SPAN: December 1962

"Mother and Child in Stained Glass"

by Zehra Rehmatulla.

CONTENTS 4

THE MOON

by V. S. Nanda

ADVENTURE

12

SPACE SURVIVAL

by Q. D. Penman

14

GREAT ART TREASURES

by Sohindar S. Rana

23

JOHN STEINBECK

by Lokenath Bhattacharya

27

JUNIUS MALTBY by john Steinbe~k

39

TEEN-AGE SERVICE

by Ruth Tryon

42

"TO MAKE

by N. V. Sagar

48

FULTON AND

by John T. Reid

THE

50

THE MISSOURI

by Surya Sen

ARTIST

THE

BEST BEITER"

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Zehra

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of

oon

Before manned flights to the moon, a number of exploratory space projects are being undertaken, in order to glean an increasing knowledge of space environment and to ensure maximum safety factars for the first lunarnauts.

The mission of Ranger (foreground) is to take close-up televised pictures of the moon, to provide information on the nature of the lunar surface and other relevant data by crash-landing an unmanned instrumented capsule on the moon. The Ranger flights so far have been only partially successful and no television pictures have yet been obtained. Ranger 4, however, impacted the moon on April 26, 1962, hitting its far side.

Further Ranger flights are planned for 1962 and 1963.

'1 These rough-landing lunar probes will be followed by soft-landing, reconnoitring Surveyor flights. Project Surveyor aims at landing about 750 pounds, including 100 to 300 pounds of instrumentation, on the lunar surface. Its instruments will include television cameras, spectrometers and other equipment, which will examine surface features in the vicinity of the landing site, analyze the lunar atmosphere and the chemical and mineral composition of surface samples, and measure radiation. Moon orbiting vehicles are also planned as part of the Surveyor project. The first Surveyor flights are scheduled for 1964.

the astounding technological advances of recent years.

But, the indomitable spirit which impelled him to cross uncharted seas and continents will send man out towards the moon, regardless of the hazards.

The target date set by the United States' space programme for the first landing on the moon is 1970, but even among scientists there are some sceptics who regard this target as unrealistic. For instance, the well-known Austrian physicist Hans Thirring likens the task to levelling the Rocky Mountains and has made a rooo-dollar public bet with the U.S. astronomer Fred Whipple that no man will reach the moon by 1970. This point of view underlines the many technical difficulties and the possible setbacks which may hinder and delay progress towards the goal. Those in charge of the U.S. manned flight programme, known as Project Apollo are, however, inclined to be more optimistic and are convinced that the essential technology for reaching the moon is within view. In any case, they have accepted the challenge and are determined that the space programme shall proceed at top speed. D. Brainerd Holmes, director of Apollo has said: "When a great nation is faced with a technological challenge, it has to accept or go backward. Space is the future of man, and the U.S. must accept the challenge of space."

The problems involved in a successful trip to the moon and back are numerous and amazingly complex.

They are not only technical and mechanical problems, related to the designing and perfecting of spacecraft for a voyage never undertaken before in man's history. There are also physiological and biological factors to be mastered, since human beings will be exposed for the first time to unprecedented conditions of climate, weightlessness or near weightlessness and other rigours and perils alien to human experience.

Foremost among the purely technical problems is that of developing adequate rocket power to propel a massive spacecraft to a destination 250,000 miles away.

The weight of a spaceship carrying three men to the moon and back, it is estimated, will be about 75 to roo tons.

To push this weight by direct ascent through the pull and drag of the earth's gravity and atmosphere and thence to the moon, a multi-stage rocket would be required which, including the fuel, would weigh about fifty times' the payload. Such a rocket would require a thrust of twelve million pounds and would be several hundred feet tall.

At one time the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Space Flight Centre at Huntsville, Alabama, did contemplate such a mammoth vehicle.

That approach has been suspended for the present, since it is now felt that there are more acceptable alternatives to a rocket of such size and complexity and that the alternatives pose less delay in the implementation of the Apollo programme.

The search for alternates, closely linked with an investigation into the relative merits of solid-fuel and liquid-fuel boosters, has resulted in what is known as the "rendezvous" concept, and concentration on the development of Saturn C-5 rockets.

Fitted with a first stage of five Rocketdyne F- I engines, developed by a private U.S. company and operating on liquid oxygen and kerosene, the three-staged Saturn C-5 will take off from the ground with 7,500,000 lbs. of thrust.

Its second stage will have five J-2 engines burning liquid hydrogen, which is the highest energy rocket fuel known, with a total thrust of 1,000,000 lbs. Between them the two stages will be capable of putting a roo-ton payload into earth orbit 140 miles high. In the third stage a single J-2 engine will push 90,000 lbs. to earth escape velocity and take it to moon orbit. While the Saturn C-5 has yet to take final shape, it is expected to be an intricate vehicle of colossal size, some 325 feet tall and will be assembled on huge 2500-ton racks. Expenditure on the assembly build-

ings, crawlers, roads and launch sites for the C-5s at Cape Canaveral is estimated at 400 million dollars.

The rendezvous method, on which Saturn C-5 development is based, would break the voyage to the moon into stages, and has the advantage of requiring much smaller rocket power than would be needed for a direct ascent. Two forms of the rendezvous technique have been studied. One application is the Earth Orbit Rendezvous.

In this plan two rocket vehicles would meet in an orbit around the earth. They would dock, or couple together.

The moon-bound Apollo would fuel from the other, an unmanned oxygen tanker unit, then depart for the moon.

The other variation of the technique is the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous which envisions a single rocket vehicle proceeding to the moon from an earth orbit, with its upper manned stage, the Apollo, to be parked in a lunar orbit.

From the Apollo astronauts would descend to the moon in a smaller craft, or bug, fitted with its own minor rocket engines for landing on the lunar surface. After a brief sojourn, they would return in their bug to rendezvous in orbit with the mother ship, coupling and transfering to Apollo for the return to earth. The bug would be left to circle round the moon.

T

HE LUNAR RENDEZVOUS technique promises to minimize some of the difficulties of a direct shot and an Apollo landing. Since the multi-ton spacecraft would not itself land on the moon, it would not be necessary for Apollo to carry the heavy equipment for a lunar landing and take-off. Even carrying the bug, the total weight of the craft would be light enough for the capacity of a single Saturn C-5.

Of these two operations, until lately NASA favoured the Earth Orbit Rendezvous. Although no irrevocable decision has yet been made, a recent reassessment of the major elements of hazard, and the time and cost involved in each method, has led to a preference for the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. In the latter plan, it must be accepted that, if anything went wrong in rendezvous manoeuvres near the moon, the crew would be lost without adequate propulsion to get back to the earth, and in view of the enormous distance, any rescue flight would have little chance of success. On the other hand, the technique employed in either operation would be essentially the same and docking in a lunar orbit would be attempted only after several crews had become proficient in rendezvous practice in an earth orbit.

These exercises in space navigation and manoeuvres will necessarily be long and expensive and much more hazardous than the simple earth-circling feats of the first astronauts. Basic training will consist of two-man flight programme for which Gemini capsules will be used.

Gemini follows the general design of the one-ton Mercury craft used by Alan Shepard, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter, but will weigh two to three times more and will have fifty per cent more cabin space to accommodate its crew of two. Principal training manoeuvres will be concerned with docking of a propulsion unit with the manned craft. Accurate ground launching marksmanship is vital, in order that the two units can approach rendezvous in correct orbital relationship to each other. This is likely to be achieved in initial exercises by launching the two units into the same orbital plane at different altitudes, rather than by attempting to put them into the same orbit.

They would then be manoeuvred into a coupling position.

In executing the Gemini operation, an unmanned Agena-B rocket would be shot first into an orbit about 300 miles up and, after careful determination of the orbit by ground observers, a Titan rocket would launch the

In later rendezvous practice the astronauts will dispense with ground guidance and make their own calculations. They will also actually dock and couple the two satellites, bringing together interlocking parts to make a firm junction. The main difficulty in this coupling operation will not be the tremendous speed of the two approaching vehicles travelling at about 18,000 miles per hour.

The force of impact is not determined by this velocity but by the speed of the vehicles in relation to each other. This relative speed can be controlled by the astronauts to as slow as one foot per second, so that the two units come together with a slight snap. The real difficulty is in ensuring that the vehicles meet in the proper end to end position, and this manoeuvre may have to be carried out by the astronauts by visual control from within their cabin.

There are also such unsolved problems as the tendency of smooth metal surfaces to weld on contact in a vacuum.

Many ingenious devices are being tested to meet the desired objective of an absolutely flightworthy coupling in space which will not affect the accurate functioning of the electrical control and other connections in the craft.

AFTER INTENSIVE trammg by Gemini crews in rendezvous techniques, they will transfer to the more complicated Apollo spacecraft. Weighing about 85,000 Ibs., Apollo will consist of three parts: the command module to house the three-man crew; the service module containing rocket engines, propellants and supplies; and the landing bug or Lunar Expedition Vehicle. The spacecraft will first be flown in the earth orbit where its many components and systems will be thoroughly tested and evaluated in a space environment. The astronauts will go through all the operations which they will have to carry out when making a rendezvous in an orbit of the moon. They will enter the bug, detach it and make brief independent sorties in it before returning to earth in the main vehicle.

When all training and other preparations for a flight to the moon are complete, another complicated feat of marksmanship will have to be performed. The moon has the most irregular orbit of any heavenly body in the solar system and is a difficult target. Very careful and elaborate computations will be necessary to ensure that the Apollo spacecraft is launched from earth orbit when its orbital planes and the moon are in the proper geometrical juxtaposition. Even an exceedingly small angular error in aim may miss the target by thousands of miles. According to one calculation, the opportunity for launching from earth orbit towards the moon will occur somewhere between once every 3.6 days and once every 10.6 days, and during these periods the "launch window" will vary from as little as four to as much as twenty-seven hours. At the proper instant, on a command from the ground, the Apollo craft will be fired into an elliptical trajectory towards the moon.

I t will travel at an initial speed of about 25,000 miles per hour as it leaves earth orbit. Its speed will diminish constantly over the long distance and rise again to about 6,000 miles in the vicinity of the moon. The trip is expected to take some sixty hours or two-and-a-half days.

Although the Apollo spacecraft will be under constant surveillance by ground control and NASA's worldwide network of tracking stations, after it is about 100,000 miles out the astronauts' own judgment and controls will be a major element in the success of the mission. They' will have to take continuous bearings on stars and the moon to make any needed navigational corrections which

must be within, small limits as there will not be enough fuel for long detours. Apollo and its crew will face three major hazards: the dense belt of electron and ion radiation near the earth known as the Van Allen radiation belts; cosmic rays of great penetrating force from outer space; and solar flares, which are storms of deadly particles shot out by eruptions on the sun's surface. Protection against the lethal solar flares, which at full intensity could burn the spacecraft to a cinder, may be difficult. It will therefore probably be necessary to schedule flights for a period which the astrophysicists can predict will be free of heavy sun-flare activity.

"In the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous plan, the Apollo astronauts will, on arriving near the moon, fire retrorockets to put their ship into a 100-mile high lunar orbit.

Two of the crew will crawl into the bug, which will have its own rocket engines, and, achieve an elliptical orbit dipping to within ten miles of the moon's surface.

They will already be familiar with some of the moon's essential features through their study of photographs and charts and the data collected by prior instrumented lunar probes such as the Ranger and Surveyor projects.

Even so, the moon will be a strange and awesome new world for these first voyagers as they hover over it and look for a suitable landing.

At last the bug will descend and its spidery legs will gingerly touch the lunar surface. No one knows how hostile is this airless surface which has been exposed to strong radiation for billions of years. It is probable that the first astronauts will take off after a very brief survey, but later crews, walking buoyantly in the moon's low gravity, may spend up to four days taking photographs, measurements and samples of surface matter and possibly performing other experiments.

