The Waterbury Democrat., 1943-07-22

for so many years. Old grads of the Hoosier Boilermaker institution still get weepy whenever his name is mentioned.
 Anyway, John Coulter was a young officer in the last war, and he got overseas. He was known to Gen. Charles G. Dawes, who was commander of the Service of Sup plies for Pershing's armies. Dawes sent for Coulter one time and ask ed him what he could suggest to im- prove things for the soldiers up at the front.
 Coulter thought minute, and then said, Raise some fresh vege- tables and send them up with the chow"
 Dawes snorted, mentioning a couple of adjectives he knew, and waved Coulter away You botan- ists!" scoffed Dawes. "If we let you have your way, you'd grow geran- iums on the parapets of the front line trenches"
 ORDER FOR VEGETABLES
 Coulter went back to his post and forgot the whole business, but ap- parently the general didn't. First thing Coulter knew, he was called back to Paris and into the presence of the general. "Sit down and write out a general order to start growing fresh vegetables to supplement the ration" Dawes commanded. He was going to give it try.
 Coulter didn't know what gen. eral order even looked like. But they showed him one, and gave him desk he could sit at to write the or der which was to set up the equi- valent of a fresh vegetable depart ment in the s. O. s. He finished it in due time, and the general signed it.
 For trial plot, Coulter got some space around Versailles - not the famous gardens themselves, perhaps, but some pretty good high-class his- torical acreage at that With a de- tail of a few American truck farm CTS and some French peasants, he plowed up quite bit of land.
 The first crop ready happened to be cabbage. An army truck was bor- roWed from the Q. M., loaded full Of fine large cabbage heads and start ed of flor some now forgotten ration dump behind the front.
 CABBAGE RAID
 AS the truck passed through the first village in which there were American troops billeted, some sol- dat spied this luscious load of po- tential slaw and made himself a raid. Another and another and an- other followed suit. That happened at the next town, and the next and the next. Before the truck was half way up to the front it was empty. It had been robbed of every head and leaf in the entire load.
 That proved, however, that bot anist Coulter knew his vege- tables, and that there was a natural appetite for fresh green foods something that didn't come out of a can. But it taught Coulter lesson When his next load of vegetables was ready, he borrowed a tarpaulin from an Ordnance Corps ammunl- tion train. On it was stencilled in big black boxcar size letters, Dan ger-High Explosives.
 That would have been the sum- mer of 1918. Coulter got a bigger job the next spring, and he kept on raising vegetables for some Of the luckier troop concentrations un- til darn near all the A. E. F. was back home. Coulter himself went back to France. He had fallen in love with the country. He got job managing French estate farms, us- ing American scientific farming methods and machinery, spending the summer in the nnorth, vacation ing every winter on the Riviera, liv- ing the life of Riley. He even wrote book about it.
 The Second World War, of course, put him out of business. He got out of France ahead of the Nazis all right, and came back to Indianna. They talked him into running for Congress in 1942, on the Republican ticket, but he got licked in the pri- mary.