"Though Dynasties Pass"

"Only a man harrowing clods . . ." wrote Poet Thomas Hardy. "Yet this will go onward the same though Dynasties pass. . . . War's annals will fade ... ere their story die"

Across Iowa's rich checkerboard of farm lands, men shucked the last of the hog-fattening corn, shaved the empty yellowed stalks from their fields, plowed the brown earth.

Last week they took time off. Men who work with the earth take pride not only in production but in the way the job is done. On the Henry Keppy farm near Davenport, 125,000 farmers and their families gathered to see how the job was done by the best of them at the annual national cornhusking contest.

As a curtain raiser for the huskers was a plowman's match, an innovation on the program, held on the neighboring Denger farm. The straightest furrows, the neatest turns with a tractor-drawn plow were made by Fred Timbers, who had traveled from Ontario to show what Canadian farmers could do. Fred Timbers became the first international champion of plowmen.

Next day, 21 local champions from eleven States lined up in the Keppy cornfield to wait the starting bomb in the husking contest. Favored by fence-row experts to win were Marion Link, Iowa State champion, Ecas Vaughan, Illinois State champion, Irving Bauman, also from Illinois, runner-up in the nationals in 1935 and 1938. The contestants, some of them stripped to the waist, sweated up & down the corn rows, snatching off the dried ears, husking them with a hook strapped to the wrist, flinging them against the "bang-boards" of tractor-drawn wagons.

Eighty minutes later time was called. The contestants were panting, splotched with blood from cutting themselves on stiff corn leaves. Judges pawed over the wagonloads, deducted gleanings, weighed the results, announced that Irving Bauman had set a new record of 46.71 bushels, had won the 1940 national championship. Second: Marion Link, whose 46.36 bushels also topped the old record of 41.52.

The 125,000 farmers and their families listened to songs by Indian children from the Sac and Fox reservations, with a slow, critical eye looked over farm implements on display at the Keppy farm, grinned at a map of Iowa made of over a million corn kernels. But what they really liked best were Irving Bauman's 46.71 bushels of husked corn. Plowman Timbers' neat turns and straight rows.

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