Crossroads Correspondents

The late rains that have advanced everything so wonderfully have not exactly pleased the tobacco growers, as tobacco should be preparing itself for the knife, instead of trying to reach the sky.

Frank Snowden will have around 8,000 pounds of White Burley for the Kentucky markets. We hope he receives a good price, as he has worked hard. Not a day too hot or an evening too late for Frank and his children in the crop time.

Mrs. Alice Box, so many years a resident, but sad and desolate since the loss of her husband, John Box, last winter, has moved to Crickett, Arkansas, to stay with her son, Ran, for a time. The rest of the family have moved to the Cuma Pruitt place near Cedar Valley. Chauncey Cline and his wife and boy, Jimmy, now occupy the nice home on the Pauley place where this family lived for so long.

Willie Snowden, a brother of Frank and Joe, came as an unexpected visitor from California last week. He has been absent twenty-eight years. He said he could not resist the longing to see his mother once more, and the old home place. But the old house was gone, burned in a grass fire some years ago.

For the past 44 years Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Mahnkey of Oasis, Mo. has been writing lines like these, honest as a furrow, compassionate as the curved hills of her native Ozark country, newsy as a fence post to a hound dog. But for this particular budget of crossroads correspondence, printed one week last spring in the Forsyth, Mo. Taney County Republican. Mrs. Mahnkey last week got $50 in cash, "a fine silver meat platter with a vegetable dish to match," a free trip to Manhattan and the title of "The Best Country Newspaper Correspondent in the U. S." from Crowell Publishing Co.'s rustic Country Home.

Oasis is a hamlet of 27 inhabitants, 15 miles from a railroad. Soon Mrs. Mahnkey's husband's general store and the rest of the settlement will have to be abandoned because a hydroelectric project will cover it with a lake. Forsyth is a town of 281 people. And the Republican has a weekly circulation of 875 among the farmers of Taney County. Mrs. Mahnkey's immediate reaction to her good fortune was terror at the prospect of her first Pullman ride and a visit to the nation's No. 1 city. But finally she told the editors of Country Home that she would come, ''hoping the public will tote fair, and not expect too much, and that . . . you'll take care of me, and see that there is no unpleasant exploitation, for there is so much that is fantastic, and distorted about the hillbilly."

A plump and gentle little body of 58, Mrs. Mahnkey's journalism is only a sideline. What she is really interested in is her poetry, which Missouri literary folk like Rose Wilder Lane would like to see properly published. A contributor of verse, letters and farm gossip to Country Home for years, Mrs. Mahnkey was partly responsible for the magazine's contest, having suggested such an event last spring. Editor Wheeler McMillen, once director of an Ohio country paper, and Editor Russell Lord, who takes more pride in his Maryland farm than in the fact that he edited the Grand Duchess Marie's royal memoirs, adopted the suggestion. Expecting a few bushels of submitted clippings, they got bales. More than a third of the 1,581 items warranted serious consideration. Excited by the response and quality of the material from the nation's most obscure reporters, Editors McMillen & Lord at once decided that "our prize offer was too puny for an event of such importance." So they upped the main prize by one silver meat platter, one vegetable dish to match and one trip to New York, created a number of special awards, scattered gratuitous $5 bounties this way & that. The contest will henceforth be expanded and enlarged, "the prize offer will be multiplied several times." Well might Country Home grow enthusiastic over their crossroads correspondents. Excerpts from the contributions displayed genuine simplicity, natural beauty, instinctive truth. As intuitive a piece of insight into the female character as ever came from Willa Gather was the report of Deborah Whitaker on her trip to New Hampshire's Governor's Ball, as published in the Milford Cabinet & Wilton Journal. A poultrywoman on the verge of the event of her life. Mrs. Whitaker entered the ballroom, "closed our eyes and breathed a prayer: 'Please, God, don't let anyone mention chickens or the price of eggs!'. . . Then someone asked us for a dance . . . quite tall and homely handsome. . . . He danced divinely. . . . Then he spoke: 'How's the chicken business?' "

Right out of the late great William Henry Hudson's The Naturalist in La Plata might have come this bit from Mrs. J. W. Peiterson of El Cajon Valley (Calif.) News: "An old family horse belonging to the Marcks Brothers of Lakeside, and raised by them from a colt on their ranch above El Capitan, died last week. Last year he was turned out to green pastures, his twenty-five years of intimate and dependable service ended. Weeks on end, the old fellow roamed where he pleased and was seldom seen.

"Last Thursday Walter Marcks saw the old horse making his way slowly up the road. The animal came directly to him, where he was working behind the house. It seemed lonesome for the human companionship it had enjoyed during a long life. 'Old Bill' craned his neck at the touch of Mr. Marcks' stroking hand. "A slight shudder then, and Old Bill sank to the ground."

And $25 went to Davis Tuttle, perceptive, philosophical columnist of the Caldwell Record of Lenoir, N. C., for what Country Home considered "the grandest piece of individual thinking and writing we have come upon for years": "Last night I thought I heard a pack of foxhounds running, but as the sound came nearer I realized it was a flock of wild geese flying out of the north. . . .

"The call, though faint, was strong enough to arouse the tame geese on the place. The old Toulouse gander sent back an answering challenge to his wild cousins, while his mates stretched out their necks and screamed to the top of their long throats. They rushed along the dark ground, beating their wings and tipping the grass with their toes, only to wheel pitifully and try again.

"As much as they disturbed my sleep. I couldn't help be sorry for them. For once they were discontent with domesticity. The boundary of their world had suddenly grown larger than the barn lot, the grove, the garden and the orchard. Somewhere far to the south waited a wide, gray marshland, pale and misty under the warm southern moon--waited the winter haven for all the web-footed creatures of the air. . . .

"Dimly we recall, or rather sense, a freer day when our forefathers had time to feel the seasons' change in them, to loaf in the warm sunlight and to drink in life like a healthy animal. . . . Our appetites have become too heavy, our inner ear too dulled to attend any call but that of ease or gain."

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