I am reminded of the tale of the man who rushed into the sheriff's office in Texas, and his gun was smoking, and he says, "I have killed a man." The sheriff said, "Who did you kill?" "Oh," he says, "I don't know his name. He is one of these after-dinner speakers." "You are in the wrong room," the sheriff said. "Go back in the hallway three doors to the right to the bounty room. They pay $5 a head for those."
My family fortunes, if there be any, were founded on nuts. My father when he was 16 years old was raised on Straight Creek near Pineville, Kentucky, some hundred miles away from Lexington, and they gathered up a wagonload of the old chestnuts, he and a hired man on my grandfather's place, and they took an ox team and took them to Lexington to peddle them out. It took them three weeks to make the return trip.
I come from Whitney County, Kentucky. It was named after old Colonel Whitney, the man who built the first brick house in Kentucky. It was in the fall of the year, and the mortar was freezing, and they mixed whiskey with their mortar to keep it from freezing.
When I get away from home they ask me if I am a Kentucky Colonel. That's one of the first things I hear, and I tell them that I am. And they want to know why they put that honor upon a small fellow like me, and I tell them it was on account of scientific research that I had done, that I had developed a new way of making egg-nog. I feed the chickens the whiskey mash and they lay bourbon-flavored eggs, and all you have to do is drop one in a glass of milk.
They always ask about the Kentucky Derby, and I tell them that the last
I heard Mint Julep was coming in on the home stretch strong.
I am not qualified with all of these experts to get up here and talk about nuts. They say an expert is a fellow that learns more and more about less and less until he knows practically everything about nothing at all; and that's kind of my shape, sir.
Now, seriously, I have had this hobby of trying to grow nuts for a number of years. I grafted a golf club on a croquet post, and I got some wonderful golf balls. Before the war I ordered some Chinese chestnuts. I got in touch with Sakata and Company in Yokahama, and they finally came in. I didn't have any experience, and about all I had was some imagination, and I planted them out in the fall of the year like I planted any other nuts. I went out in the spring and investigated. There wasn't a darn one come up. The rats had beat me to them and eaten them all up.
I was a persistent cuss and ordered some the next year, and I put them up in fruit jars and figured I would plant them in the spring, and when the spring came they all had the dry rot.
So I ordered them the third year, and I made sacks out of fly screen wire and put those nuts outside, and in the spring they came up and I had a lot of nice sprouts about this high and put them in a seed bed with a board all the way around. My father is blind in one eye, couldn't tell a chestnut from a weed, and he pulled up the weeds and he pulled all the chestnuts up except one.
The fourth year I had better success, and I raised that year 400-and-some-odd chestnut seedlings, and I did more or less the Johnny Appleseed stuff with those. I gave those away in the community. I am, among other things, a banker, and I figured those would be as good as calendars, and I have not been able to follow the history of them. However, there is one of them I think is exceptional. It's a self-pollinator and is bearing heavy crops, and I intend to follow that particular tree up.