mily fortunes, if there be any, were founded on nuts. My father
when he was 16 years old was raised on Straight Creek near Pineville,
Kentucky, some hundred miles away from Lexington, and they gathered up a
wagonload of the old chestnuts, he and a hired man on my grandfather's
place, and they took an ox team and took them to Lexington to peddle
them out. It took them three weeks to make the return trip.

I come from Whitney County, Kentucky. It was named after old Colonel
Whitney, the man who built the first brick house in Kentucky. It was in
the fall of the year, and the mortar was freezing, and they mixed
whiskey with their mortar to keep it from freezing.

When I get away from home they ask me if I am a Kentucky Colonel. That's
one of the first things I hear, and I tell them that I am. And they want
to know why they put that honor upon a small fellow like me, and I tell
them it was on account of scientific research that I had done, that I
had developed a new way of making egg-nog. I feed the chickens the
whiskey mash and they lay bourbon-flavored eggs, and all you have to do
is drop one in a glass of milk.

They always ask about the Kentucky Derby, and I tell them that the last
I heard Mint Julep was coming in on the home stretch strong.

I am not qualified with all of these experts to get up here and talk
about nuts. They say an expert is a fellow that learns more and more
about less and less until he knows practically everything about nothing
at all; and that's kind of my shape, sir.

Now, seriously, I have had this hobby of trying to grow nuts for a
number of years. I grafted a golf club on a croquet post, and I got some
wonderful golf balls. Before the war I ordered some Chinese chestnuts. I
got in touch with Sakata and Company in Yokahama, and they finally came
in. I didn't have any experience, and about all I had was some
imagination, and I planted them out in the fall of the year like I
planted any other nuts. I went out in the spring and investigated. There
wasn't a darn one come up. The rats had beat me to them and eaten them
all up.

I was a persistent cuss and ordered some the next year, and I put them
up in fruit jars and figured I would plant them in the spring, and when
the spring came they all had the dry rot.

So I ordered them the third year, and I made sacks out of fly screen
wire and put those nuts outside, and in the spring they came up and I
had a lot of nice sprouts about this high and pu