Youth Gone to Seed

For more than six decades, American Seed Co. of Lancaster, Pa., provided thousands of youngsters with their first lessons in free enterprise. Grade school children scampered about their neighborhoods selling the firm's garden seeds for a chance to share in the profits and win prizes like bicycles and baseball mitts. But now American Seed has gone out of business, the victim of childhood corruption. Since 1975, some 400,000 young business people have sent away for the seeds but then pocketed all the sales receipts, instead of returning part of the money to the company as payment for the seed. So far...