International: Elmer

Cigarettes drooping mournfully from the corners of their mouths, the French farmers clustered in the cornfield, waiting for the show to begin. A bottle of wine protruded from the hip pocket of one, a long loaf of bread from another. Professor Jay C. Hackleman, a University of Illinois agronomist on loan to the Mutual Security Agency, mounted the corn wagon. “Where’s Elmer?” somebody whispered. In a moment Elmer Carlson, 43, a bronzed, strapping Iowa farmer and onetime U.S. national cornhusking champion, was found—on hands & knees inspecting a newfangled carbide scarecrow. Looking like a miniature 75-mm. cannon and operating on the same principle as a flash buoy, it was like nothing Elmer had ever seen in Iowa. He left it reluctantly, to join the professor in the corn wagon.

“We’re very pleased to see you here,” the professor began, through an interpreter. “It shows your interest in hybrid corn . . .” BOOM! went the crow-chaser. The professor went on with his lecture.

The Frenchmen shuffled their feet and watched Elmer, who was nonchalantly strapping an evil-looking husking hook to his right wrist. At last the speech was over, and Elmer strode into the cornfield. He seized an ear or two, ripped the husks open with his hook and tossed them into the wagon. One of the Frenchmen spat. Then Elmer took off his shirt. “Okay, Thorson,” he called to his companion, a onetime Iowa farmboy now clerking at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. “Let’s go!”

Corn on the Bang-Board. Down they went like angry threshing machines through the rows of hybrid corn, grabbing an ear of corn in the left hand, ripping open the husk with the hook, seizing the ear with the right hand, tearing the husk open with the left, snapping the stripped ear off with the right and flipping it against the bang-board of the wagon, all in a single uninterrupted operation. The pair tossed corn with machine-gun precision, hitting the bang-board with a new ear every second or oftener. “Oiyoiyoi, oiyoiyoi!” shrilled one of the astounded French farmers, seizing his spinning head in both hands. When all the corn was husked, everybody gathered around to try out the hooks. Even the local priest joined in the trials, while Elmer passed out pencils stamped with his picture.

Since mid-September, Elmer has done his act over & over for the benefit of farmers in Italy, France and Holland, all of which are increasing their corn crop, to save import dollars. MSA figured that the farmers could raise even more if they learned to harvest in the traditional U.S. style instead of lugging each ear home to be stripped at a husking bee around the family hearth.

Donkey in the Lobby. The French took to the idea from the very beginning. Last week, when Elmer left to go on to Holland, the French farmers insisted he come back once more and teach them to teach still others before he left for good. Elmer promptly accepted the invitation. For one thing, it will give him a chance to buy one of those cannon scarecrows. An uninhibited man who startled the Democratic conventioneers in Chicago last July by leading a live donkey into the lobby of the Palmer House, Elmer badly wants a cannon scarecrow to take home to Iowa; he thinks he might even set it up on the rail of his ship and “let go a real Iowa salute” at the Statue of Liberty on the way home.