Their mission completed, the astronauts will get into the bug again, fire their rockets and rise into rendezvous orbit to rejoin the mother ship. The bug will then be abandoned to circle round the moon and the Apollo and crew will return to earth. While the Centre at Cape Canaveral will still be able to exercise remote control of the spacecraft and will help with navigational computations, any malfunctions or repairs will have to be handled by the crew themselves. At midcourse computations must be checked and corrections made to ensure that the capsule re-enters the earth's atmosphere in a precise forty-milewide corridor. Failing this, it would either overshoot the earth and be lost in the solar system or burn up.

On re-entry into the strong gravity field of the earth, the spaceship will be negotiating the severest and most hazardous part of its journey. The speed will increase again to about 25,000 miles per hour and tremendous heat will be' generated, posing a serious problem. In current Apollo designs, deceleration is left mainly to the drag of the atmosphere while the heat is dissipated by a heat shield that gradually burns away. Studies on the reentry heat problem are,exploring other more effective safeguards to be incorporated in the final design.

Some of the obstacles impeding travel to the moon may at present seem almost insurmountable. But it is a project which has fired the imaginations of men and to which all the resources of human endeavour and ingenuity will be directed in full measure. The rendezvous technique is regarded by many as the vital key to opening up of all space, and it is possible that once the landing on the moon has been accomplished, the moon itself may become a rendezvous station for even more daring explorations into inter-planetary regions .•

The artist's concept, opposite, painted for SPAN by M. Mullick, illustrates steps involved in a lunar landing as planned at present for Project Apollo. Speeding from the earth (I),

module, Apollo capsule and lunar the Apollo spacecraft consisting of three parts-service bug, attached to the nose of the capsule-will enter a circular lunar orbit about 100 miles high. Two of the crew will transfer to the bug which will then separate from the mother ship (2) and will be propelled by its own rocket engines into an elliptical orbit towards the moon's surface. From a height of about ten miles the bug will slowly descend to the moon and land.

(3) After brief exploration, the astronauts will re-enter the bug and launch towards Apollo's orbit. Rendezvous will be made (4) and the bug will 6e abandoned (5) to circle around the moon, after which Apollo will set its course (6) for the earth.

This life-support suit is designed future astronauts to move about in space outside their spaceships. The 160-pound pack includes gas jet stabilization and propulsion devices and equipment to support a human life in space for periods up to four hours. while assembling. repairing or servicing such craft in orbit or in deep space. to enable

SPACE SURVIVAL F

OR THE CONQUEST of space' on which man has just embarked, both man and machine have to cope with conditions never experienced before in human history. While machines of fantastic power are now being perfected to propel spaceships which will take man on his voyage to the moon and other planets, energetic and novel experimentation is also proceeding to solve the unprecedented problems of meeting man's basic needs during his extended journeys in space.

Limitations of accommodation in spacecraft and the prohibitive cost of rocketing supplies into space from earth make it imperative that alternative means should be found of meeting these basic needs of the astronauts for food, water and oxygen. There is also the allied problem of disposal of the carbon dioxide exhaled by them and of other body wastes. .

Among the scientists who have been

working on this complex problem is Dr. Arthur]. Pilgrim, head of the Life Support Systems of the Boeing Company's Bioastronautics Section, located at Seattle, Washington. His research is centred on the feasibility of turning a spaceship into what is termed a "closed system." Such a system would be based on the photosynthesis process, in which energy needed for plant growth is derived from the conversion of carbon dioxide and water into sugar, while oxygen is given off when the plants are exposed to light. This system in a spaceship would utilize human wastes, which contain water and a high proportion of nitrogen, to fertilize and nourish certain types of plants. Water, oxygen, food and waste products would pass through an endless cycle to be used over and over again.

Since plants might be the sole source of food in space, they would have to be edible, as well as nutritious and appetizing enough to keep the astronauts physically fit and mentally contented. They would be plants capable of thriving on human wastes, absorbing large amounts of carbon dioxide and releasing large amounts of oxygen in a relatively short time. Other relevant considerations are weight and ability to survive under conditions of weightlessness and cosmic radiation.

To find the plants most suited to meet these rigid requirements, Dr. Pilgrim and his assistants have been experimenting with a wide range of plant life. Two groups on which the unit is working at present are: broadleaf plants, such as dandelions, cabbage and lettuce, and certain marine plants. To grow plants without soil, which would handicap the spaceship with additional weightload, Dr. Pilgrim is using a mineral-rich solution formed from human wastes and water.

The liquid plant-food is sprayed directly onto the exposed roots of the plants. Such simple marine plants as algae-many of which are monocellular, with no roots, stems, leaves, flowers or seeds-seem to be the most promising.

Some ten thousand different species of algae have already been identified.

It is algae which are familiar as the slime in a fish tank, the green scum on a pond and as certain kinds of seaweed in the oceans. They grow in a wide range of colours and sizes and some specie or the other is found in every part of the world. A strain of dark green algae native to the State of Texas, which belongs to a group called Chlorella, has yielded encouraging results in Dr. Pilgrim's experiments. This particular strain has a high nutritional value as it contains about fifty per cent protein plus fats, carbo-hydrates, minerals and vitamins, and has also the considerable advantage of doubling its dry weight every two and a half hours. It is estimated that algae to supply one man's daily requirements of food could be grown ,in an area of less than five cubic feet, and the same quantity of algae would also supply him with enough oxygen.

On a spaceship it is proposed that the algae be grown in a device called a photosynthetic gas-exchanger. Human wastes, broken down by bacteria and chemicals, would be mi~ed with water and piped with carbon dioxide into a large glass tank containing algae.

The tank would be illuminated by fluorescent lamps to stimulate photosynthesis. Other pipes would carry oxygen and the day's crop of algae away from the tank. Oxygen produced by the algae would be fed into the spaceship's atmosphere. Mter extraction of algae, the solution would be returned to the tank. The algae would be dried to make a flour-like substance.

With the addition of artificial flavouring, taste and odour can be improved and many different foods prepared from the "flour." In fact tests have shown that, when suitably prepared and flavoured, algae cookies taste no different from ordinary white flour cakes.

Although experiments with the Chlorella strain have been successful, it is possible that another species might prove to be even more suitable for the peculiar conditions of space journeys.

Dr. Pilgrim's studies are therefore continuing and thousands of other specimens of algae are being examined .•

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Great Art Treasures

EARLY IN the twentieth century an elegantly dressed businessman in his late fifties visited an art gallery in New York. He was shown a painting tagged three hundred dollars. Astonished at the price, the shrewd visitor looked at the art piece intently for a while and then asked the dealer: "Are they paying that kind of money for¡ these things ?"

Less than twenty years later, this very gentleman paid almost a million dollars for a single painting- The Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi. He spent a good many years accumulating masterpieces, most notably mediaeval and Renaissance Italian paintings and sculptures, and by the time he finished collecting he had paid out more money for art than any other man in United States history.

This famous connoisseur was New York's dime-store tycoon Samuel Henry Kress, a self-made multimillionaire.

Any other person in his place would have liked to see such rare art possessions set as jewels in a private museum but Kress preferred to have his art collections spread around the country. Today Kress-collected art adorns the walls of some forty-five art galleries, big and small, in various parts of the United States.

Kress made a modest beginning as a collector of art. It was the Florentine art dealer Count Allessandro Contini-Bonacossi who launched Kress on a purchase programme of Italian art, which assumed full scale proportion after 1924. Soon Kress was buying art in big lots. Though his wholesale buying ended up with a sizeable number of second and third-rate paintings, his collection also included many masterpieces. The art dealers found him to be a knowledgeable buyer and a shrewd appraiser of art. For months and sometimes years he would pour over photographs of paintings and sculpture which he contemplated buying. He spent hours in the corridors of New York's Metropolitan Museum comparing its possessions with his prospective purchases. Collection of paintings and sculptures which Kress called "my children" had by this time become the major preoccupation of this sturdy, silent business magnate who never married and made few friends.

By 1929 when Kress moved from his modest apartment in midtown Manhattan to a spacious fiat in the fashionable Upper Fifth Avenue in New York, his art collections crowded the walls, stairways and even adorned the ceilings of his house. He had to hire a curator to catalogue his art possessions.

EL GRECO: St. Francis Venerating the Crucifix Donated to the DeYoung Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California.

The millionaire had already passed his sixty-fifth birthday when in 1929 he incorporated the Samuel H. Kress Foundation "to promote the moral, physical and mental welfare of the human race." This foundation took over the management of the Kress collection under the guidance of Mr. Kress himself. The foundation continued to acquire new art pieces and made donations to small municipal or university museums, the only qualification for such a donation being that the museum be located in states served by the Kress stores.

In the 1930's Kress became a client of the art dealer Joseph Duveen who negotiated one of the most widely publicized of the Kress purchases. In 1935, when Kress acquired Duccio's The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew for $250,000, the Kress collection attained acknowledged eminence and Samuel Kress became the United States' Number One collector.

At this point, Kress commenced giving away his art treasures in a big way. New York's Metropolitan Museum, of which Samuel Kress was elected a trustee in 1936, was the first major beneficiary. One of the earliest presentations to this museum included Luca di Tomme's Madonna and Child, a noteworthy specimen of the rare fourteenth century Siena School of painting.

In 1938 Kress acquired another celebrated workGiorgione's Adoration oj the Shepherds. By this time Kress's preoccupation with art had invaded the realm of his business and in December that year this masterpiece of Italian painting was displayed in a window of the Kress store in New York during the Christmas season.

Later, this painting was presented to the National Gallery in Washington.

Not only did Kress purchase great art pieces at fabulous prices, he spent a fortune to restore these masterpieces to their original brilliance. For this delicate and highly specialized work Kress had hired a whole crew of craftsmen from Italy. Each new acquisition was X-rayed, cleaned and the damaged surfaces repaired by experts.

Each painting was mounted in a frame in keeping with the period to which the painting belonged. At times new frames were created out of ancient carved mouldings. The collections were then stored in heat and humidity-controlled rooms where museum directors came to see works which the foundation would lend or donate to them.

In the mid-thirties Kress was contemplating a private museum for his collection which was growing at a tremendous rate. But he changed his mind when the ational Gallery in Washington was opened in 1937. Kress pre-

sented the new museum 380 paintings and eighteen sculptures mainly by Italian and French masters.

Kress was very particular about the display of the art pieces he had donated to the National Gallery. He spent hours with his art advisers discussing frames and choosing pieces of velvet for shadow-boxes. He had models built of the gallery rooms in which his collection was to be installed and spent weeks planning the positioning of the paintings by tacking tiny photographs on the walls in various arrangements. Kress personally made the formal presentation of these works at the dedication of the National Gallery in March 1941. With this was started a large scale dispersal of the Kress collections.

In February 1945 Samuel Kress had the honour and satisfaction of being elected president of the National Gallery. Later in the same year, Kress suffered a paralytic attack which left him bedridden and impaired his sight.

His brother Rush Kress took charge of the collection and work of the foundation.

Besides offering the Americans an opportunity to see rare masterpieces of art, the Samuel Kress Foundation donated large sums for the promotion of health and higher education in the country. A grant for research was made to the American Heart Association in 1948, and to the

New York University Bellevue Medical Centre a gift of eight million dollars was made in 1949. Equipment was donated to the Memorial Centre for Cancer and Allied Diseases, New York City, in 1952 and a year later the National Practical Nurse Education Association received a Kress grant of $30,000 for its recruiting programme.

More than half a million dollars has been given for the restoration of historic churches in five European countries.

The Kress business multiplied in the meantime and

by July 1955 the Kress stores totalled 264 i.n different parts of the United States, with a net earnings of over ten million dollars.

Kress died in September 1955 in his apartment, surrounded by masterpieces he was unable to see. In his will he left the larger part of his estate to the National Gallery and to charity.

