Marion Progress

MARION PROGRESS. MARION, N. C., THURSDAY. APRIL 15. 1948

Need Home Food Gardens Now as Much as in War Says Secretary Marshall

Freedom gardens this year are as necessary to the national welfare as were Victory gardens during the war, Secretary of State Marshall told the National Freedom Garden Conference in Washington D. C. He said: "Food today is just as vital, probably more than during the war. No time in our history has the production and conservation of food been so important. Anything that can be done to stimulate the growing of food by individuals in local gardens should be done, and will be tremendously helpful to meet the great problem now before us. I don't speak theoretically from a desk in the State Department. I ordered my seeds and sets this year ten days ago. My problem is, do I negotiate or do I hoe, plant and weed. I propose doing both."

To prove his qualification as a "dirt gardener".the secretary told the following story, which may well become a classic: "When Mrs. Marshall and I returned from China we brought with us a Chinese woman named Anna. She had a very definite belief in two things: one was the dominance of the male in the household, and the other was the fact that food was the greatest motivating force in our lives.

"The second day I was Secretary of State I managed to escape for a few hours and motor down to my house in Leesburg and was jubilantly greeted by Mrs. Marshall with the news that she had at last. after two or three years of effort obtained a truck load of, putting it politely, fertilizer, I was immediately put to work to distribute this great soil improver with a shovel and wheelbarrow.

"Anna spied me. I might explain that in China probably the lowest form of human life is the man with the wheelbarrow. She was profoundly shocked, rushed out of the house and we enjoyed in a genuine struggle over the possession of the wheelbarrow"She said what I was doing was utterly repugnant to her in that, in her belief, it lowered and humiliated the position of the Secretary of State if it did not affect the generalGovernment. My reaction was, I would enjoy doing it. I settled the argument by virtue of greater physical strength. But she remained fixed in that feeling. We all, I think agree with her concept as to the relationship of food to the people of the world but there was a slight difference in the manner of implementation."

Secretary and Mrs. Marshall look over their Freedom Garden.