Anderson's Acres

Where the corn grows tall in Iowa, almost everybody knows hearty, conscientiously corny Ray Anderson. In blizzards and blistering heat, through muck and manure, he has been rambling its countryside for 17 years, helping build for the Cedar Rapids Gazette a circulation of 45,000, for himself a 242-lb. girth and a reputation as a top U.S. newspaper farm page editor. This week 55-year-old Anderson moved to broader pastures. His new beat: the rural Midwest, as a roving editor of Farm Journal and Farmer's Wife (TIME, Jan. 17).

No armchair agronomist, Ray Anderson's talents range far afield from reporting. His farm page is a bursting bin of unmetered verse, sound information on crops and controls, self-snapped pictures, Falstaffian musings on the "gorgeous gorging" of apple-mulberry pie at Center Junction. Before gasoline rationing slowed his pace he averaged 38,000 miles a year, perhaps half of them over unpaved pikes and stubbly fields.

A lifetime friend of Henry Agard Wallace, Anderson has snapped at New Deal farm policies. But the Anderson bite is most painfully remembered by Iowa GOPsters. At a 1940 dinner attended by Cedar Rapids' Harrison Earl Spangler, now national Republican chairman (TIME, Feb. 14), Anderson got nettled by ques-tions as to how farmers would vote, exploded in his deep bass that they would never go with the G.O.P. so long as it was run by Spangler-type men. His Iowa friends have lately noticed in Anderson's "Out on the Acres" column a leaning toward conservatism, see election-year significance in his move to the rural journal of Philadelphia's Old Guardsmen Joseph and Howard Pew.

Farm Journal (circ. 2,700,000) succeeded in luring Anderson after many others had failed. One factor: his managing editor will be Carroll P; Streeter, originator 20 years ago of the Gazette's farm page.

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