Since 1939 more than 3,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, tapestries and other art objects have flowed from the seemingly boundless supply of Kress art treasures.

Last February, the final items of the Kress collection were donated: eleven paintings were given to the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, the last of 45 institutions in all parts of the U.S. which have received a total of $50 million of Kress-collected art .•

SPAN is especially pleased to present to its readers as a specialftaturefor Christmas, this article on the recipient of the Nobel Prizefor Literaturefor I962. The accompanying short story, Junius Maltby, from Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven, typifies the qualities of his works cited in the Nobel award: H ••• at one and the same time realistic and imaginatiue writings, distinguished as they are by a sympathetic humour and a social perception."

LITERATURE MUST reflect an awareness of the isolation of man from man. In the work of John Steinbeck, that sense of separateness often takes the form of what is called "social consciousness," and may be detected in most of his major works as the inexorable voice of social protest. .

Great fiction-even good fiction-deals with individuals who, however intimately related, are inviolable and separate persons. Out of this condition, as in life, arises the need for communication, compassion and relationships with each other which satisfy the desire to influence others or to attain harmony of purpose with.them.

Art or literature-like society-seeks, not a unity which eliminates what is individual, but a community, comprising distinct human persons whose relationship depends upon both their separateness and their identity of purpose or values.

In the novels of Steinbeck, as in tnose of many other contemporary writers., the protest is against those social, political or economic forces which separate men from each other. His works may not directly advocate social reform, but in them there is this implied perception that the contemporary challenge to human experience calls for a strenuous, perhaps desperate, effort for separated individuals to draw close to one another, to unite in the enjoyment of life by means of a human relationship, to proceed together acr,osswhat Henry James once termed "the great greasy sea" of the anarchic modern world. .

But to say only this would amount to oversimplification. Steinbeck's literary reputation has suffered, and still continues to suffer, from a body of criticism precisely

so generalized. Some have tried to explain away his social consciousness as an "unsympathetic, in some places excoriating, treatment of middle-class morality and ideals," without taking into account his genuine social sympathies and his great compassion for fellow human beings. Moreover, Steinbeck has been a very uneven writer and there is no clearly coherent evolution of style or perspective in his work. This is testified to by the author himself when he says, "My experience in writing has followed an almost invariable pattern. Since by the process of writing a book I have outgrown that book, and since I like to write, I have not written two books alike."

There may be some truth in the feeling, fairly widespread, that there is more than one Steinbeck. In The Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle, and a number of short stories, Steinbeck is an angry man whose sympathetic awareness of the fateful division between man and man has generated powerful dramatic tension in his work. In some of his other works Steinbeck emerges as a gifted humorist whose talent instils cheerfulness into the midst of adversity-the Steinbeck of Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, The Wayward Bus. This is the warm-hearted and amused author, who sometimes seems to be only distantly related to the angry Steinbeck. A careful analysis of his writing career, however, will show that the two Steinbecks are one.

That he has been preoccupied with certain basic concepts which recur with s.urprising consistency throughout all his important work. Whether his posture is one of humour or of wrath, compassion is the common factor and always ennobles the character to whom he gives exprt;ssion, whether that character be a whole man or a mutilated life.

John Steinbeck novelist of wrath, poet with humour

Despite heated controversy, John Steinbeck is one of America's major novelists. Along with Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner and Wolfe, he belongs to the group of great American novelists of this time. Already in the . early 1940's-by which time he had written Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, The Red Pony, and the lyrical stories of The Pastures of Heaven-Steinbeck was one of the bright lights in the literary firmament.

Not much of his life, except an outline of the major events, is known to the public. To the inquirers for biographical data he once replied in characteristic manner, "Please feel free to make up your own facts about me as you need them. I can't remember how much of me really happened and how much I invented ....

Biography by its very nature must be half-fiction." And again elsewhere he is known to have said, "I really like the biographical method used by my dictionary. It would say, John Steinbeck, writer, born 1902, died (?). There is method. There is finish. There is ~ven suspense." Still the facts are there, and also, in his correspondence with McIntosh and Otis, his literary agents for many years, there appears a singularly honest and revealing record of. what Steinbeck himself thought about his way of writing.

John Ernst Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in the Salinas Valley, California, of an Irish mother and a half-German father. The Salinas Valley is the most important biographical link between the writer and his writings. It was in this area of California, bounded on the north and south by the Pajaro and Jolon valleys and on the west and east by the Pacific Ocean and the Galiban

Mountains, that Steinbeck found the materials of his fiction. It was here that he came to know and admire the paisanos and bums of Tortilla Flat, Cannery Rowand Sweet Thursday; here he met and worked with the migrant labourers of In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath; here also he met the people of The Long Valley, The Pastures of Heaven, The Red Pony, The Wayward Bus and East of Eden. From this country he acquired that intimate knowledge and love of nature which plays a significant part in his works.

After inconclusive studies at Stanford University, he led a roving life, becoming in turn ranch-hand, carpenter's mate, painter's apprentice, chemist, labourer and journalist-until, while caretaker of an isolated estate which was snow-bound during most of the year, he started writing seriously. His first book to attract attention was Tortilla Flat, published in 1935-a story about a community of paisanos, whose blood is a mixture of Spanish, Mexican, Italian and other assorted varieties, and whose one main activity is the cultivation of indolence in all its forms.

Here, for the first time, Steinbeck showed his profound power of sympathetic observation, applied to the como' passionate delineation of persons living outside the boundaries of polite society.

Since the publication of Tortilla Flat, he has written a number of novels, stories and plays, many of which have been produced as successful movies. These include Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, considered by many to be his greatest book, Forgotten Village, Sea of Cortez, The Moon Is Down, The Wayward Bus, The Pearl, The Russian Journal and East of Eden. During World War II, Steinbeck

Junius

Maltby was engaged by the U.S. Army Air Forces on special writing assignments. The New York Herald Tribune sent him to Europe as a correspondent. He was also in England for some time on the staff of the Daily Express.

All through his writing career Steinbeck has worn two masks, one tragic, the other comic. Some of his stories are warm and humorous; others are intensely passionate and tragic. But he has never been accused of insincerity.

Once writing to his agents about one of his stories he did not particularly like to see in print, he said, ÂŤMice (Of Mice and Men) was a thin, brittle book, and an experiment but at least it was an honest experiment. This one is an experiment in trickery and trickery in a book is treachery."

CONCERN FOR the common man or even the underdog, the writer's need to protest against social injustice, are not elements new to American literature. Long before Steinbeck, .Emerson urged on his contemporaries to write precisely about those things when he said, "Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, Ollr fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boasts and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung." Many others' who preceded Steinbeck wrote about these things, but Steinbeck has done it in a different way. In translating these persons, places and occupations into narrative, he has clothed all of it in a warm haze of trustful moral purity, giving it an aura ofinnocence that might have been typical of Emerson, Thoreau or Whitman, and which claimed to detect beauty and purity amidst the lowliest squalor. The inhabitants of the Pastures of Heaven or of Tortilla Flateven their liars, lunatics and prostitutes-are well-intentioned eccentrics or innocents, none of whom is truly vicious. Similarly, in his more violent novels, such as The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck seems never willing to believe that there is anything seriously wrong with the human heart: the causes of wrongs must lie elsewhere--in social, economic, or political flaws of society.

But this element of innocence is not all. There is also in Steinbeck's writings a great deal of anger, either expressed overtly or couched in mild sarcasm. The Grapes of Wrath, unique for its humanity and power, is a splendid specimen of his passion and ire. It is not sentimental propaganda, but one of the most emotionally compelling novels in the history of literature. It relates the story of a dispossessed American community, the Okies, driven from their land in Oklahoma by the implacable march of natural erosion and consequent economic failure. These displaced people took flight from their drought-stricken "Dust Bowl" country of the 1930's-before the reclamation programmes of Roosevelt's New Deal-to the fruit orchard sections of California, but not, alas, to find a promised land in the "Golden West."

The book was of great topical interest, since it appeared at a moment when concern for alleviating the lot of the migrants was widespread. And The Grapes of Wrath did have a practical and beneficial effect on the migrants' condition in California. But one does not now read it for these reasons. This odyssey of the Okies is not merely an indictment of industrial civilization or an important social document, it is also a chronicle of the fortitude and devotion of the common man.

One of the great literary 'merits of Steinbeck is that, while describing depressing human conditions, he imbues his characters with the unconquerable qualities of hope and love and an enduring dignity. A blend of two distinct motifs can be detected in his fiction. The first is the contemporary social motif, the other the classical American motif.

The latter reaffirms¡a sense of promise and possibility and

of as yet unspoiled novelty in man and his habitation. It is a celeb rational sense of life, having a mystical sympathy both for the individual and for what Whitman called the "en-masse," man collectively. This nineteenth-century vision of New England and the American east has been successfully naturalized by Steinbeck in his native California and translated into its idiom. Again, in his stories as a whole and especially in The Grapes of Wrath and East qf Eden, he has re-enacted an old American dream of the westward march of people from the exhausted East and other regions. .

Two principal points of criticism relate to Steinbeck's work. The first point concerns the conflict between his poetry and politics. It is often contended, not without reason, that Steinbeck's poetry, the truly creative side of his work, has remained faithful to the classical American tradition, while his narratives have become more and more engrossed with the topical and political. His career has been considered by many to be something of a casualty, due to an unlucky wedding between art and rebellion which has resulted in a fatal hostility between his poetic and political impulses. But this conflict, between art and rebellion, is to a certain extent inevitable in today's literature, the latter being a necessary reflection of the inherent ambivalence of contemporary existence.

The second point of criticism, which has a special relevance to his outright socially conscious works, is that Steinbeck has often tended to sacrifice the separate man, to submerge the individual in the group, and that in his work one rarely comes across the image of a concrete individual personality, resolutely differentiated and dimensional.

This emphasis on group-men, and not individuals, was certainly stimulated by the ruggedly destructive individualism of the 1930'S. But the art of narrative has to deal with distinct human persons who are not group-men but companions.

One of Steinbeck's characters says, "You have never known a person. You aren't aware of persons, Joseph; only people. You can't see units, Joseph, only the whole."

And that is equally true of Steinbeck himself. Again, in In Dubious Battle, the story of a labour struggle on California fruit farms, Dr. Burton elaborates the same idea, saying: "I want to watch these group-men (the strikers), for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men. A man in a group isn't himself at all, he's a cell in an organism that isn't like him any more than the cells in your body are like you."

But, happily, John Steinbeck now appears not to have stopped there. In East of Eden, one of his more recent novels, comes at last this revelation withheld from the characters of his earlier works: "And this I believe. That the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: an idea, religion or government which limits or destroys the individual."

Elsewhere, in the journal he kept while working on East of Eden, he states a newly conceived moral position, a perspective long delayed in the perception of John Steinbeck, the novelist, and one which could add a new dimension to his subsequent works. In the journal he writes: "The writers of today, even I, have a tendency to celebrate the destruction of the spirit and God knows it is destroyed often enough. It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to encourage. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half-developed culture, it is this-great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support weak cowardice.".

J un i us

Maltby

by John Steinbeck

Reprinted by permission of the author's 0lent

Š

J

UNIUS MALTBY was a small young man of good and cultured family and decent education. When his father died bankrupt, Junius got himself inextricably entangled in a clerkship, against which he feebly struggled for ten years.

After work Junius retired to his furnished room, patted the cushions of his morris chair and spent the evening reading. Stevenson's essays he thought nearly the finest things in English; he read Travels with a Donkey many times.

/932 by John Steinbeck.

One evening soon after his thirty-fifth birthday, Junius fainted on the steps of his boarding house. When he recovered consciousness, he noticed for the first time that his breathing was difficult and unsatisfactory. He wondered how long it had been that way. The doctor whom he consulted was kind and even hopeful.

