Department Of The Interior

DSM: The reason why the soil Erosion Service was established in the Department of the Interior was an interesting story in itself. Rex Tugwell who was one of the instigators of the Soil Conservation Service was quite interested in it and so was the President. When they decided to set up an agency to promote erosion control work Tugwell was given the job as Under Secretary of Agriculture. He called in Hugh Bennett who was the best informed man in this field in the Department of Agriculture, and who had been working for Erosion Control throughout the years since 1903 at the time he joined the Department as a young man doing

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soil survey work. He told Hugh Bennett about the prospects for such a program and said that because of the fact that there were bureaus within the Department that were vying for the job they thought they were going to have to set it up in the Interior Department, would he be interested? Hugh was hell bent, of course, because he was always hell bent to do anything about soil erosion and this gave him an opportunity. He was willing to leave the Department and move over to Interior, which he did. During the first several months the agency was known as the Soil Erosion Service in the Department of Interior.

It was moved back to the department in April or May of 1935 and renamed and it was shortly after this that I came into the picture because Jack Cutler who was Regional Director at Dayton, Ohio, had come into Washington and had recommended that the kind of division that I ultimately headed, the division of States Relations and Planning be established and recommended that I head it. This was in May 1935 as I remember it, when I was first consulted. As a result of this recommendation I received an offer but it took all summer to get the job worked out so I moved over in September.

The Soil Conservation Service at the time I joined the organization was responsible for two major activities. One of them was the establishment and supervision of a large number of erosion control projects throughout the country which Hugh Bennett had initiated and the other was the supervision of a very large number of Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) camps. These were utilized in connection with the local soil conservation projects. They were doing tree planting, terracing, most of which was done by machine, but there were certain phases where hand work was needed; also nursery work. Soil Conservation Service maintained a number of nurseries throughout the country to provide planting stock for the establishment of trees and shrubs in areas that needed cover.

There were, I believe, ten regions at the time with a regional director in charge of each, plus a state soil conservation coordinator in each of the states. He was responsible to the regional office.

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The extension service generally throughout the country or the state extension directors generally throughout the country were quite unhappy that the Soil Conservation Service was working directly with farmers on the various projects and in the use of CCC camps. They felt that they should come under the control of the Extension Service. Hugh Bennett thought just the opposite. As a matter of fact he was somewhat embittered against the Extension Service because of the fact that only in one or two states had they done anything, in his judgment, of any importance toward developing an erosion control program other than the all-out terracing programs that were extant in many of the old southern states, and he felt much of that was overdone. So it was necessary if we were going to work within the states to get the cooperation of the Extension Service to work out a program which would reasonably satisfy them and get their assistance and at the same time get ahead with our work.

My major job at the beginning of my work in the SCS was trying to establish this kind of relationship with my old cohorts. I had worked many years in agricultural extension as a county agent and later as a supervisor. I knew all of the directors well at that time and we had many arguments every time we had a meeting.

I had the opportunity to set up my own new division. I was able to hire the personnel which I selected. We had three sections within the division. I had to fight the battle to get the kind of grades that I felt I needed in order to secure the personnel of my choice. These grades, were controlled at that time by the Civil Service Commission because the Soil Conservation Service which had not been under Civil Service was blanketed into the Civil Service in early December of 1935.

One of the new sections was a section on extension relations and was headed by J. Philip Campbell who was a former extension director in Georgia and who had good relations with the extension directors through out the country. The information section was moved into my division. The second new section had to do

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with planning. T. L. Gaston whom I had worked with in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration headed this particular section. The work of this section developed very shortly into plans for the development of cooperation with the states through the medium of soil conservation districts acts which were proposed by the Department of Agriculture.

