Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting | Page 6

for eight weeks or more." In two weeks and two days I was hoeing corn.
On the way here I dropped into various places that were of interest. Jack Miners. The place is really better than when their father was alive. I came over across the river and dropped into Battle Creek.
I spent a good time hunting for Kellogg and I couldn't find him. One person told me he was dead. He was quite peppy over the telephone and I was amazed because he had been ill and well, then ill and then well. He says, "Come on over. I am ready and looking for you." He wrote me a letter scolding me. He asked where I was going and I told him. I asked him, "Do you know you are a life member of that association?"
He has a monster dog descended from Rin-Tin-Tin and that dog is clean, intelligent and looks like a human being. He is on the shore of Gull Lake, a seven-mile-long, one-mile-wide lake. Marvelous looking. He had abandoned his big house and he gave that to soldiers and sailors and sick men. I had asked for him and they have never heard of him. That's how he hides himself. He is back on the lake again. So I hunted and found a house so unique that no one but he could have a house like that built. There he was and he was peppy as ever. He has a new man on the bird sanctuary. He was fully alive.
I don't want to take up any more of your time. I have had call on me an enormous number of people who are more interested in nut growing than ever. I can't blame them, with the price of meat so high, and so many doctors advising the displacement of animal foodstuff by the eating of nuts.
It was on my 94th birthday that I got a plaster cast and was in it two weeks and two days. I will tell you a little secret. I was supposed to have a diet. They had a dietician and I said I didn't need to eat anything. I drank orange juice and pineapple juice and apple juice and grapefruit juice. I ate some European black bread with carroway seeds; it tasted bitter. I don't eat so much as I did before the accident. I am trying to be careful of myself.
I want to have a talk with Wilkinson on the black walnut. I have four big trees of Stabler, and hardly a nut grows on them. Down there they behave themselves and have big crops. How do they have such big crops? I like them. I don't believe there is a tastier nut in the world. Even my hybrid Asiatic butternut cross. I have got quite a lot of them here to show you and the biggest filberts in the world and they are all seedlings.
Not a hickory nut, butternut or black walnut. I had a ton of black walnuts. There is a good crop of hybrids, filberts, English walnuts, and there are some other nuts. I am north of Lake Ontario. When any of you are going across, drop in and see me.
TUESDAY MORNING SESSION
DR. ROHRBACHER: Will you please come to order. My gavel is in Iowa City, so I will use my pocket knife. We have to make a little change in our program. Our leader, Mr. Magill, is not yet here.
First on our program this morning will be Dr. C. J. Birkeland, head of the Department of Horticulture at the University of Illinois. It's wonderful to have such a splendid response so early in the morning.
DR. BIRKELAND: It is certainly nice to see such a big turnout and we certainly welcome you to Illinois. We have been interested in nuts for a long time and probably will be more interested in the future. We have one man on our staff who has for years been interested. Now that we have two, we will be twice as interested. In the past, years ago, the Endicotts probably pioneered in a new variety of nuts. Later on, the Caspers and Gerardis and Whitfords and now the Oakes and Best families are doing a lot of work in the propagation of new and better varieties. We have a lot of areas in Illinois suitable for nut propagation, with the Wabash, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers, and we have been working with farm advisers and other groups to increase nut production and now we have a new horticultural experimental station in the southern part of the state. There is a lot of land suitable for that type of production.
Out on the horticultural farm we have, I guess, several hundred seedlings and varieties of nuts which you will probably see. I hope your stay here