Untidy

Daniel Willard, 65, has that beaming grandfatherly smile. He cannot help it; he has much about which to be happy. He is president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and one of the best loved executives in the nation. As head of the board of trustees of Johns Hopkins University, he is the mainspring of its present reorganization and expansion program. Once he said: "There is romance in this business. . . ." He referred to railroads, but he might well have been thinking of his early Vermont farmhood.

It was onetime Farmer Willard rather than present day Railroader Willard who talked to a congress of farm boys and girls in Chicago last week. True enough, he did mention railroads and urged the youths to acquaint themselves with national affairs, but his smile was mellowest when he told of farmhood. Said he:

"My father owned his farm of about 250 acres of woodland hills, pasture and meadow lands. He had, I suppose, about 60 or 70 acres of tillable land. He kept, when I was a boy, five or six cows, a yoke of oxen, ten or a dozen head of young cattle, including calves, two or three horses and sometimes 200 sheep, and of course hens, turkeys, guinea fowl, pigs. As I was the only boy in our family, you can perhaps imagine how busy I could be. ... It was my job to feed and water the horses and clean out the stables; then I had to help feed the cows and cattle. . . . The hogs also had to be fed. . . . There was one other job that was wholly mine. No one ever took it away from me and there was no one else that I could wish it upon. I refer, of course, to filling the wood box in the kitchen. It sometimes seemed to me that it had no bottom at all.

"The meanest job on the farm, so I thought, was picking up potatoes, but I liked to husk corn. There were many other jobs supposed to be a boy's size, such as going after the cows up in the pasture, washing the buggy ( this was before the day of the automobile), sticking pumpkin seeds, pulling weeds in the garden. . . .

"I forgot to mention churning. I had to turn the churn and we had one cow that I despised; it seemed as if her cream never would turn into butter, and it also seemed as if it was always time to churn when the weather was just right for fishing or sliding down hill. Churning was an all-the-year-round job.

"We farm better today than we did when I was a boy but not as much better as we ought to. ... There is one feature, however, about farm life in America which is seldom, if ever, referred to. ... I refer to the appearance of carelessness and neglect which is so common on our farms. It has always been so; it was so when I was a boy; it is so still. Sometimes I think it is even worse now than was the case 50 years ago. I refer to such things as leaving wagons and farm machinery out in the fields or outside the barn or shed in all kinds of weather, permitting window panes to be missing, doors and gates off the hinges, fences out of order, piles of wood, lumber and stones around the buildings where they ought not to be; stumps and stones in a tillable field when they might be removed; piles of rubbish around the place that ought to be burned if no value. . . .

"Now, I know that the railroads, or some of them, are also bad housekeepers, and it is just as inexcusable for the railroads to be careless and neglectful as it is for the farmers. ... I am convinced that in the long run it actually pays in dollars and cents to keep picked up, but in any event we can afford and actually do afford to do some things not because they pay directly but just because to do so gives us a certain worth while feeling of satisfaction. That is why men wear collars, have their hair cut and shave; and also why girls bob their hair, powder their noses--not to go further into details. . . .

"I am pained when I hear them [the farmers] unjustly criticized but it cannot be denied that they are in part at least responsible for some criticism because of their indifference as a class concerning appearances."