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Last week he was on his farm in Indiana, the international emergency forgotten for a local crisis: his hogs had diarrhea. He hurried home to his farm in north central Indiana's Carroll County. There his maternal great-grandfather was the first white settler, on a grant signed by Vice President Martin Van Buren in 1835. His paternal grandfather, Andrew Jackson Wickard, his worldly goods slung across his back, rode his one-eyed bay mare, "Chubby," into the county's Section 29 on a day in 1845.
In 1873 the elder Wickard himself built the gabled house in which Claude was born to young Andrew and Iva Leonora Kirkpatrick in 1893. Here Claude lived, married and raised two daughters—the only home he knew until he moved to Washington in 1933. At 17, Claude got fancy notions about going to Purdue University's School of Agriculture at Lafayette, 25 miles away. He graduated in 1915, with old-fangled resolve and new-fangled ideas, went back to Section 29. He tested the soil, found it sour, made a homely epigram: "We're mining the soil—not farming it." He began experimenting. Heedless of neighbors' alarms that he would kill the soil forever, he strewed phosphorus on the fields. He did nothing but farm, talked only about farming. His horizon stretched as far as he could see from his hog pastures; no farther.
In 1918 he married pretty, blue-eyed Louise Eckert, daughter of a Logansport saloonkeeper, moved her into the green-trimmed white farmhouse. The downstairs was expanded and slicked up a bit, but the old overstuffed furniture with the carefully placed antimacassars remained, and is there still.
Wickard became a good farmer, won ten gold medals from the Farm Bureau for coaxing a yield of 100 bushels to the acre from his cornfields. He went in heavily for hogs, got into the ton-litter competition, won another half-dozen medals. In five years he had bought another 100 acres abutting his ancestral 280 and had paid off a $5,000 mortgage. In 1926 he became the second Carroll County farmer to be singled out for the Prairie Farmer's widely recognized distinction of "Master Farmer."
In 1927 he became County President of the Farm Bureau, helped organize a farmers' cooperative, which he headed.
Hired Man. Claude Wickard was growing beyond his own soil. Wickard began working in extension projects, traveling the State, talking to farmers. In Indiana, farm politics and State politics are often the same thing. In 1932 Wickard became Democratic precinct captain. A slim, dark young fellow, Wayne Coy, then publisher of the Delphi Citizen (now rapidly becoming President Roosevelt's No. 1 trouble-shooter), got Wickard's friends to persuade him to run for the State Senate. Wickard ran, won.
In July 1933 the corn-hog problem was a big chunk of the whole farm problem. Wickard became a member of a committee representing the corn-hog States, talked so earnestly in Des Moines that Al G. Black, then head of the Department's corn-hog section, was impressed. He asked Wickard to come to work in Washington.