At Palmer's

At Frank W. Palmer's place near Norton, Kan. last week, beneath the creak and jingle of harness and the wooden noises of wagons you could hear the bang and rattle of hard corn ears hitting against wagon boards as 13 strapping farmers set out to see who was the best cornhusker in the U. S. Drought had made Palmer's stand of corn sparse for a husking bee- barely 60 bu. to the acre-and caramel-colored dust rose from underfoot to get in your nose, but there were not many weeds and that makes for fast husking.

Twenty thousand people fringed the long-rowed field, speculating as to who would be the winner. Walter Olson of Rio, Ill., who can strip a shuck from the stalk and send one ear over his tailgate with another right behind it, who uses either a steel peg or a hook impartially, was not competing. He won last year and the year before. But Harold Holmes and Orville Welch, two Illinois boys who had won their State's championship, were known to be spry harvesters. Then there was Fred Stanek of Fort Dodge, Iowa. Three years ago he won at Winnebago, Minn, on a rainy, windy afternoon, and the year before that in a slushy snow at Fremont, Neb.

Flailing away with both hands, up and down the corn rows the farmers went as fast as they could go, each well-trained team of horses leading in front without direction, each tough cornstalk a fight. After 80 min. a gun boomed. Swiftly the judges weighed the yield. Ray Hanson of Cottonwood County, Minn, had the biggest load but he did not win. Competitive cornhusking has its intricacies. For every pound of marketable corn that the gleaners find left in the field the husker is penalized three pounds, for every ounce over five ounces of silks and shucks per 100 Ib. of corn husked, 1% of the weight of shucked corn is deducted; for every ounce more than nine the penalty is 3%. Ray Hanson's penalties were heavy and Fred Stanek was declared the winner. He had husked a net load of 2,123.8 Ib., 30.34 bu. of grain. Farmers felt that he could have equalled the all-time record of 35.8 bu. set by Elmer Williams of Illinois ("The Praying Husker") in 1925 had Farmer Palmer's stand of corn been better than it was.

The contest, of which this was the seventh annual repetition, was sponsored by the Standard Farm Papers and the farm press of Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas. But whereas the best prizefighter in the U. S. can make a million dollars a year, the best cornhusker in the U. S. gets only $100 over and above wages, plus a reputation around home for being an extra good farm hand.

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