The Winged Victory of Papou

For centuries before and after King Xerxes camped there with his Persians waiting to do battle at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the plain of Anthele lay bleached and barren. No trees grew to shade its parched acres from the relentless Grecian sun; no water flowed over the bank of the winding Sperchios River to wash them clear of salt and alkali. For generations, no local farmer even bothered to put his plow to the 9,000 useless acres of the plain, and even those who worked the stingy lands on its edge were forced to content themselves with only the scantiest yields.

On a February day in 1949, however, an elderly American agricultural expert named Walter Eugene Packard drove out to Anthele from Athens. As plainly and unmistakably American as the prostyle of a Midwestern bank, he joined the villagers for coffee and sweets at the local inn and promptly got down to business. "Some of us," he told his listeners, "think you can grow things on this land of yours. Rice, for instance." Torn between skepticism and wonder, the farmers of Anthele listened respectfully as Packard went on to outline a plan whereby U.S. money and Greek labor might be combined to test the fertility of the plain of Anthele.

From the Gods. The Greeks have little trust in bureaucratic schemes, but, said a Greek recalling the incident later, "here in this village, we like what we like, and when we don't like something, we speak up. Somehow, we liked the way this American spoke to us."

Some 40 local landowners turned over 100 acres to Packard's project; other villagers abandoned the idleness of the coffee shops to man picks & shovels for $1.50 a day; a small army of American tractors and bulldozers moved in to divert the course of the Sperchios River. In the midst of it all, usually coatless and with shirtsleeves rolled high, Walter Packard worked side by side with his Greek friends. In a few weeks, the dubious villagers who came down each evening at dusk to watch work on the newly flooded paddyfields were rewarded with the sight of tender green shoots reaching skyward. "It was like a miracle from the gods," said one of them.

By that time, all the people of Anthele plain had come to know Walter Packard as "Papou" (Grandfather). Children picked wildflowers for him. Church bells in all the villages rang when his familiar jeep was spotted bumping along the road from Athens. Even the road itself was renamed Packard in his honor. But Papou

Packard was not one to rest on laurels.

He was busy making plans to turn the 100 acres of rice into 1,000 and the1,000 into 2,000. By last year, his vision and enthusiasm had helped the Greeks put 4,000 acres of the Anthele plain under cultivation. For the first time in history Greece was able to export rice. The gain to the Greek economy on an original U.S.

overseas-aid investment of $43,000 was over $10 million. More important, perhaps, was the fact that the farmers of Anthele for the first time in human memory were prosperous and selfsupporting.

For a Hero. Last week, as 70-year-old Walter Packard of Berkeley, Calif, prepared to complete his six-year assignment in Greece, the people of Anthele honored him as the Greeks have honored their heroes for centuries--with a marble statue in the village square. It was quarried from the same stone which went into the Parthenon and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

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