"You're by no means too far gone to get well," he said. "But you really must take those lungs out of San Francisco. If you stay here in the fog, you won't live a year.

Move to a warm, dry climate."

Junius Maltby

The accident to his health filled Junius with pleasure, for it cut the strings he had been unable to sever for himself. He had five hundred dollars, not that he ever saved any money; he had simply forgotten to spend it. "With that much," he said, "I'll either recover and make a clean, new start, or else I'll die and be through with the whole business." .

A man in his office told him of the warm, protected valley, the Pastures of Heaven, and Junius went there 'immediately. The name pleased him. "It's either an omen that I'm not going to live," he thought, "or else it's a nice symbolic substitute for death." He felt that the name meant something personal to him, and he was very glad, because for ten years nothing in the world had been personal to him. , There were, in the Pastures of Heaven, several families who wanted to take boarders. Junius inspected each one, and finally went to live on the farm of the widow Quaker.

She needed the money, and besides, he could sleep in a shed separated from the farmhouse. Mrs. Quaker had two small boys and kept a hired man to work the farm.

The warm climate worked tenderly with Junius' lungs. Within the year his color was good and he had gained in weight. He was quiet and happy on the farm, and what pleased him more, he had thrown out the ten years of the office and had grown superbly lazy. Junius' thin blond hair went uncombed; he wore his glasses far down on his square nose, for his eyes were getting stronger and only the habit offeeling spectacles caused him to wear them. Throughout the day he had always some small stick . protruding from his mouth, a habit only the laziest and most ruminative of men acquire. This convalescence took place in 1910.

In 191 I, Mrs. Quaker began to worry about what the neighbors were saying. When she considered the implication of having a single man in her house, she became upset and nervous. As soon as Junius' recovery seemed sure beyond doubt, the widow confessed her trepidations. He married her, immediately and gladly. Now he had a home and a golden future, for the new Mrs. Maltby owned two hundred acres of grassy hillside and five acres of orchard and vegetable bottom. Junius sent for his books, his morris chair with the adjustable back, and his good copy of Velasquez' Cardinal. The future was a pleasant and sunshiny afternoon to him.

MRs. MALTBY promptly discharged the hired man and tried to put her husband to work; but in this she encountered a resistance the more bewildering because it presented no hard front to strike at. During his convalescence, Junius had grown to love laziness. He liked the valley and the farm, but he liked them as they were; he didn't want to plant new things, nor to tear out old. When Mrs. Maltby put a hoe in his hand and set hiin to work in the vegetable garden, she found him, likely enough, hours later, dangling his feet in the meadow stream and reading his pocket copy of Kidnapped. He was sorry; he didn't know how it had happened. And that was the truth.

At first she nagged him a great deal about his laziness and his sloppiness of dress, but he soon developed a faculty for never listening to her. It would be impolite, he considered, to notice her when she was not being a lady. It would be like staring at a cripple. And Mrs. Maltby, after she had battered at his resistance of fog for a time, took to sniveling and neglecting her hair.

Between 1911 and 1917, the Maltbys grew very poor.

Junius simply would not take care of the farm. They even sold a few acres of pasture land to get money for food and

clothing, and even then there was never enough to eat.

Poverty sat cross-legged on the farm, and the Maltbys were ragged. They had never any new clothes at all, but Junius had discovered the essays of David Grayson. He wore overalls and sat under the sycamores that lined the meadow stream. Sometimes he read Adventures in Contentment to his wife and two sons.

Early in 1917, Mrs. Maltby found that she was going to have a baby, and late in the same year the wartime influenza epidemic struck the family with a dry viciousness.

Perhaps because they were undernourished the two boys

were stricken simultaneously. For three days the house seemed filled to overflowing with flushed, feverish children whose nervous fingers strove to cling to life by the threads of their bed clothes. For three days they struggled weakly, and on the fourth, both of the boys died. Their mother didn't know it, for she was confined, and the neighbors who came to help in the house hadn't the courage nor the cruelty to tell her. The black fever came upon her while she was in labor and killed her before she ever saw her child.

The neighbor women who helped at the birth told the story throughout the valley that Junius Maltby read

books by the stream while his wife and children died. But this was only partly true. On the day of their seizure, he dangled his feet in the stream, because he didn't know they were ill, but thereafter he wandered vaguely from one to the other of the dying children, and talked nonsense to them. He told the eldest boy how diamonds are made.

At the bedside of the other, he explained the beauty, the antiquity and the symbolism of the swastika. One life went out while he read aloud the second chapter of Treasure Island, and he didn't even know it had happened until he finished the chapter and looked up. During those days he was bewildered. He brought out the only things he had and offered them, but they had no potency with death.

He knew in advance they wouldn't have, and that made it all the more terrible to him.

When the bodies were all gone, Junius went back to the stream and read a few pages of Travels with a Donkey.

He chuckled uncertainly over the obstinacy of Modestine. Who but Stevenson could have named a donkey "Modestine" ?

One of the neighbor women called him in and cursed him so violently that he was embarrassed and didn't listen.

She put her hands on her hips and glared at him with contempt. And then she brought his child, a son, and laid it in his arms. When she looked back at him from the gate, he was standing with the howling little brute in his arms.

He couldn't see any place to put it down, so he held it for a long time.

The people of the valley told many stories about Junius. Sometimes they hated him with the loathing busy people have for lazy ones, and sometimes they envied his laziness; but often they pitied him because he blundered so. No one in the valley ever realized that he was happy.

They told now, on a doctor's advice, Junius bought a goat to milk for the baby. He didn't inquire into the sex of his purchase nor give his reason for wanting a goat.

When it arrived he looked under it, and very seriously asked, "Is this a normal goat?"

"Sure," said the owner.

"But shouldn't there be a bag or something immediately between the hind legs?-for the milk, I mean."

The people of the valley roared about that. Later, when a new and better goat was provided, Junius fiddled with it for two days and could not draw a drop of milk.

He wanted to return this goat as defective until the owner showed him how to milk it. Some people claimed that he held the baby under the goat and let it suck its own milk, but this was untrue. The people of the valley declared they didn't know how he ever reared the child.

One day Junius went into Monterey and hired an old German to help him on the farm. He gave his new servant five dollars on account, and never paid him again. Within two weeks the hired man was so entangled in laziness that he did no more work than his employer. The two of them sat around the place together discussing things which int~rested and puzzled them-how color comes to flowers -whether there is a symbology in nature-where Atlantis lay-how the Incas interred their dead.

In the spring they planted potatoes, always too late, and without a covering of ashes to keep the bugs out.

They sowed beans and corn and peas, watched them for a time, and then forgot them. The weeds covered everything from sight. It was no unusual thing to see Junius burrow into a perfect thicket of mallow weeds and emerge carrying a pale cucumber. He had stopped wearing shoes because he liked the feeling of the warm earth on his feet, and because he had no shoes.

In the afternoon Junius talked to Jakob Stutz a great deal. "You know," he said, "when the children died, I

Junius

Maltby

thought I had reached a peculiar high peak of horror.

Then, almost while I thought it, the horror turned to sorrow and the sorrow dwindled to sadness. I didn't know my wife nor the children very well, I guess. Perhaps they were too near to me. It's a strange thing, this knowing. It is nothing but an awareness of details. There are long visioned minds and short visioned. I've never been able to see things that are close to me. For instance, I am much more aware of the Parthenon than of my own house over there." Suddenly Junius' face seemed to quiver with feeling, and his eyes brightened with enthusiasm. "Jakob," he said, "have you ever seen a picture of the frieze of the Parthenon?"

"Yes, and it is good, too," said Jakob.

Junius laid a hand on his hired man's knee. "Those horses," he said. "Those lovely' horses-bound [or a celestial pasture. Those eager and yet dignified young men setting out for an incredible fiesta that's being celebrated just around the cornice. I wonder how a man can know what a horse feels like when. it is very happy; and that sculptor must have known or he couldn't have carved them so."

That was the way it went. Junius could not stay on a subject. Often the men went hungry because they failed to find a hen's nest in the grass when it came suppertime.

The son of Junius was named Robert Louis. Junius called him that when he thought of it, but Jakob Stutz rebelled at what he considered a kind of literary preciousness. "Boys must be named like dogs," he maintained.

"One sound is sufficient for the name. Even Robert is too long. He should be called 'Bob.' " Jakob nearly got his way.

"I'll compromise with you," said Junius. "We'll call him Robbie. Robbie is really shorter than Robert, don't you think?"

He often gave way before Jakob, for Jakob continually struggled a little against the webs that were being spun about him. Now and then, with a kind of virtuous fury, he cleaned the house.

Robbie grew up gravely. He followed the men about, listening to their discussions. Junius never treated him like a little boy, because he didn't know how little boys should be treated. If Robbie made an observation the two men listened courteously and included the remark in theil"

conversation, or even used it as the germ of an investigation. They tracked down many things in the course of an afternoon. Every day there were several raids on Junius' Encyclopedia.

A huge sycamore put out a horizontal limb over the meadow stream, and on it the three sat, the men hanging their feet into the water and moving pebbles with their toes while Robbie tried extravagantly to imitate them.

Reaching the water was one of his criteria of manhood.

Jakob had by this time given up shoes; Robbie had never worn any in his life.

The discussions were erudite. Robbie couldn't use childish talk, for he had never heard any. They didn't make conversation; rather they let a seedling of thought sprout by itself, and then watched with wonder while it sent out branching limbs. They were surprised at the strange fruit their conversation bore, for they didn't direct their thinking, nor trellis nor trim it the way so many people do.

There on the limb the three sat. Their clothes were rags and their hair was only hacked off to keep it out of their eyes. The men wore long, untrimmed beards. They

watched the water-skaters on the surface of the pool below them, a pool which had been deepened by idling toes. The giant tree above them whisked softly in the wind, and occasionally dropped a leaf like a brown handkerchief.

Robbie was five years old.

"I think sycamore trees are good," he observed when a leaf fell in his lap. Jakob picked up the leaf and stripped thr: parchment from its ribs.

"Yes," he agreed, "they grow by water. Good things love water. Bad things always been dry."

"Sycamores are big and good," saidJunius. "It seems to me that a good thing or a kind thing must be very large to survive. Little good things are always destroyed by evil little things. Rarely is a big thing poisonous or treacherous.

For this reason, in human thinking, bigness is an attribute of good and littleness of evil. Do you see that, Robbie?"

"Yes," said Robbie. "I see that. Like elephants."

"Elephants are often evil, but when we think of them, they seem gentle and good."

"But water," Jakob broke in. "Do you see about water too?"

"No, not about water."

Junius

Maltby

"But I see," said Junius. "You mean that water is the seed oflife. Of the three elements water is the sperm, earth the womb and sunshine the mold of growth."

Thus they taught him nonsense.

The people of the Pastures of Heaven recoiled from Junius Maltby after the death of his wife and his two boys.

Stories of his callousness during the epidemic grew to such proportions that eventually they fell down of their own weight and were nearly forgotten. But although his neighbors forgot that Junius had read while his children died, they could not forget the problem he was becoming. Here in the fertile valley he lived in fearful poverty. While other families built small fortunes, bought Fords and radios, put in electricity and went twice a week to the moving pictures in Monterey or Salinas, Junius degenerated and became a ragged savage. The men of the valley resented his good bottom land, all overgrown with weeds, his untrimmed fruit trees and his fallen fences. The women thought with loathing of his unclean house with its littered dooryard and dirty windows. Both men and women hated his idleness and his complete lack of pride. For a while they went to visit him, hoping by their neat examples to drag him from his slothfulness. But he received them naturally and with the friendliness of equality. He wasn't a bit ashamed of his poverty nor of his rags. Gradually his neighbors came to think of Junius as an outcast. No one drove up the private road to his house any more. They outlawed him from decent society and resolved never to receive him should he visit them.

