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¶For the first time in six years, all available exhibition space was rented at the New York State Fair at Syracuse. One of the oldest (95 years) and best attended (263,000 paid admissions, 10,000 unpaid). New York's celebration boasted its biggest horse show, a new $100,000 4-H livestock pavilion, a new prize for the best Belgian draft horse. At the spelling bee the winning moppet marred a perfect score by leaving the "t" off "cachet." Her consternation was no greater than that of young Eleanor Smithers of Ogdensburg, when asked to show her blue-ribbon Holstein calf, "Fineview Springbank Babe," to two famed stockmen, Owen D. Young and Caesar Kleberg, whose King Ranch in Texas is the world's largest. Governor Herbert Lehman told Fairgoers: "Control of prices, regulation of supplies and restrictions of movement and distribution of products . . . may be justified in times of great economic stress, but we should be careful that we do not project emergency measures into permanent activities."
Governor. City man though he is, New York's Lehman is well aware that the one "must" date on every Governor's calendar is his visit to his State's Fair. And of all the Governors who dutifully put in their appearances at State Fairs last week, none was so pleased or proud as Clyde LaVerne Herring of Iowa. To its citizens Iowa is the end Farm State of the Union and its State Fair the best anywhere. The smiles on the faces of his fellow-citizens which greeted Governor Herring as he marched through the Grand Avenue entrance of the Fair Grounds at Des Moines last week had been put there by a booming hog market, a corn crop 55% more abundant than last year's, an estimated farm income of $500,000,000. But Governor Herring, sombre, benign, snowy-crested, could recall days when there was not a smile in all Iowa.
Within six months after his inauguration in 1933, Governor Herring had gone through a farm strike led by Milo Reno. There was riot and martial law at Le Mars, where a State Judge who sanctioned mortgage foreclosures was dragged from his bench, nearly lynched (TIME, May 8, 1933). In desperation Governor Herring had proclaimed a farm mortgage moratorium, later called a conference of Midwestern Governors, led them to Washington.
Just why a rich, retiring realtor in his early 50's like Clyde Herring wanted to become Governor at such an unhappy time is hard to say. Born near Jackson, Mich., his first job was carrying bundles at a Jackson drygoods store for $1.50 a week. Soon he rode his bicycle 80 miles into Detroit to become a jewelry clerk. At 18 he fought Spain from Chickamauga, Ga. Later he raised cattle in Colorado, fattened them in Iowa, finally "realized that I could hire a man to do the work for $30 a month and do something else myself." In Detroit he had fixed Henry Ford's watch, thus came to know that rising automobile manufacturer. From 1910 until the distributing system was reshuffled after the War, Clyde Herring was Ford agent for Iowa. By that time he had acquired $3,000,000 worth of Des Moines real estate.