In a rambling, five-room Georgia farmhouse at 5 o'clock one morning last week, a fat (205 lb.), genial Southerner rolled reluctantly out of bed, downed a cup of coffee laced with bourbon, pulled on a shapeless seersucker suit, and started reading aloud to warm up his vocal cords. Shortly after, Channing Cope, 55, farm editor of the Atlanta Constitution (circ. 187,000) and one of the South's best-known and most influential newspapermen, ambled to an easy chair on his screened front porch.
For a few moments, he listened idly to a rain crow's mourning call, and squinted at his herd of Jersey cows browsing on the green pastures. At 60 seconds past 6 a.m., preceded by eight bars of Dixie and a short commercial, Farm Editor Cope leaned toward a porch microphone and ad-libbed: "I never saw a prettier day . . ." By the. time his chatty half-hour broadcast was over, Cope had worked up an appetite for a heaping platter of fried eggs, sausages and hot biscuits, washed down by more coffee and bourbon. Then he settled down to write his daily newspaper column, "Channing Cope's Almanac," in the same breezy, cracker-barrel fashion in which he talks.
Last week Newsman Cope was reaching an even broader audience: his first book, Front Porch Farmer (Turner E. Smith & Co.; $2.75) was Atlanta's No. 1 non-fiction bestseller, and four Southern state universities had approved it as an agricultural textbook. Even the rival Atlanta Journal gave Constitution Columnist Cope an ungrudging pat on the back: "An important book for the entire South. Channing Cope is a prophet."
Mail It In. Prophet Cope's mecca is 700-acre Yellow River Farm, 40 miles southeast of Atlanta. In 1945, when Constitution Editor Ralph McGill asked Cope to write a column, he accepted on one condition: "Let me mail it in." He still does most of his work on the front porch, where his 26-year-old third wife, Ruth, helps answer his 30 fan letters a day.
Almost daily Cope finds room in his column for his favorite gospel—the coming of a Southland rich with new topsoil, year-round pastureland and milk-fed beef. The foundation of the Cope gospel is the fast-growing vine, kudzu;*he organized Georgia's Kudzu Club (20,000 members), and has plugged the vine so long that friends call him "the Kudzu Kid." It was betting on the horses that introduced Cope (and Georgia) to another important crop. On his way to drop a little money at the 1945 Kentucky Derby, Cope spotted a grass called Kentucky 31 fescue, later seeded some on his own farm; today there are 100,000 acres of Ky. 31 fescue (originally a European grass) in Georgia.
Perish to Death. A Kentucky Baptist preacher's son, Channing Cope went to sea at 15 and didn't get his shore legs back until he was 26; later he was by turns pressagent, lawyer, radio broadcaster and farmer. When Cope put down his first payment on rundown, worn-out Yellow River Farm in 1927, the county agent predicted that he would "perish to death" before he got a living out of it; now, with hired hands doing the work, Cope nets $11,000 a year.