Junius knew nothing about the dislike of his neighbors. He was still gloriously happy. His life was as unreal, as romantic and as unimportant as his thinking. He was content to sit in the sun and to dangle his feet in the stream.

If he had no good clothes, at least he had no place to go which required good clothes.

ALTHOUGH. THE people almost hated Junius, they had only pity for the little boy Robbie. The women told one another how horrible it was to let the child grow up in such squalor. But, because they were mostly good people, they felt a strong reluctance for interfering with Junius' affairs.

"Wait until he's school age," Mrs. Banks said to a group of ladies in her own parlor. "We couldn't do anything now if we wanted to. He belongs to that father of his.

But just as soon as the child is six, the county'll have something to say, let me tell you."

Mrs. Allen nodded and closed her eyes earnestly.

"We keep forgetting that he's Mamie Quaker's child as much as Maltby's. I think we should have stepped in long ago. But when he goes to school we'll give the poor little fellow a few things he never had."

"The least we can do is to see that he has enough clothes to cover him," another of the women agreed.

It seemed that the valley lay crouched in waiting for the time when Robbie should go to school. When, at term opening, after his sixth birthday, he did not appear, John Whiteside, the clerk of the school board, wrote a letter to Junius Maltby.

"I hadn't thought of it," Junius said when he read it.

"I guess you'll have to go to school."

"I don't want to go," said Robbie.

"I know. I don't much want you to go, either. But we have laws. The law has a self-protective appendage called penalty. We have to balance the pleasure of breaking the law against the punishment. The Carthaginians punished

even misfortune. If a general lost a battle through bad luck, he was executed. At present we punish people for accidents of birth and circumstance in much the same manner."

In the ensuing discussion they forgot all about the letter. John Whiteside wrote a very curt note.

"Well, Robbie, I guess you'll have to go," saidJ unius, when he received it. "Of course they'll teach you a great many useful things."

"Why don't you teach me?" Robbie pleaded.

"Oh, I can't. You see I've forgotten the things they teach."

"I don't want to go at all. I don't want to learn things."

"I know you don't, but I can't see any other way out."

And so one morning Robbie trudged to school. He was clad in an ancient pair of overalls, out at the knees and seat, a blue shirt from which the collar was gone, and nothing else. His long hair hung over his grey eyes like the forelock of a range pony.

The children made a circle around him in the school yard and stared at him in silence. They had all heard of the poverty of the Maltbys and of Junius' laziness. The boys looked forward to this moment when they could torture Robbie. Here was the time come; he stood in their circle, and they only stared at him. No one said, "Where'd you get them clothes," or, "Look at his hair," the way they had intended to. The children were puzzled by their failure to torment Robbie.

As for Robbie, he regarded the circle with serious eyes. He was not in the least frightened. "Don't you play games?" he asked. "My father said you'd play games."

And then the circle broke up with howls. "He doesn't know any games."-"Let's teach him pewee."-"No, nigger-baby." "Listen! Listen! Prisoner's base first.""He doesn't know any games."

And, althOl-1ghthey didn't know why, they thought it rather a fine thing not to know games. Robbie's thin face was studious. "We'll try pewee first," he decided. He was clumsy at the new games, but his teachers did not hoot at him. Instead they quarreled for the privilege of showing him how to hold the pewee stick. There are several schools of technique in pewee. Robbie stood aside listening for a while, and at last chose his own instructor.

ROBBIE'S EFFECT on the school was immediate. The older boys let him entirely alone, but the younger ones imitated him in everything, even tearing holes in the knees of their overalls. When they sat in the sun with their backs to the school wall, eating their lunches, Robbie told them about his father and about the sycamore tree. They listened intently and wished their fathers were lazy and gentle, too.

Sometimes a few of the boys, disobeying the orders of their parents, sneaked up to the Maltby place on a Saturday, Junius gravitated naturally to the sycamore limb, and, while they sat on both sides of him, he read Treasure Island to them, or described the Gallic wars or the battle of Trafalgar. In no time at all, Robbie, with the backing of his father, became the king of the school yard.

This is demonstrated by the facts that he had no chum, that they gave him no nickname, and that he arbitrated all the disputes. So exalted was his station that no one even tried to fight with him.

Only gradually did Robbie come to realize that he was the leader of the younger boys of the school. Something self-possessed and mature about him made his com-

Junius

Maltby

panions turn to him for leadership. It wasn't long before his was the voice which decided the game to be played.

In baseball he was the umpire for the reason that no other boy could make a ruling without causing a riot. And while he played the games badly himself, questions of rules and ethics were invariably referred to him.

After a lengthy discussion with Junius and Jakob, Robbie invented two vastly popular games, one called Slinkey Coyote, a local version of Hare and Hounds, and the other named Broken Leg, a kind of glorified tag. For these two games he made rules as he needed them.

MISS MORGAN'S interest was aroused by the little boy, for he was as much a surprise in the schoolroom as he was in the yard. He could read perfectly and used a man's vocabulary, but he could.not write. He was familiar with numbers, no matter how large, yet he refused to learn even the simplest arithmetic. Robbie learned to write with the greatest of difficulty. His hand wavered crazy letters on his school pad. At length Miss Morgan tried to help him.

"Take one thing and do it over and over until you get it perfectly," she suggested. "Be very careful with each letter."

Robbie searched his memory for something he liked.

At length he wrote, "There is nothing so monsterous but we can belief it of ourselfs." He loved that monsterous.

It gave timber and profun'dity to the thing. If there were words, which through their very sound-power could drag unwilling genii from the earth, 'monsterous' was surely one of them. Over and over he wrote the sentence, putting the greatest of care and drawing on his 'monsterous.' At the end of an hour, Miss Morgan came to see how he was getting on.

"Why, Robert, where in the world did you hear that?"

"It's from Stevenson, ma'am. My father knows it by heart almost."

Of course Miss Morgan had heard all the bad stories of Junius, and in spite of them had approved of him. But now she began to have a strong desire to meet him.

Games in the school yard were beginning to fall off in interest. Robbie lamented the fact to Junius one morning before he started off to school. Junius scratched his beard and thought. "Spy is a good game," he said at last. "I remember I used to like Spy." "Who shall we spy on, though?"

"Oh, anyone. It doesn't matter. We used to spy on Italians."

Robbie ran off excitedly to school, and that afternoon, following a lengthy recourse to the school dictionary, he organized the B.A.S.S.F.E.A.]. Translated, which it never was above a whisper, this was the Boys' Auxiliary Secret Service For Espionage Against The Japanese. If for no other reason, the very magnificence of the name of this organization would have made it a force to be reckoned with. One by one Robbie took the boys into the dim greenness under the school yard willow tree, and there swore them to secrecy with an oath so ferocious that it would have done credit to a lodge. Later, he brought the group together. Robbie explained to the boys that we would undoubtedly go to war with Japan some day.

"It behoofs us to be ready," he said. "The more we can find out about the nefarious practices of this nefarious race, the more spy information we can give our country when war breaks out."

The candidates succumbed before this glorious dic-

tion. They were appalled by the seriousness of a situation which required words like these. Since spying was now the business of the school, little Takashi Kato, who was in the third grade, didn't spend a private moment from then on.

If Takashi raised two fingers in school, Robbie glanced meaningly at one of the Boy Auxiliaries, and a second hand sprung frantically into the air. When Takashi walked home after school, at least five boys crept through the brush beside the road. Eventually, however, Mr. Kato, Takashi's father, fired a shot into the dark one night, after seeing a white face looking in his window. Robbie reluctantly called the Auxiliary together and ordered that espionage be stopped at sundown. "They couldn't do anything really important at night," he explained.

In the long run Takashi did not suffer from the espionage practised on him, for, since the Auxiliaries had to watch him, they could make-no important excursions without taking him along. He found himself invited everywhere, because no one would consent to be left behind to watch him.

The Boy Auxiliaries received their death blow when Takashi, who had in some way learned of their existence, applied for admittance.

"I don't see how we can let you in," Robbie explained kindly. "You see you're a Japanese, and we hate them."

Takashi was almost in tears. "I was born here, the same as you," he cried. "I'm just as good American as you, ain't I?" Robbie thought hard. He didn't want to be cruel to Takashi. Then his brow cleared. "Say, do you speak Japanese?" he demanded.

"Sure, pretty good."

"Well, then you can be our interpreter and figure out secret messages."

Takashi beamed with pleasure. "Sure I can," he cried enthusiastically. "And if you guys want, we'll spy on myoid man."

But the thing was broken. There was no one left to fight but Mr. Kato, and Mr. Kato was too nervous with his shotgun.

Hallowe'en went past, and Thanksgiving. In that time Robbie's effect on the boys was indicated by a growth in their vocabularies, and by a positive hatred for shoes or of any kind of good clothing for that matter. Although he didn't realize it, Robbie had set a style, not new, perhaps, but more rigid than it had been. It was unmanly to wear good clothes, and even more than that, it was considered an insult to Robbie.

One Friday afternoon Robbie wrote fourteen notes, and secretly passed them to fourteen boys in the school yard. The notes were all the same. They said: "A lot of red indians are going to burn the Pres. of the U.S. to the stake at my house tomorrow at ten o'clock. Sneak out and bark like a fox down by our lower field. I will come and lead you to the rescue of this poor soul."

For several months Miss Morgan had intended to call upon Junius Maltby. The stories told of him, and her contact with his son, had raised her interest to a high point.

Every now and then, in the schoolroom, one of the boys imparted a piece of astounding information. For example, one child who was really famous for his stupidity, told her that Hengest and Horsa invaded Britain. When pressed he admitted that the information came from Junius Maltby, and that in some way it was a kind of a secret. The old story of the goat amused the teacher so much that she wrote it for a magazine, but no magazine bought it. Over and over she had set a date to walk out to the Maltby farm.

She awakened on a December Saturday morning and

found frost in the air and a brilliant sun shining. After breakfast she put on her corduroy skirt and her hiking boots, and left the house. In the yard she tried to persuade the ranch dogs to accompany her, but they only flopped their tails and went back to sleep in the sun.

The Maltby place lay about two miles away in the little canyon called Gato Amarillo. A stream ran beside the road, and sword ferns grew rankly under the alders.

It was almost cold in the canyon, for the sun had not yet climbed over the mountain. Once during her walk Miss Morgan thought she heard footsteps and voices ahead of her, but when she hurried around the bend, no one was in sight. However, the brush beside the road crackled mysteriously.

ALTHOUGH SHE had never been there before, Miss Morgan knew the Maltby land when she came to it. Fences reclined tiredly on the ground under an overload ofbramble. The fruit trees stretched bare branches clear of a forest of weeds. Wild blackberry vines clambered up the apple trees; squirrels and rabbits bolted from under her feet, and soft voiced doves flew away with whistling wings. In a tall wild pear tree a congress of bluejays squawked a cacophonous argument. Then, beside an elm tree which wore a shaggy coat of frostbitten morning glory, Miss Morgan saw the mossy, curled shingles of the Maltby roof. The place, in its quietness, might have been deserted for a hundred years. "How rundown and slovenly," she thought. "How utterly lovely and slipshod!" She let herself into the yard through a wicket gate which hung to its post by one iron band. The farm buildings were grey with weathering, and, up the sides of the walls, outlawed climbers pushed their fingers. Miss Morgan turned the corner of the house and stopped in her tracks; her mouth fell open and a chill shriveled on her spine. In the center of the yard a stout post was set up, and to it an old and ragged man was bound with many lengths of rope. Another man, younger, and smaller, but even more ragged, piled brush about the feet of the captive. Miss Morgan shivered and backed around the house corner again. "Such things don't happen," she insisted. "You're dreaming. Such things just can't 'happen." And then she heard the most amiable of conversations going on between the two men.

"It's nearly ten," said the torturer.

The captive replied, "Yes, and you be careful how you put fire to that brush. You be sure to see them coming before you light it."