In view of Hugh Bennett’s attitude toward the Extension Service I had a bit of a problem when I first moved over. Some of the first memoranda or letters that I had prepared to go out to the field and to the extension directors didn’t suit him and nearly every time he saw the Extension Service mentioned he would take his pencil and draw a line right through it. I finally decided that I couldn’t carry on like that so when this happened the third time to a memorandum of this type I said "I think, Hugh, that I had better present my resignation." I thought he was going to cry. He said "Oh no, don’t do that, don’t even talk like that." So we chatted about it a little while and I told him very frankly that if we were going to carry on work with the states we were going to have to work out some kind of sound relationship. I made it clear that I was not going to sell him down the river. From that time on he never even read my letters or memorandum that were going out, he just signed them. So I had no more trouble with that situation although he still did not like the Extension Service.

Before I moved over to the SCS I had the opportunity to review the proposed States Soil Conservation Districts Act which had been prepared by M. L. Wilson and Philip Glick within the Department of Agriculture. As a consequence one of the first responsibilities that I had after I established myself within the SCS in September in addition to our job of Extension Relations was to get acceptance of a Soil Conservation Districts Act by Hugh Bennett and his staff. In order to get approval by the states it seemed necessary to include the Agricultural Extension Directors, Directors of Agricultural Experiment Stations, and the Dean of the Agricultural College on the state committee that was to be established by the Act to give general supervision to the establishment and operation of the local districts which were proposed under such an Act.

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This problem of getting the Extension Directors in particular and the other college people as members of the state committee created a bit of a problem within the SOS but the proposal was finally accepted.

The proposed Soil Conservation Districts Act was essential in the minds of M. L. Wilson and of many of the rest of us within the Department in order to establish new local agencies which would plan and supervise a program of erosion control without having to do it through the county commissioners and the established county setup. They were not authorized to carry on programs of this type. Furthermore they were busy with roads, and ditches and a lot of other things that they were traditionally responsible for and it was felt that it would not work well under these old established regimes. Furthermore there were many people in the Department and in the SOS that felt that such an organization should be established on a water-shed basis rather than on county lines.

Among other things in the act was provision for the establishment of land use regulations, which could be formulated by the districts in order to require certain erosion control methods on the part of farmers which would help to protect their neighbors and help to protect the soil in the area. This, of course, was an entirely new authorization which was not available to anyone at that time.

The Battle To Secure Passage Of The State Soil Conservation District Act

DSM: I don’t remember exactly when we got final approval of the draft of the Act by the Department, by the departmental agencies, by the Soil Conservation Service and by the Secretary of Agriculture but the Act was printed up within a few months. It was in the early spring of 1936 before we were able to distribute a copy of the proposed Act to the states. Then the

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battle started in many of the states because there was opposition to having such a law. Certain of the Extension Directors in particular opposed it and in some cases the deans and other college people. Some of the states adopted the Act almost immediately. One of the first states to adopt it was North Carolina which was Hugh Bennett’s home state. Many of the states in the south adopted the Act without much argument because of the very serious problem of erosion which had developed throughout many years, caused principally by their type of clean cultivation cotton and corn and other clean cultivated crops.

The hardest fights in order to get the Act adopted developed in Texas, Kentucky and Missouri with lesser resistance in the states of Oregon and California. We had arguments in other states and we had to spend a good deal of time in convincing would-be members of the state committees that it was important and sooner or later we were able to do it. There were adjustments made in the provisions of the Act in some of the states. Many of the states objected to passing an Act with the land use regulations included but fortunately some of them did and some of them have been useful particularly in the wind erosion areas.

Fortunately for me I had complete support within the Secretary of Agriculture’s office when the battle developed in states like Texas and Kentucky in particular. Telegrams would come in asking the Secretary’s point of view, hoping to get this support. I always wrote the answers and sent them over and Paul Appleby and Milton Eisenhower (Paul Appleby, the Secretary’s top assistant, in particular) saw to it that the Secretary was convinced that my answers were proper so they were signed and sent back in due order. The battle went on but we finally won the battle in all of these states. By the time I left the SCS in early 1942, thirty-seven states had adopted the States Soil Conservation Act.

