Leon Kansas
Sept.
9, 1943
Dear
DeVere:-
Thursday night, after supper at home
Stanley is reading a 'big-little' book, Barbara is washing the dishes, Mother
is empting cream in the big can, and Dad shaved and is writing to DeVere, and
of course your Radio is on in the kitchen, can you picture a scene at home.
Mother started her school on Monday,
just had half day on Labor day, I suppose you know by this time that
Bloomington doesn't start until Sept 20th on account of Infantile Paralysis,
two cases in the neighborhood Linda Jackson and a little Bradford boy, The
father has the job Mr. Fivecoats used to have
Augusta High School started by the Bloomington student's don't get to go
for two weeks. Barbara Lu. Smart has
every lady on their High-Horse
she started and told them she had been staying in town this summer, some
of the Momma's are up in the air about it.
Stanley was sure disappointed
because school dident start, he would like to go and visit mothers school, but
dont like to have him go since Bloomington did'ent open.
On Tuesday Stanley and I went to a
sale west of Douglass and brought a roan cow.
On Wed I mowed the Sudan grass in the north lot and I plowed in the
afternoon and I plowed today, plowed here at home and one of the patches on
Causey, There is a sale on the Kidwell place south of McCabe, Think I'll go and
suppose Stanley will too I would like to buy a few young cows or heifers.
I want to get some Rye sowed here at
home so we can have some fall pasture, think I'll put Rye on two of the patches
on Causey.
Lenz'es
got a 1930 Ford for school transportation this year, just got it last
week. And Lloyd King's got a 1937 Ford
for Charles, I think Charles has been putting in some time putting an extra
horn on it.
Your clothes came yesterday, It came
the day before, but nobody was at home
so the mail-carrier left it at the store.
Got the prairie hay up last week had
seven stacks and baled about twenty-five ton.
We was 3 1/2 day putting up the seven stacks. Art. Herbert and Marvin have been working
about three weeks on their hay and I noticed this evening they had six stacks
up.
We
got an invitation to a Wedding Sept. 18th in Kansas City, Vivian Clark is to be
married, is having a church wedding.
We have two fresh cows Maude and
Winfred have calves.
Guess I have told you about all for
this time, hope this finds you well.
Love
Dad
--
Letter from my grandfather, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Cape Girardeau,
Mo., Thursday, September 9, 1943.
My grandfather didn’t seem too concerned
about polio (infantile paralysis). However, in 1943, there
were 12,450 cases of polio in the United States. The country’s most prominent polio victim was
President Roosevelt, who was stricken in 1921 and paralyzed from the waist down. Despite a persistent myth I’ve heard, Americans
were well aware that Roosevelt had suffered from polio and was disabled. He was rarely photographed in a wheelchair;
but he did help found the March of Dimes in 1938, which helped polio victims
and funded research into a polio vaccine, and took a prominent, public role in
their campaigns. A vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk in the 1950s and public
vaccination campaigns began in 1957.
Attack rates fell below a thousand a year in the U.S. by 1960, below a hundred a
year by 1967. The year 1999 was the
first year with no reported cases in the U.S.. Worldwide, there were 650 cases of polio in
2011. (Sources: "Incidence Rates of
Poliomyelitis in US"; http://www.post-polio.org/ir-usa.html; David M.
Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story
[Oxford University Press, 2005], 255; “History of Poliomyelitis” and “Poliomyelitis
eradication” in wikipedia.org)
This letter has one of two references to
Sudan grass in this collection of family letters, indicating my grandfather may
not have grown much of it. Sudan grass
was brought to the United States by the U.S. Department of Agriculture from
Sudan in 1909 and first planted in Texas.
It was then grown through the Plains from Texas to South Dakota. It was
a sorghum related to the other sorghums grown in African and elsewhere. It was grown primarily for hay (or for
seed to plant the next year). According to a 1916 agricultural bulletin,
"Sudan grass makes a very palatable hay, richer in protein than prairie
hay, but not as rich as alfalfa hay."
Sudan grass was a cousin of the southern African sorghum my grandfather
grew (which he called “kaffir corn”).
But while the ancestors of southern African sorghum had gradually moved
with farmers from Sudan to southern Africa millennia ago and then to the United
States in the 1870s, Sudan grass came relatively directly from Sudan to Texas
in 1909. Despite these millennia of
separation, farmers had to be careful not to plant the two sorghums in adjacent
fields or they would interpollinate and lose their particular
characteristics. Still other types of sorghum had come to the Americas on slave ships starting in the seventeenth century. (Sources: Robert Earl
Karper, "Sudan Grass," Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College
Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 103 (1915): 3; G. E. Thompson,
"Sudan Grass in Kansas" Kansas State Agricultural College (1916), 4.)
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