Miss Morgan nearly screamed with relief. She walked a little unsteadily toward the stake. The free man turned and saw her. For a second he seemed surprised, but immediately recovering, he bowed. Coming from a man with torn overalls and a matted beard, the bow was ridiculous and charming.

"I'm the teacher," Miss Morgan explained breathlessly. "I was just out for a walk, and I saw this house.

For a moment I thought this auto-da-fe was serious."

Junius smiled. "But it is serious. It's more serious than you think. For a moment I thought you were the rescue.

The relief is due at ten o'clock, you know."

A savage barking of foxes broke out below the house among the willows. "That will be the relief," Junius continued. "Pardon me, Miss Morgan, isn't it? I am Junius Maltby and this gentleman on ordinary days is Jakob Stutz. Today, though, he is President of the United States being burned by Red Indians. For a time we thought he'd be Guenevere, but even without the full figure, he makes

a better President than a Guenevere, don't you think?

Besides he refused to wear a skirt."

"Damn foolishness," said the President complacently.

Miss Morgan laughed. "Jlvfay I watch the rescue, Mr. Maltby?"

"I'm not Mr. Maltby, I'm three hundredRedIndians."

The barking of foxes broke out again. "Over by the steps," said the three hundred Red Indians. "You won't be taken for a redskin and massacred over there." He gazed toward the stream. A willow branch was shaking wildly. Junius scratched a match on his trousers and set fire to the brush at the foot of the stake. As the flame leaped up, the willow trees seemed to burst into pieces and each piece became a shrieking boy. The mass charged forward, armed as haphazardly and as terribly as the French people were when they stormed the Bastille. Even as the fire licked toward the President, it was kicked violently aside. The rescuers unwound the ropes with fervent hands, and Jakob Stutz stood free and happy. Nor was the following ceremony less impressive than the rescue. As the boys stood at salute, the President marched down the line and to each overall bib pinned a leaden slug on which the word HERO was deeply scratched. The game was over.

"Next Saturday we hang the guilty villians who have attempted this dastardly plot," Robbie announced.

"Why not now? Let's hang 'em now!" the troop screamed.

"No, my men. There are lots of things to do. We have to make a gallows." He turned to his father. "I guess we'll have to hang both of you," he said. For a moment he looked covetously at Miss Morgan, and then reluctantly gave her up.

That afternoon was one of the most pleasant Miss Morgan had ever spent. Although she was given a seat of honor on the sycamore limb, the boys had ceased to regard her as the teacher; "It's nicer if you take off your shoes," Robbie invited her, and it was nicer she found, when her boots were off and her feet dangled in the watel.

That afternoon Junius talked of cannibal societies among the Aleutian Indians. He told how the mercenaries turned against Carthage. He described the Lacedaemonians combing their hair before they died at Thermopylae.

He explained the origin of macaroni, and told of the discovery of copper as though he had been there. Finally when the dour Jakob opposed his idea of the eviction from the Garden of Eden, a mild quarrel broke out, and the boys started for home. Miss Morgan allowed them to distance her, for she wanted to think quietly about the strange gentleman.

The day when the school board visited was looked forward to with terror by both the teacher and her pupils.

It was a day of tense ceremony. Lessons were recited nervously and the misspelling of a word seemed a capital crime.

There was no dav on which the children made more blunders, nor on whi~hthe teacher's nerves were thinner worn.

The school board of the Pastures of Heaven visited on the afternoon of December 15. Immediately after lunch they filed in, looking somber and funereal and a little ashamed. First came John Whiteside, the clerk, old and white haired, with an easy attitude toward education which was sometimes criticized in the valley. Pat Humbert came after him. Pat was elected because he wanted to be.

He was a lonely man who had no initiative in meeting people, and who took every possible means to be thrown into their contact. His clothes were as uncompromising, as unhappy as the bronze suit on the seated statue of Lincoln in Washington. T. B. Allen followed, dumpily rolling up the aisle. Since he was the only merchant. in the valley,

Junius

Maltby

his seat on the board belonged to him by right. Behind him strode Raymond Banks, big and jolly and very red of hands and face. Last in the line was Bert Munroe, the newly elected member. Since it was his first visit to the school, Bert seemed a little sheepish as he followed the other members to their seats at the front of the room.

When the board was seated magisterially, their wives came in and found seats at the back of the room, behind the children. The pupils squirmed uneasily. They felt that they were surrounded, that escape, should they need to escape, was cut off. When they twisted in their seats, they saw that the women were, smiling benevolently on them.

They caught sight of a large paper bundle which Mrs. Munroe held on her lap.

SCHOOL OPENED. Miss Morgan, with a strained smile on her face, welcomed the school board. "We will do nothing out of the ordinary, gentlemen," she said. "I think it will be more interesting to you in your official capacities, to see the school as it operates every day." Very little later, she wished she hadn't said that. Never within her recollection, had she seen such stupid children. Those who did manage to force words past their frozen palates, made the most hideous mistakes. Their spelling was abominable.

Their reading sounded like a gibbering of the insane. The board tried to be dignified, but they could not help smiling a little from embarrassment for the children. A light perspiration formed on Miss Morgan's forehead. She had visions of being dismissed from her position by an outraged board. The wives in the rear smiled on, nervously, and time dripped by. When the arithmetic had beeq muddled and travestied, John Whiteside arose from his chair.

"Thank you, Miss Morgan," he said. "If you'll allow it, I'll just say a few words to the children, and then you can dismiss them. They ought to have some payment for having us here."

The teacher sighed with relief. "Then you do understand they weren't doing as well as usual? I'm glad you know that."

John Whiteside smiled. He had seen so many nervous young teachers on school board days. "If I thought they were doing their best, I'd close the school," he said. Then he spoke to the children for five minutes-told them they should study hard and love their teacher. It was the short and painless little speech he had used for years. The older pupils had heard it often. When it was done, he asked the teacher to dismiss the school. The pupils filed quietly out, but, once in the air, their relief was too much for them.

With howls and shrieks they did their best to kill each other by disembowelment and decapitation.

John Whiteside shook hands with Miss Morgan.

"We've never had a teacher who kept better order," he said kindly. "I think if you knew how much the children like you, you'd be embarrassed."

"But they're good children," she insisted loyally.

"They're awfully good children."

"Of course," John Whiteside agreed. "By the way, how is the little Maltby boy getting along?"

"Why, he's a bright youngster, a curious child. I think he has almost a brilliant mind."

"We've been talking about him in board meeting, Miss Morgan. You know, of course, that his home life isn't all that it ought to be. I noticed him this afternoon especially. The poor child's hardly clothed."

"Well, it's a strange home." Miss Morgan felt that

she had to defend Junius. "It's not the usual kind of home, but it isn't bad."

"Don't mistake me, Miss Morgan. We aren't going to interfere. We just thought we ought to give him a few things. His father's very poor, you know."

"I know," she said gently.

"Mrs. Munroe bought him a few clothes. If you'll call him in, we'll give them to him."

"Oh. No, I wouldn't-" she began.

"Why not? We only have a few little shirts and a pair of overalls and some shoes."

"But Mr. Whiteside, it might embarrass him. He's quite a proud little chap."

"Embarrass him to have decent clothes? Nonsense!

I should think it would embarrass him more not to have them. But aside from that, it's too cold for him to go barefoot at this time of year. There's been frost on the ground every morning for a week."

"I wish you wouldn't," she said helplessly. "I really wish you wouldn't do it."

"Miss Morgan, don't you think you're making too much of this? Mrs. Munroe has been kind enough to buy the things for him. Please call him in so she can give them to him."

A moment later Robbie stood before them. His unkempt hair fell over his face, and his eyes still glittered with the fierceness of the play in the yard. The group gathered at the front of the room regarded him kindly, trying not to look too pointedly at his ragged clothes. Robbie gazed uneasily about.

"Mrs. Munroe has something to give you, Robert," Miss Morgan said.

Then Mrs. Munroe came forward and put the bundle in his arms. "What a nice little boy!"

Robbie placed the package carefully on the floor and put his hands behind him.

"Open it, Robert," T. B. Allen said sternly. "Where are your manners?"

Robbie gazed resentfully at him. "Yes, sir," he said, and untied the string. The shirts and the new overalls lay open before him, and he stared at them uncomprehendingly. Suddenly he seemed to realize what they were. His face flushed warmly. For a moment he looked about nervously like a trapped animal, and then he bolted through the door, leaving the little heap of clothing behind him.

The school board heard two steps on the porch, and Robbie was gone.

Mrs. Munroe turned helplessly to the teacher.

"What's wrong with him, anyway?"

"I think he was embarrassed," said Miss Morgan.

"But why should he be? We were nice to him."

The teacher tried to explain, and became a little angry with them in trying. "I think, you see-why I don't think he ever knew he was poor until a moment ago."

"It was my mistake," John Whiteside apologized.

"I'm sorry, Miss Morgan."

"What can we do about him?" Bert Munroe asked.

"I don't know. I really don't know."

Mrs. Munroe turned to her husband. "Bert, I think if you went out and had a talk with Mr. Maltby it might help. I don't mean you to be anything but kind. Just tell him little boys shouldn't walk around in bare feet in the frost. Maybe just a word like that'll help. Mr. Maltby could tell little Rohert he must take the clothes. What do you think, Mr. Whiteside?': "I don't like it. You'll have to vote to overrule my objection. I've done enough harm."

"I think his health is more important than his feelings," Mrs. Munroe insisted.

J un ius Maltby

SCHOOL CLOSED for Christmas week on the twentieth of December. Miss Morgan planned to spend her vacation in Los Angeles. While she waited at the crossroads for a bus to Salinas, she saw a man and a little boy walking down the Pastures of Heaven road toward her. They were dressed in cheap new clothes, and both of them walked as though their feet were sore. As they neared her, Miss Morgan looked closely at the little boy, and saw that it was Robbie. His face was sullen and unhappy.

"Why, Robert," she cried. "What's the matter?

Where are you going?"

The man spoke. "We're going to San Francisco, Miss Morgan."

She looked up quickly. It was Junius shorn of his beard. She hadn't realized that he was so old. Even his eyes, which had been young)Jooked old. But of course he Was.pale because the beard had protected his skin from sunburn. On his face there was a look of deep puzzlement.

"Are you going up for the Holidays?" Miss Morgan asked: "I love the stores in the city around Christmas.

I could look in them for days."

"No," Junius replied slowly. "I guess we're going to be up there for good. I am an accountant, Miss Morgan.

At least I was an accountant twenty years ago. I'm going to try to get a job." There was pain in his voice.

"But why do you do that?" she demanded.

"You see," he explained simply, "I didn't know I was doing an injury to the boy, here. I hadn't thought about it. I suppose I should have thought about it. You can see that he shouldn't be brought up in poverty. You can see that, can't you? I didn't know what people were saying about us."

"Why don't you stay on the ranch? It's a good ranch, isn't it?"

"But I couldn't make a living on it, Miss Morgan.

I don't know anything about farming. Jakob is going to try to run the ranch, but you know, Jakob is very lazy.

Later, when I can, I'll sell the ranch so Robbie can have a few things he never had." .

Miss Morgan was angry, but at the same time she felt she was going to cry. "You don't believe everything silly people tell you, do you?"

He looked at her in surprise. "Of course not. But you can see for yourself that a growing boy shouldn't be brought up like a little animal, can't you?"

The bus came into sight on the highway and bore down on them. Junius pointed to Robbie. "He didn't want to come. He ran away into the hills. Jakob and I caught him last night. He's lived like a little animal too long, you see. Besides, Miss Morgan, he doesn't know how nice it will be in San Francisco."

The bus squealed to a stop. Junius and Robbie climbed into the back seat. Miss Morgan was about to get in beside them. Suddenly she turned and took her seat beside the driver. "Of course," she said to herself. "Of course, they want to be alone.".

