Delta's 22

Colorado's mile-high Delta County should have been a good place to live and farm last week. Through the warm days ranchers sheared their sheep, branded their new calves. Lambs tried out their wobbly legs in the meadows; over the broad fields men & women planted potatoes and beets. The big irrigation pipes spilled cold mountain water into the ditches to course slowly through pear and peach orchards. Even after the sunset had flared red over Uncompahgre Plateau and the chill night wind swept down from the peaks, plowmen worked in the dark by searchlights.

They had to work late in Delta County. There was scarcely a farmer who had not lost to the Army a son, a hired man, or both. Some had lost a third of their help, some had lost half. Delta's farmers and the three solid citizens on its draft board knew the law: "essential" farm workers should be deferred. But their boys were too proud to ask for deferment. Anyway, the board had almost no one else to call.

One evening last week, as the sun sank, the Denver & Rio Grande Western's Mountaineer chuffed out of the county seat depot. Aboard were 44 men bound for the Army; 22 of them born and reared on Delta's farms. There was no one to replace them. Delta was steeped in gloom. Around the corrals, the talk was of draft boards, of furloughs and missing men: "A green man is helpless on a ranch. . . . My crops are shot to hell." In town, bespectacled King L. Banks, manager of the potato growers' coop, was busy helping worried farmers fill out affidavits, deferment forms.

In Denver, some 175 miles to the east, tall, affable Governor John C. Vivian heard about Delta County's train, lost his affability, finally lost his temper. In four years as Lieutenant Governor, three months as Governor, quiet John Vivian had made little ripple in his own State. Now he made a splash that reached all the way to Washington. In the draft laws, he found a neglected phrase: "The Governor of each State shall have charge of the administration of the selective service law in his State." Governor Vivian's fist hit his desk top. Off went an order to Colorado's selective service chief: notify all draft boards immediately to stop taking farmers.

In startled Washington, everybody knew that Gov. Vivian had brought the farmer's manpower problem to a dramatic crisis that the Administration could no longer ignore. One day later, President Roosevelt promised that 3,000,000 farm helpers would be deferred this year.

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