. One of the things that impressed me
more than anything else in the report of the Secretary was the fact that
we have lost a large number of members, and that we haven't attracted to
ourselves many new members. So far as my personal experience goes, if I
were to choose the one method of being most thoroughly disliked, it
would be to ask my neighbors, particularly those who do not know me, to
become members of any kind of a nut association. There is a glamour
about planting, and it is a sort of a disease with some people, year
after year, to seek for novelties. These nut tree advertisements that
read so well attract many purchasers. Right here in this section people
are buying nut trees that they are going to plant in a blighted
district, and these people, when they see what utter failures they have,
will be so disgusted with nut growing that when you approach them you
cannot talk nuts to them, and you will never have them join the
Association. More and more are leaving the Association, and very few new
ones are coming in to take their places. So I think the resolution ought
to be changed.

THE PRESIDENT: In what respect would you have it changed?

DR. ULMAN: To apply generally.

MR. LITTLEPAGE: Yes. Well, I agree very largely with what the doctor
says. I have always felt that the success of this organization--the
success of the nut industry as a whole--depended upon its being upon an
entirely truthful, fair and honest basis. I would rather see a crooked
cashier in a bank than a crooked nurseryman or tree man. The cashier you
can check up at 4:30 every afternoon; you can't check up the crooked
tree man for about ten years. I think the worst of all discouraging
things to people who want to go to the country to build up farms and
homes is to run into alluring, but misleading, advertisements. I have an
abounding faith in tree culture. I think that the pecan tree, the black
walnut, varieties of the English walnut and of a number of other nut
trees, are going to make it most possible and more desirable for men to
go to the country, but I think the success of those things depends upon
giving those people, as far as possible, facts, and not misleading them.
Wherever a man sets a tree that is a failure you have a man as a failure
generally as a tree man, and wherever you get a man to set a tree that
succeeds, you have a living, walking advocate of the tree business.
This Association has been fortunate all along in its policie