Teen-Age Service

ROBBINS is one of more than junior LEE volunteers in u.s. hospitals who are finding satisfac120,000

tion in being useful. These boys and girls from fourteen to eighteen years of age have accepted this responsibility simply for the satisfaction derived from service.

They receive no salaries.

Like Lee Robbins, some are looking forward to medicalor nursing careers. Lee wants to be a doctor as her grandfather was. Her mother, also a volunteer, had the same dream but abandoned it to raise her family. Even though Lee marries, she will probably realize her ambition, since women of today have found that they can successfully combine homemaking and a profession.

Lee works at the Beverly Hospital in Beverly, Massachusetts, with about 150 other teen-age volunteers, helping as messenger, in clerical jobs, in the laboratory, or wherever else she is needed and assigned. The teenagers also work in the hospital's canteen and gift shops which are usually community-operated affairs. Staffed

Teen-Age Service

Observing surgery is permitted only to those junior volunteers with a serious interest in pursuing the study of medicol science.

entirely by volunteers, these enterprises turn over their earnings to the hospital.

Blue smocks are worn to identify volunteers from fourteen to sixteen years of age; those from sixteen to eighteen wear cherry-coloured smocks. The elite of the junior volunteer group are the "candy-stripers," so called from the striped pinafores which they wear indicating that they have taken the six weeks course in basic care of patients. This group is permitted to take temperatures, make beds and help give medicines under supervision.

The concept of volunteer service to hospitals has grown as the hospital system in the United States has expanded. Citizens have felt an obligation to do all they can to help keep the standards of their community hospitals at a high level.

Always understaffed, hospitals in turn are grateful to the volunteers who help relieve them of the administrative and routine work of the hospital, thus freeing nurses and doctors for professional duties.

Volunteers can also visit with the patients, which overworked doctors and nurses can rarely do. Hospitals recognize that these friendly chats are of great psychological importance in restoring a patient to health.

To be a junior volunteer requires considerable personal responsibility. Volunteers must pledge to keep confidential all information concerning patients. They must always be gentle, tactful and cheerful. But in giving, they also gain-in poise, maturity, and in that indefinable satisfaction that comes of serving without hope of reward .•

"To

IN

M<Qke the Best

1914 a fifteen-year-old American farm girl named Margaret Lofgren was taken to the White House to meet President Wilson. She was shy, excited and nervous, and the President's first remark made her even more nervous.

"How do you do, Margaret?" President Wilson said. "What did you do that has brought you to Washington?"

"Why, I haven't done anything," she stammered. "I only learned to make good bread."

The President said, "Margaret, in this country there is only one nobility and the title to it is that of achievement. And you belong to it because of your achievement in bread-making."

Margaret Lofgren had been acljudged Min-nesota's first ch;,tmpion breadmaker and was a member of one of the rural youth clubs which, a few years later, came to be called 4-H Clubs.

Bread-making is of course only one of the numerous projects in which 4-H

Clubs participate. With its roots going back to the closing years of last century, the 4-H movement was started in a small way in rural America to help farm youth's study and improve farming techniques and rural homemaking. It has steadily increased its scope and now extends to abeut seventy countries all over the world.

There are some 90,000 4-H Clubs in the United States with a total membership of nearly two-and-a-half million.

The list of their comprehensive activities ranges from development of new farming practices to promotion of international co-operation and understanding. Any boy or girl between the ages of ten and twenty-one may join a 4-H Club and may choose a project related to the science of agriculture or farm home life-improvement of crops, livestock or poultry, updating of handling, packaging and marketing techniques, elimination of farm

Better"

hazards. Or a member may choose some other activity, such as home management, home decoration, food preparation and preservation, handicrafts, child care, first aid, safe driving, landscape gardening or miscellaneous civic duties. The choice is indeed so wide that any boy or girl may take up almost any project in which he or she is interested. Profit mayor may not be an objective of the project.

The 4-H movement began about sixty years ago as an effort to preserve and stimulate farm youth's interest in agriculture and ensure that their rural heritage was not swallowed up by the country's urban and industrial expansion. National attention was focused on the importance of practical education in agriculture, manual arts andhome-making, on fulfilling the needs of adolescents in farming communities and on raising rural cultural standards.

One of the sponsors of the movement

4-H sheep-raiser Wesley Jacabsen demanstrates ta his sister a lamb braoder he designed, for which he was awarded a $300 scholarship.

A special group project of these farm youths is learning the maintenance and repair of tractors.

was Professor Liberty Hyde Bailey, a naturalist and professor of horticulture at Cornell University, who urged the establishment of nature clubs and issued bulletins on the wonders and 'bea-uty of field and forest as part of the university's extension service. The idea was welcomed by county agents, agriculture extension workers and others interested in the welfare of rural vouth. Studies of wild life soon extend~d to studies of farm animals and farm operations, and the nature clubs developed into corn-growing, cottongrowing and cattle-raising clubs.

Interest in better crops and what rural boys could do to improve corn, the nation's chief cereal crop, was greatly stimulated by the efforts of Will B. Otwell, president of the Farmers' Institute in Macoupin County, Illinois. Encouraged by earlier experiments, Otwell organized a state-wide boys' corn contest preparatory to the holding of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904. The 1,250 samples received from the contestants, together with some 600 photographs of the youthful competitors,

were arranged at the Illinois Agricultural Exhibit at the St. Louis Fair in the shape of two huge pyramids of corn. Surrounding the pyramids were signs reading: "Grown by the farmer boys ofIlIinois," and on a huge banner were the words: "8,000 Farm Boys in Contest." The exhibit literally stole the show from other states. Four years later Otwell climaxed his activities by organizing in Carlinville, Illinois, a rally of farm youngsters from all over the United States. He paraded them on horseback, the boys wearing a blue sash of crepe paper hanging from the shoulder and the girls wearing a sash of gold. The parade measured four miles in length. I t was headed by the Governor of Illinois and reviewed by Vice President Adlai Stevenson (grandfather of the present U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations).

The work of Otwell and other pioneers laid the foundations on which later leaders of the 4-H movement built. It was not, however, until about 1920 that the clubs were properly organized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture'S Extension Service and

placed on a firm financial footing.

Around that time, the name 4-H became the official label, signifying the four broad objectives of the organization, namely: HEAD, pledged to clearer thinking, so that young people may have an intelligent understanding and appreciation of the environment in which they live and develop a scientific attitude towards the problems of the farm and the home; HEART, pledged to greater loyalty, to the development of desirable ideals and standards for farming, home-making, community life and citizenship; HANDS, pledged to larger service, to "learning by doing," to the acquisition of technical skills in farming and home-making and conducting of suitable farm or home enterprises and demonstrations; and, HEALTH, pledged to efficient working, the intelligent use of leisure and to better living.

The 4-H Club emblem is the fourleaf clover with the letter "H" on each leaf. The club colours are green and white; the white background of the flagsymbolizes puri ty and the green of the emblem represents nature's most common colour, as also the attributes of youth, life and growth.

The motto of 4-H Clubs is "To Make the Best Better."

4-H Clubs are organized on completely democratic lines. They are conducted under the supervision of County Agricultural Agents, and voluntary leadership is provided by citizens-farmers, teachers, businessmen, clergymen. The members elect their own officers and learn early to respect the wishes of the majority.

Meetings are conducted in accordance with parliamentary procedure.

Programmes are based on the members' own needs, desires and interests.

This emphasis on local needs is one of the foremost reasons for the growth of the movement. Projects are reexamined from time to time and adapted to suit current conditions.

They may be projects carried out by one individual or by a team or group under the guidance of club leaders and the County Agent. Members are expected to write a report upon completion of each project, in which they assess mistakes as well as successes.

The results achieved by 4-H Clubs in the United States have been gratifying. They are reflected not only in increased agricultural output but in the general improvement of rural life. By developing manual skills, the young members of the clubs add to their school or college education a highly useful element of professional or domestic training. Club work provides the missing element in much of school instruction-a close and

personal relationship between book knowledge and actual life situations and problems. By learning to solve some of these problems and acquiring self-confidence and self-reliance, young people learn to equip themselves better for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.

A

SPIRIT OF healthy rivalry is strong in 4-H Club work. Demonstrations and exhibits are held from time to time, and judging of finished products helps in improving standards of quality and stimulating members' interest.

Participation in local, state and national fairs provides opportunities for display of both individual and team work, and for incentives to greater effort. Since the earliest davs of the movement, 4-H Club boys ~ild girls have been award winners in countrywide shows and contests, and have often excelled their elders in achievement. In 1909 Jerry Moore, a sixteenyear-old boy from South Carolina, became the champion corn-grower of the United States, outstripping even the most seasoned farmers. In more recent times Daniel Davies, of Cleveland, Tennessee, has completed in eight years as many as ro8 projects contributing to the modernization of his father's 138-acre farm.

When a bill for the further development of agricultural extension work, of which 4-H Club activities are a vital part, was being considered by the U.S. Congress in 1927, Gladys Bull, a club girl from Worcester County, Maryland, came to testify before the Senate Committee on Agriculture.

Pointing to the dress she was wearing, a neatly tailored outfit, she said: "I would like to ask the gentlemen to estimate what this dress cost me." One of the Senators stated that by Washington standards it would cost $ I 50, while another gave an estimate of $35.

"It cost me exactly $1.13," Gladys replied. "I have a coat here that I remade for $2.18." This testimony brought home to legislators more vividly than any reports and speeches what 4-H Club work was achieving in terms of purposeful, rural living.

Deeds naturally count more than words, and 4-H results count more than any elaborate propaganda for the movement. An excellent illustration of the social and humanitarian aspects of 4-H work is provided by the Variety 4-H Club, Fallon, Nevada.

Members of this group are mentally retarded but, under the guidance and inspiration of their leaders, they undertake many of the activities of normal children. They raise rabbits, build model airplanes, make bird

feeders, hold meetings and attend summer camp.

Recreation, healthy and inspirational, is an important part of 4-H Club programmes. It includes camping, hiking tours and educational trips, music and dramatic performances and pageants. The first National Camp, attended by delegates from all over the United States, was held in Washington in 1927 and, except during the war years, the Camp has been held annually thereafter. It enables rural youth to exchange ideas, to become better acquainted with the research work of the United States Department of Agriculture and to see the machinery of the Federal Government at work.

In 1959 a generous grant from the Ford Foundation helped establishment of the 4-H National Centre in Washington. Located on a twelveand-a-half-acre site and with facilities for accommodating 300 visiting members, the Centre is the venue of varied activities and serves as headquarters for the International Farm Youth Exchange Programme. Under this programme, American farm youth have visited some sixty other countries, including India, living and working with farm families, and rural youth from those countries have come to the United States to get first-hand knowledge of American farm life and techniques.

During recent years the 4-H idea has spread to many countries all over the world. In India the Young Farmers' Association was formed in 1956 by a group of zealous Farm Youth Exchangees and other progressive rural youth, under the guidance of Dr. P. S. Deshmukh, at that time Union Minister for Agriculture. In his address at the Mysore State Young Farmers' Rally, held by the Association in February 1959, Prime Minister Nehru remarked: "This inspires me and encourages me, because this is the kind of thing we want to have all over India." The Association now has a membership of about 200,000 and, in spite of handicaps, is making progress.

It has organized national conventions, seminars and training camps. It publishes two monthly journals in English and Hindi, besides informative and technical booklets. Some 150 members of the Association have already visited the United States and other countries under youth exchange programmes.

Based on ideals of self-help, cooperation and progressive citizenship, which are of universal application, the 4-H movement has naturally crossed national boundaries. I t is now a potent force for building better communities everywhere and is making a worthwhile contribution to international understanding and goodwill..

Janice Hullinger, 4-H Club member fram Ohio, poses with her international grand champion Aberdeen Angus steer, which she raised and exhibited as one of her projects.

