I met George Whitaker at the county fair in 1964.
He was showing a Hereford steer. I was showing a rhubarb pie.
His steer got reserve champion. My pie got blue ribbon. He came over to the pie tent afterward with his ribbon pinned to his shirt and said, “I hear yours beat mine.”
“Pies and steers aren’t in the same category,” I said.
“Everything’s in the same category if you look at it right,” he said.
I didn’t know what that meant. I still don’t, entirely. But I married him two years later.
George’s family farmed too. Two hundred acres of corn and beans west of town. But George had been to Korea, and then to college on the GI Bill. He came home with a degree in economics from Iowa State and a head full of ideas.
He got a job at First National, the big bank in the county seat. Twenty miles away. He wore a suit every day and drove a used Ford.
He hated it.
“They don’t understand farming, Dot,” he’d say at the dinner table. “They look at a farmer and see a risk. They see dirt and old boots and a pickup truck with rust on the fenders. They don’t see the man who’s been feeding this country for three generations.”
He watched First National turn down loan after loan. Good farmers. Honest men. Men whose fathers and grandfathers had worked the same land for a hundred years. They’d come in with their hats in their hands and their best shirts on, and some young man in a suit would look at their boots and their hands and say no.
One afternoon in 1967, my own father went in for a loan.
He needed eight thousand dollars to replace his milking equipment. The old system had broken down. Without new equipment, he’d have to sell the herd. Forty cows. Thirty years.