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A Promotion To Assistant Chief

DSM: In the midst of all of this I became Assistant Chief of the Soil Conservation Service in 1938 and turned over the work of the division of States Relations and Planning to J. Philip Campbell who had headed up the section on State Relations earlier.

An Attempted Take Over

DSM: In the meantime the battle on the part of the state extension directors to take over the work of the Soil Conservation Service continued. Along in the late 1930’s Harry Brown who had been extension director in the state of Georgia came into the Department as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. At that time Cecil Creel who was Director of the Agricultural Extension work in the state of Nevada was chairman of the extension relations committee, of the Land Grant College Association which functioned as sort of a watch dog for the extension directors generally in regard to legislation and cooperation with departmental agencies. Creel and his group evidently convinced Harry Brown that he ought to convince the Secretary that the proposal to have the extension service take over the SCS was a good one.

I found out that they had already been to the Senate and had talked to Senator Bankhead of Alabama who was Chairman of the Senate Agricultural Committee and he had agreed to some language to make the change provided the Secretary would recommend it. Before we knew it they practically had the Secretary committed to approve the language but somehow it came to our attention. So we went into battle. We convinced the Secretary that he should arrange a meeting with the extension committee and with the SCS representatives. I was Assistant Chief and Hugh Bennett told me I was

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to be spokesman. Well, we argued the case before the Secretary and I must have been really steamed up because after the meeting broke up we arranged to see the Secretary the next morning along with M. L. Wilson, the Under Secretary and William Jump the budget director for the Department.

When we went into the Secretary’s office, before I had a chance to say anything, Secretary Wallace turned to me and said "Dillon, yesterday as you were making your presentation I was reminded of the fact that you were sitting in the same position in relation to the Secretary of Agriculture fighting the battle against the takeover as I was with the President of the United States, because of the fact that the Interior Department was trying to take over the Forest Service." This evidently appealed to him as something that was important and relevant.

As a result of further discussions that morning he definitely decided to tell Harry Brown that he would not approve the proposed language. As a consequence there was no change in the law. This was a major victory for the SCS and for me personally.

A Proposal To Move Some Regional Offices

DSM: One other incident that I remember quite clearly resulted from an idea that was developed by Paul Appleby and Milton Eisenhower, who was working very closely with him at the time. They decided that the various regional offices within the Department of Agriculture should have the same location in the field so that they would have easy access to each other and be able to carry on better working relations. Such agencies as the Forest Service and the Soil Conservation Service had a great deal in common, for example, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics and other agencies which had field offices of this type. Well, there seemed to be no getting away from it so we had

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to start work on this matter. One of the proposals was to move the office from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to Atlanta, Georgia, where the Forest Service was already located. This, of course, was stepping on Jimmy Byrnes toes who was probably the most powerful Senator in the U.S. Senate at the time. He was highly respected. He carried the battle against the change and we lost which didn’t hurt my feelings too much. Nevertheless at some cocktail party or other he was heard to make the remark "That those two Jews Eisenhower and Myer were planning to wreck his program in South Carolina."

During the midst of this battle for the changes of the offices I was called upon to go with the Secretary to some kind of meeting. In route I told him that we were planning to move the regional office of the SCS in Des Moines, Iowa, to Milwaukee where the Forest Service Office was already located. This, of course, meant that we were moving a major office out of the Secretary’s home state and into another state. He asked me a few questions about it and what was going on and I explained to him what we were called upon to do and he didn’t rebel. We moved the office.

The Pearl Harbor Attack And A Change In Status

DSM: In the fall of 1941 Hugh Bennett was asked to go to Venezuela to do some soil survey work for the government of Venezuela. He was down there for several weeks and during that period I was acting Chief of the Soil Conservation Service. It was at this time that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and we were in the war.