Fulton and the Holy River T

HE HUDSON RIVER, as painted by a group of early nineteenth century American artists, was a series of green and tranquil vistas-fringes of ancient forest, the wooded flanks of the Catskill Mountains, verdant, misty medowlands. Its waters, springing up in the fastness of the Adirondack Mountains, flowed hundreds of miles southward to empty into the Atlantic at the growing seaport of New York. Its lower length was dotted with quiet farms and hamlets.

On August 17, 1807, this river's sultry peace was broken by a strange, smoke-belching craft, with great wooden wheels churning the water at each side. People were calling it "Fulton's Folly," but its proper name was the Clermont and it was the world's first practical steamboat. It was the brainchild of an American inventor, Robert Fulton, and was destined to revolutionize transportation on rivers and the seven seas. On that distant day in August, the Clermont travelled over

150 miles up the idyllic Hudson River to prove that steam navigation was not merely a painter's dream.

For Robert Fulton had spent a good part of his life as a painter of portraits and landscapes. Born before America's independence in a small Pennsylvania town, he had early in life learned the intricacies of the jeweller's trade. Subsequently his restless talent found that he could make a fair living with brush and canvas. A much better-known American painter, Benjamin West, had established himself in England as a notable Court artist, and Fulton in 1787 joined West as his disciple.

But in Robert Fulton's character, married to his artist's vision, there was a lively curiosity for mechanical things.

As a mere lad he had invented a kind of mechanically propelled boat. In England, he became acquainted with James Watt, the Scottish inventor of the steam engine, and began to divide his time between painting and certain engineering problems. Moving to

Sketches by B. Roy Choudhury from old engravings

Paris, he constructed a submarine, ÂŤThe Nautilus," for the French navy, and carried out with another American-Robert Livingston-his first and largely unsuccessful experiment with pushing a boa t forward by steam power.

Fired with faith and vision, Fulton and Livingston arranged with James Watt and Matthew Boulton to build a steam engine to Fulton's specifications in order to make the grand experiment on America's Hudson River. It was a complicated business to calculate the engine power necessary and to devise the subtle arrangement of the paddlewheels, but the combined ingenuity of the four friends resulted in the historic and successful trial run up New York's beautiful river. Several days later, regular passenger trips were inaugurated on the Hudson and in a few years scores of paddle-wheelers were plying the Atlantic seaboard rivers of the United States, while parallel progress was being made in the British Isles.

Elated at the phenomenal success of his invention, Fulton began to dream of steamboats on all the great rivers of the world, including the holy Ganges.

In 1812 he wrote to a friend in New York: "This work is so honourable and important, it is so grand an idea that Americans should establish steam vessels to work in India, that it requires vigour, activity, exertion, industry, attention, and that no time be lost." The next year he actually began negotiations with a London banker "to establish steamboats for passengers and merchandise on the Ganges from Calcutta to Patna, a distance of about 500 miles."

Two years later, Robert Fulton died without seeing the realization of his dream of steamboats on the Ganges.

His vigour, industry and vision did not last long enough to accomplish his grandiose project on the other side of the world. Only after a number of years did river steamers make their appearance on the Ganges. It is said

that the Nawab of Oudh first put a steamboat on an Indian river in 1819, but it was not until 1823 that the Diana was launched in Calcutta as the first operating steamer in India, and not until 1828 that the Hoogly steamed from Calcutta to Allahabad with the impetus of Lord Bentinck's authority.

Thereafter, during the next two decades, steam river boats were not an uncommon sight on the Ganges. (The reader who is curious to following further the history of steam navigation on the Ganges is referred to an exceptionally interesting study written by an American scholar, Henry T. Bernstein, Steamboats on the Ganges, Bombay, Orient Longmans, 1960.)

It is fruitless, I suppose, to speculate on what might have happened if Fulton had lived long enough to participate in starting the steam traffic on India's rivers. It certainly would have been a dramatic "first" in the history of American technical co-operation with India!.

The M issouri Artist

LOCATED ON the northern side of the square at Franklin, a frontier town in the midwestern State of Missouri, the inn, or the "house of entertainment," as its proprietor chose to call it, was always full of people.

Among its regular customers were many fascinating characters, from drunken boatmen and land speculators to county politicians and newspaper editors. All those who earned a living in the fields, in the woods, on the river or in the surrounding villages would, while passing by, drop in for a glass. Much tall talk by some, idle gossip by others, the casual, characteristic pose of a loafer at the bar counter, or someone's silent brooding in a smoky, obscure corner -all this contributed to the atmosphere of the inn.

And amidst this, there was always one more presence: that of a small boy, of whom the customers were hardly conscious. He was George, son of Henry Bingham, the innkeeper. He would watch with avid eyes every movement and pose of these fascinating characters, in whose virile charm and naturalness he found much that typified the new and wondrous experiences of the frontier world.

And all that the boy observed at the inn he stored in his memory, to set down later on canvas in a series of pictures that are now regarded as a national heritage.

The Missouri Artist

The inn was opened in the spring of 1820, when George was only nine. Franklin, by then, was already a modest frontier metropolis. It had schools and a library.

The town, as well as the surrounding county, had its share of doctors, lawyers, merchants, military men, editors, schoolmasters and country gentlemen. There were wellbred, well-read, substantial citizens, who had come from Kentucky and other states and were intent on establishing quickly in their new settlement the culture and propriety they had inherited. But there was another side of the picture too. Noise and rowdyism were still part of daily life.

Men were still killed in duels or murdered. Typically uproarious used to be the behaviour of drunken boatmen who once attempted to tear down the county jail. Happily, such violence and brutality, common details in a frontier picture, were gradually disappearing from Franklin. The town was already on the fringe of civilization. It had some real importance on the frontier and was developing rapidly. In short, every aspect of life on a frontier that was ceasing to be frontier was spread before little George Bingham. It was a panorama which would have stirred

and possessed any romantic lad of his age. And it did stir and possess him.

Apart from the inn, there was the river, the Missouri, which held a deep fascination for the boy. This great river, winding for more than 2,500 miles through the heart of the United States, is inextricably interwoven with the nation's history. During the nineteenth century, a colourful era in the river's history, the Missouri served as a great inland artery for commerce and transportation.

River boats used to ply up and down stream continuously, carrying heavy cargoes and thousands of passengers each year. George Bingham, as a boy, was under its spell. Idling on the water-front at Franklin, he watched the river's ever-changing boat traffic, which brought him glimpses of strange people from worlds both more and less sophisticated than his own. He watched the raftsmen at work, saw the flatboatmen loafing. He studied the cargo loaded upon the rafts and river boats.

All this was his boyhood world, the vision of which he was to reproduce in art form so faithfully years later.

No wonder that real as his pictures of life along the river

are, a romantic glow of boyhood wonder and loving remembrance pervades them.

GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM painted the men of the West effectively because he was one of them. Unlike many American artists in the mid-nineteenth century, who suffered under the delusion that greatness could be achieved only by painting heroic subjects, Bingham fortunately turned to material which he knew most intimately and so gave life. to a moment of history. The farmers and the politicians, the lawyers, editors, town drunks, boys, gentlemen and boatmen, all anonymous but made immortal in his paintings, were part of his daily life. Were it not for the fact that their world was his own, physically and spiritually, he could not have captured its essence with such great understanding and sympathy as he did.

Though often referred to as "the Missouri Artist," George Bingham was not a Missourian by birth. He was born on March 20, 181 I, on a plantation in Augusta

County, Virginia. His father, Henry, was the son of a Methodist preacher and farmer from New England, and his mother, Mary Amend, daughter of an immigrant German miller. In 1819 the land boom in western Missouri led the family to emigrate to Franklin, then on the frontier, and in Missouri George Bingham spent most of his life.

As a boy of nine, Bingham had his first glimpse of an artist when Chester Harding, an American portrait painter, passed by in search of the western pioneer Daniel Boone, whose portrait he wished to paint. Bingham's desire to paint was apparently wakened by this meeting.

But he never saw another artist until Harding once more travelled through that country seven years later. Meanwhile, as a pastime, he began to copy photo engravings, painting with homemade pigments. To earn a living he learned to roll cigars, worked as a cabinetmaker's apprentice, and even read law and theology. Happily, at his second meeting with Harding, he was encouraged to persist with his paintings, and, by 1834, had definitely made art his vocation. Even before that, by the time he

was nineteen, he had acquired sufficient skill to paint portraits for which he asked modest sums.

In 1837 he studied art for a short time in the East, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. At different times he lived in Washington, D.C., was for a short while in Europe with his headquarters at Dusseldorf, and subsequently made numerous trips to various parts of the United States. But Missouri remained his home and he died in Kansas City on July 7, 1879.

Small and delicate in appearance, George Caleb Bingham always wore a wig, having lost all his hair from a severe attack of measles when he was nineteen. About his wig a contemporary art historian has this story to tell: "My father, who was one of his pupils at the University of Missouri (Bingham was then attached to the University as professor of painting), used to tell me how the boys would steal Bingham's wig-the great painter was as bald as a doorknob-and then return it in shame. For they loved him and honoured his genius: as my father asked sedately, 'What other university in America ever had a professor-a full professor of painting, or revered him justly?' " Considering that he had little formal training in art-most of his best work was done before he went to Dusseldorf at the age of forty-five on a short study tourand that he had to keep up an unending struggle against the hurdles natural to the frontier, the achievement of George Caleb Bingham appears at first glance one of the mysterious phenomena of the age. "Jolly Flatboatmen," which was selected by the American Art Union in 1846 for its annual engraving, was his first genre painting to receive much attention. Among his other noteworthy river pictures, all completed between the years 1844 and 1857, are "Watching the Cargo," "Fishing on the Missouri," "Raftsmen Playing Cards," and "Fur Traders Descending the Missouri." "Fur Traders," when it was first exhibited at the American Art Union rooms in October, 1845, did not immediately electrify the art world; but now, more than a century later, it stands out as the first of a brilliant succession of Bingham's paintings superbly evoking the spirit of western life.

The list of his genre pictures indicates still one more

interesting aspect of his personality: his deep interest in politics. It is in the portrayal of the political scene, as well as of life on the great river, that his remarkable achievement lies.

As a young man drawing near voting age in Boonville, a small town close to Franklin and where his mother apprenticed him to a cabinetmaker, Bingham must have been increasingly aware of politics, which was one of the liveliest expressions of the American spirit in the new country. But politics was his avocation too. As early as 1846, he was elected to the legislature as a Whig by a margin of three votes. In 1859, on the eve of the Civil War, Bingham became a man of strong Union convictions and threw himself into the political struggle in his state. He became an office holder, served between 1862 and 1865 as a conspicuously honest and efficient state treasurer, and in 1875 was made adjutant-general of Missouri.

Two of his outstanding pictures depicting political scenes are "Stump Speaking" and "Verdict of the People," both completed within a year, between 1854 and 1855.

In these pictures also he was a part of the life he painted.

"Stump Speaking," for instance, if not a personal statement, was certainly grounded in personal experience. The painter had actually been "on the stump," as a local newspaper of that time reported, and had "gone through a hot and exciting canvass." It was that active work of campaigning which led him to think of depicting a gathering of the "sovereigns," as he termed the American voters.

In a way, Bingham made himself the social historian of his own place and people. Today his greatness is recognized in the fact that he saw the grand meaning of the commonplace.

Jot only that. Out of his meagre knowledge of the technique of painting and his own sensibility, he was able to create a style of great visual poetry-a large and at times archaic severity of drawing, brilliantly luminous, yet smoky in colour, and almost impressionistic 'in nature. In his paintings is depicted, with astounding vigour and freshness of observation, what he felt as typical of his time, place and people, and yet over them is a glow of grandeur and solemnity that evokes a heroic age .â&#x20AC;˘

Overleaf:

George Caleb Bingham's

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri.