Flipping Through the Pages of History

After watching the King Corn DVD again this weekend at The Farm, the interview with the controversial Ag secretary Earl Butz had new meaning.

Butz died Feb. 2. While we were enjoying the documentary, the iFarmer looked up Butz’s obit on his iPhone. And when he read out loud that Butz — in addition to uttering a completely racist and tasteless observation — was editor of the Purdue Exponent in 1932.

That sent us straight to the ’30s Purdue yearbooks…the Debris. We had them on hand because my grandparents were at Purdue in the late ’20s and early ’30s. And because one of my favorite talismans is my grandfather’s press key, I knew he was the Exponent sports editor in 1931. So not only was Butz a contemporary of my grandfather’s, but the two surely worked together.

Sure enough we found photos of the two corn-fed Hoosiers on the Exponent pages. But I don’t recall hearing about their paths crossing anywhere else. They were in different activities, sports and fraternities. And while Butz pursued the agricultural sciences, my grandfather became a pharmacist, though he clearly had an interest in farming.

My grandfather actually first landed a job in Chicago working for Eli Lilly. But he didn’t keep the job long. He was fired after missing three days of work. His reason? He was suffering from pneumonia. Ironic that a pharmaceutical company fired a worker for being sick.

Butz is a fascinating figure…he took this country from a subsidized system that paid farmers not to produce, to a system that paid farmers to overproduce. The result? More money for farmers and surpluses of corn that fed the high fructose corn syrup industry and, now, the biofuel experiment.

In the first photo, Butz is on the left and my grandfather is on the right. In the second, grandpa is upper right and Butz is lower left. BTW…there is little doubt that Alto Farmgirl is related to the gentleman farmer in this picture…the lips, the eyes, that sly look. No doubt.