Following the Declaration of War in December 1941 I awakened one morning and found a story in the newspapers which stated that Secretary of Agriculture, Claude Wickard, had established a new agency within the department known as the Agricultural Conservation and Adjustment Administration. "Spike" Evans who had

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been for quite some time chief of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration was made administrator and I was announced as Assistant Administrator of this new overall agency. Neither Evans nor I were informed of this action ahead of time. This came as a complete shock to both of us.

It developed that this was an idea that had been dreamed up by a couple of the Secretary’s assistants, Sam Bledsoe and Bob Shields. Evidently they thought there should be some consolidation of the agencies and if I were moved over I would want to bring the SCS into control under my wing in the new organization. As a consequence it put me in a pretty hot spot. I immediately wired Hugh Bennett in Venezuela what had happened and he was out in the field so it took time to find him. When he returned to Washington it was early January. He was so upset that I was completely ignored. He brought Lewis Merrill, who was the Regional Director at the time in Fort Worth, Texas, into Washington as his right hand man.

Fortunately Merrill and I had worked together very closely on the fight to get a Soil Conservation Districts law established in Texas and he had complete confidence in me. He understood the problem so he came in every day to tell me what was going on. This was the only communication I had with anyone in the SCS for days on end.

I am sure that Hugh Bennett thought that maybe I had something to do with the Secretary’s action. In any case he was very upset about the whole matter. I had always made it very clear to him that nothing happened that I didn’t tell him about in respect to the service as soon as I knew it. I explained to him that it had all happened without my having anything to do with it and that he could be reassured that I was not going to move in to wreck the service but that didn’t satisfy him.

So from early January until mid-June I at first was Assistant Administrator of the new organization and then from late January to mid-June I was acting administrator. "Spike" Evans was appointed to the Federal Reserve Board and left the department during

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January. I had made up my mind that I was not going to be a party to shuffling the agencies and the takeover of the AM and the SCS completely as I was urged to do. So my job in the meantime had to do with handling the tough problems that nobody else wanted to handle in regard to the various agencies. Occasionally I had a meeting of the agency chiefs to talk about inter-agency problems.

As an example of the type of tough problems that I had to handle: the AAA had a real problem between the southern region and the western region because of the battle as to how the cover crop seeds which were grown in Oregon should be handled in arranging for sales to cotton farmers in the south. Since nobody wanted to handle it I had to referee this battle. I did it and I’m sure that I did it without very much support on either side but I finally had to make a decision and I made it.

In the case of SCS the major problem that came up during this period was the fact that our appropriations by the Congress were reduced for administrative purposes and it seemed necessary to eliminate some of the regional offices. One of the regional offices which had been established because the former chairman of the House Agricultural Committee, Marvin Jones, insisted was a wind erosion region be established at Amarillo, Texas. If it wasn’t established he said he would write it into law. So it had been established.

In the meantime Marvin Jones had moved out of the Congress and over to the Court of Claims. We decided that we didn’t need the Amarillo office any more and it was to be dropped. It fell to me to go to see Marvin Jones. He didn’t like it but he said he would not stand in the way. I came back to report to the Secretary that I had informed Marvin Jones and he had accepted the fact that we were going to do it. He looked at me and smiled and said "What did Grover Hill say?"

Grover Hill was at that time Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. He was an appointee upon the recommendation of Marvin Jones and he was a great supporter of Marvin Jones. I said "I haven't talked with Grover."

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He said "I think you had better do so." So I went and talked with Grover Hill and Grover really put up a scrap. He told me that we were being traitors to Jones and that we were cutting the ground out from under him. We spent an hour or two together. He tried to convince the Secretary to overrule us but we stood pat and we got the job done.

These items were examples of the kind of dirty work that I had to handle during this period and I didn’t get too much thanks for it. Nobody in the different groups that came under the administration that I was heading liked the new organization. Incidentally the Agricultural Conservation and Adjustment Administration included four agencies: the Agricultural Adjustment Administration; the Soil Conservation Service; Crop Insurance Service; and the Sugar Division.

GO TO Chapter IX