N. Dakota town tries to re-invent itself with land giveaway, Crosby, North Dakota

Open the Web page of Crosby, N.D., and step back in time half a century, for here is a wagon bringing bundled grain to feed into a giant separator that blows chaff out one side and wheat from the other.

It is a picture from my youth, farm days during World War II, threshing crews made up of 4-F deferments, older farmers and a few migrants. Huge lunches under a rare tree on the prairies, gallons of coffee, hearty talk, the comfort of community. I was old enough to shock grain and pitch bundles into a wagon, but not to work around the chuffing separator with its long, flapping belts.

Those little farming communities were an entire world for a Dakota boy of that era. The great mid-century journalist, Eric Severeid, raised in nearby Velva, commented, "Perhaps it was our common dependence upon the wheat that made all men essentially equal, but I do know now, having looked at society in many countries, that we were a true democracy in that huddled community of painted boards. A man might affect pretensions, but he would not pretend for long."

Floyd J. McKay / guest columnist

Full Story: http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=floyd14&date=20050914&query=crosby

(Thanks to Tom Rolfstad for passing this along. Russ)