Two important rural journalism news stories: First, W. Horace Carter (above) died. Carter, 88, was editor and publisher of The Tabor City Tribune in North Carolina. In 1950, four years after he founded the paper, Carter began a series of stories and editorials about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in southeastern North Carolina. "The Klan, despite its Americanism plea, is the personification of Fascism and Nazism," the World War II veteran wrote.
Carter and his family were threatened constantly over the years. "He was a God-and-country kind of guy," said his son, Russell Carter. "But he was committed to social justice, and he was not prepared for the fact that other people didn't see it that way." Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1953 for his anti-Klan articles and editorials.
Also, this week the MacArthur Foundation named Jerry Mitchell of Jackson, Mississippi, as one of its two dozen fellows. Mitchell is a reporter at the Clarion-Ledger newspaper and has been unrelenting in reporting on civil rights-era crimes. He will use his "genius grant" of $500,000 (paid over five years) to complete a book. "There are a lot of rabbit trails I want to run down," Jerry said. We here at the Yonder couldn't be prouder of both of these guys.
The man who is credited with starting the Green Revolution has died. Norman Borlaug, 95 and a resident of Dallas, passed away Saturday evening. "In the early 1960s Prof Borlaug realised that creating short-stemmed varieties would leave food plants more energy for growing larger heads of grain," the BBC reported. "His high-yield, disease-resistant dwarf wheat quickly boosted harvests in Latin America, and his techniques were particularly successful in South Asia, where famine was widespread. Analysts believe the Green Revolution helped avert a worldwide famine in the late 20th century." Borlaug won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work.
Borlaug was born in Iowa —''I was born out of the soil of Howard County,'' he said. ''It was that black soil of the Great Depression that led me to a career in agriculture" — and was a professor at Texas A&M University. He did much of his work when he organized and directed the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program in Mexico. He remained concerned with food and food production until he died. "We all eat at least three times a day in privileged nations, and yet we take food for granted," Borlaug said in a recent interview. "There has been great progress, and food is more equitably distributed. But hunger is commonplace, and famine appears all too often."
At a conference in the Philippines in 2006 he said: "We still have a large number of miserable, hungry people and this contributes to world instability. Human misery is explosive, and you better not forget that."
Tony Wernimont was the starting guard on his high school basketball team. It was the November of his senior year, and then he lost part of his arm in a farm accident.
This Labor Day, Allen Bush pays tribute to a western North Carolina farmer who taught him about plants, machinery, hard work, and living up to your word.
Elmer Kelton wrote The Time It Never Rained to "give urban people a better understanding of hazards the rancher and the farmer face in trying to feed and clothe them."
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Chuck Offenburger, a well-known Iowa journalist and rural advocate who has chronicled Hawkeye State events, history and people for nearly a half-century, is now fighting advanced cancer. After telling friends, family and close colleagues about his diagnosis in recent days Offenburger posted a detailed column on his popular Web site about facing down the cancer doctors first discovered in his abdomen. "Believe me, I am far from defeated," Offenburger, 62, said. "I go into this challenge with robust optimism, pretty strong spirituality, my acceptance and actually some serenity."
Offenburger has long been a champion of rural issues, serving on a number of boards related to economic development and progress in Iowa's small towns. He arguably knows rural Iowa as well as anyone ever has. Offenburger and his wife, Carla, live in a renovated farmhouse in rural Cooper, outside the Greene County seat city of Jefferson. Offenburger became a household name in Iowa with his “Iowa Boy” column in The Des Moines Register, a featured piece that ran up to four times weekly from the 1970s to 1998. Offenburger recently authored a book featured on The Daily Yonder about Iowa State University basketball star Gary Thompson.
For a generation of younger Iowa journalists -- myself at the top of the list -- Offenburger is a much loved and valued mentor who not only offers regular encouragement and promotion of our work but detailed emails on possible new angles, story ideas and ways to make our next contributions better. We are, needless to say, praying for him.
Neil Armstrong knows quite a lot about Yonder. He grew up in the small town of Wapakonata (pop. 9474), on Ohio’s western plains, earning the rank of Eagle Scout and graduating from Blume High School.
At
age 38, he was the first person to set foot on the Moon (pop. 0). On
July 20, 1969, Armstrong left his footprint in the “fine sandy
particles” 250,000 miles from home.
People who grew up in wide
open spaces seem to have an affinity for outer space. Hometowns of
current astronauts include Creve Coeur, Missouri; York, Maine; Ashland,
Nebraska; Ft. Huachuca, Arizona -- we really need to look into this!
Like Armstrong, John Glenn, the first orbiter of Earth, was a rural
Buckeye, hailing from New Concord, Ohio (pop. 2651).
A high
school classmate of Neil Armstrong’s said that at the 50th reunion in
1997 “all the class members wrote a short biography of their lives
since high school. Neil Armstrong’s identified him as a test pilot, but
said nothing about space or a moon landing.”
Armstrong has shunned the spotlight for 40 years now. He and his wife Carol live quietly in a suburb of Cincinnati.
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