Yanqui Cotton Patch

"What is your secret?" envious Nicaraguans kept asking the two youthful yanquis. Far from having a secret, the yanquis were just amateur cotton growers who had struck it rich with their first crop. Until their own tall, sturdy plants bore plump bolls of ripening cotton, neither of them had even so much as walked through a cotton patch.

Frank Mordecai, 29, of Raleigh, N.C., and Richard Pfeiffer, 25, of Los Angeles, both city boys, both ex-G.I.s, met in 1948 in Phoenix, Ariz., where they were students at the American Institute of Foreign Trade. Most of the other students planned to go into export-import trade, but Frank and Dick thought they might do better by producing some commodity. On a trip to Central America, they studied the possibilities of lumber in Honduras and cattle in El Salvador, finally decided on cotton in Nicaragua.

They leased a 237-acre plot near Managua, got a $7,000 bank loan, bought a tractor on credit, and set to work. Neither of them had ever operated a tractor before. "We had a big field," Dick recalls, "so we just turned her loose and fiddled around until we sort of got the hang of it." Once they found out how to run the tractor, they fitted it with lights and ran it at night.

They stretched their money to the limit ("for six months we didn't drink a beer"), battled leaf worms, boll weevils, and occasional Nicaraguans who found unopened cotton bolls good to eat. While native growers (most of whom work their plantations with cheap hired labor) were paying out costly bounties for boll weevils caught by hand and stuffed into bottles, Frank and Dick were spraying insecticides under a hot tropical sun.

This week the two yanquis are back in the U.S. for a brief vacation. They plan to return to Nicaragua shortly, and have already signed up a 700-acre tract at Tipitapa for their second crop. They will need two more tractors, two more jeeps, plenty of equipment and supplies. But they expect to have no trouble financing these expanded operations: their 170-bale first crop brought them a net profit of nearly $40,000.

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