Americus times-recorder. [volume] (Americus, Ga.) 1891-current, 1924-12-30
More Sweat and Less
Gas

You can pay your debts---re-
gardless---says Clarence Poe edi-
tor of one of the best farm pa
pers, the Progressive Farmer.
Mr.. Poe says he and his father
paid farm debts when cotton
was selling at 7 or s cents, by
doing without what was oblig-
ed to have"
In a signed editorial headed
Personal Experience In Fight
ing Debt" Mr.. Poe says:
"Oh WE'LL" l can hear you say
ing, "that's all easy enough for
Clarence Poe to say, for he prob
ably makes good living as a
farm paper editor. He doesn't
know anything about what we
crop-mortgage, time-price victims
have to put up with. he has new
er been in such a fix as we are
in. If he had been, he'd know
that we simply haven't got a
chance to get out-that's ALL"
In answer to that | Just wish
to say that you are altogether
wrong. grew up on 100-acre
Dixie cotton farm in days when
times were ten times harder than
they are today. Just last week |
had a reminder of those days
when | read in my local daily an
item reprinted from that paper
just twenty-five. years before,
Sreading as follows:
Cotton on the local market is
Z 1-8 cents a pound. From all
indications, the 7-cent mark will
be reached in few days. Many
farmers are holding their cotton"
Eight cents was an average
price for cotton in the days when
| was growing up. | have help
ed my father plant it and chop
it and pick. it and haul it to the
gin and sell it for cents a
pound. I know what it was for
us for some years to pay "time
prices" for what we bought. |
know what it means to have a
mortgage on the old home farm.
And yet it is one of the proud
memories of my life that while
some unfortunate circumstances
thus threw my father into debt,
yet in the darkest days the South
ern cotton farmer has ever known
we "buckled up" and made a
fight for freedom. We cut out
time prices" An old farmer
near me used to say 81 got my
start by doing without what
was obliged to have" That was
pretty nearly the program my
fathers family adopted for get
ting free of debt. Pay as you
go, and if you can't pay, don't
go, became our motto. We wore
old clothes, patched clothes. and
if necessary ragged clothes; got
our living from cows and gar
den (anything to keep from buy
ing on credit), and year after
year, even when cotton was and
cents a pound, we made little
payment on the mortgage.
Talk about heroism, but though
my father was an early volunteer
in the immortal army that had
followed Lee and Jackson thirty
years before, yet the heroism
which my father and other South
ern farmers showed in fighting
the battle against debt and g.
cent cotton in those trying days!
The hum of the spinning wheel
was then a familiar sound, and
the whir of the handloom. Home
spun clothes and home-knit socks
and stockings and homemade
folk used homemade substitutes
for coffee, and made our own ink
Z from maple bark, and grew and
cut and cured and twisted their
own smoking and chewing tobac-
co-anything to keep out of
debt.
Paying out of debt IS no easy
job---it requires all the MAN
there is in one, but it CAN BE
DONE, and Mr.. Poes slogan of
doing without things was
obliged to have is a sure way
out of debt and onward to sue
cess.
The price of cotton has had
much to do with our rural in
debtedness. but lot of it comes
from the high price of gasoline,
More sweat and less gas in 1925
will put many a fellow on the
right side of the ledger.
Method II His Madnass