Sport: Cotton Pickers

Blytheville, Ark. had never seen so many folks before. On Ross Hughes’s farm there were 15,000 of them—come from as fur away as Texas to see the first annual cotton-picking championship of the U. S.

It was Roscoe Crafton’s idea. Set a-thinkin’ by the national publicity given the Corn Belt’s annual corn-husking championship, he got some fellow cotton merchants to form an association last winter, sow the seeds of a national cotton-picking contest. “Wide open to the world” it would be. So they sent invitations to the Cotton Belt’s Rotary, Kiwanis and Lions clubs, asking them to sponsor an entrant apiece.

Last week 136 contestants showed up: men & women, black & white, day laborers, land-owning farmers from eleven States. Some came as free-lance pickers (paying their own $10 entry fee), but the majority represented civic-minded cotton communities. Each entrant was given two half-mile rows to pluck. A good cotton picker, pacing himself for a day’s work in the field, averages from 18 to 35 lb. an hour. But last week’s pickers were after something more than a day’s pay. When the two-hour limit was up, one of the pickers had turned in 129 Ib. of “good clean cotton.” He was 15-year-old Harold Mason, a shy, gangling Senath, Mo. schoolboy, youngest competitor in the field.

If he had picked that cotton for Planter Hughes the day before, young Mason would have been paid about 75¢. Last week he got $1,000 and the title “first world’s champion cotton picker.” Descendant of a long line of farm folk, Schoolboy Mason intends to use his prize money for an agriculture course at the University of Missouri.