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Show h : MARY : Si SUCCEEDS W SI ON I MAIN STREET : E :$ j ; j $5 By LAURA MILLER JN ;; i i i ; ; ; ! o; ! i i ; ; by Laura Miller BREEDING ENTHUSIASM FOR THE FARM Torter, Mo., used to be a community with Its tail between its less. At the schoolhouse, for instance, flapping wall paper, fallen plaster, broken panes at unshaded windows corresponded corre-sponded with the peeling paint, ripped clapboards, treeless yard of a neglected neglect-ed rural school. Tramps added filth. Porter children went to Klrksvllle to school later to Kirksville or elsewhere else-where to live if they could possibly escape the blight at home. Farming was becoming a despised pursuit. Today Porter has seen co-operative buying, good roads, blooded stock, a demonstration farm on the one hand, and a young folks' band, an Interdenominational Interde-nominational Sunday school, and college col-lege entrance courses on the otlw; Increased In-creased Its real estate values, substituted substi-tuted a community for a neighborhood divided against Itself, and turned its children Into Porter and farm enthusiasts. enthusi-asts. Its Farmers' week and home economics course, conducted annually by the university, are famous throughout through-out the state for the local support given by old and young. At the heart of the new Porter Is its once-despised school. At the Innermost Inner-most heart of all the development Is the Porter school teacher, Marie Turner Tur-ner Harvey. She is one of those more than wise folk, a leader who knows when not to lead. From the six-year-old whose English and penmanship, arithmetic and fanning lessons become be-come vitally Important affairs when she can sum them up In a triumphant sentence, "I planted a GO-foot row of onions today," to the erstwhile enemies ene-mies who discover unexpected good In each other while rerooflng the school building so as not to raise their tax rate, Mrs. Harvey has taught the community com-munity to discover its own powers. A dozen years ago, in the KirksvHle schools, Mrs. Harvey h&d realized that, while she was teaching Porter children chil-dren to be good citizens of Kirksville, the more successful a teacher she was, the more the rural community suffered. suf-fered. In 1912, parents of some Porter Por-ter children who were growing up scornful o7 the home place, asked her to make over their own school. Mrs. Harvey won conservative farmers farm-ers by having the old schoolhouse re paired instead of approving the proposed pro-posed new building. She insisted on the dignity of a house of her own, even though the only empty house was a tumble-down $5 a month cottage. She weathered threatened injunction suits, "stacked" school board elections and underground scandal started by the group who suspected a nigger in the woodpile when a high-priced teacher voluntarily came to Porter at $50 a month. The three years she promised to give have grown to ten. Still Porter finds room for growth. Still it begs for more of Mrs. Harvey's sort of domination over its affairs. |