Norman Borlaug Interview (page: 7 / 9) Ending World Hunger	Print Interview

At the University of Minnesota, you worked a number of odd jobs, and one of the jobs was at a coffee shop where you worked for meals. Can you tell us about that, and about a girl you met named Margaret Gibson?

Norman Borlaug: Well, that was the first job. As soon as we arrived in Minneapolis, Chamberlain took Upton and I down to the university coffee shop. It was a small restaurant with three bars and a set of booths down one side. This guy was an athlete and he had been on the U.S. Olympic team. A huge guy -- he must've weighed 275 pounds -- fat, explosive. He used to throw the hammer in the Olympics of 1928, I suppose it was. So he owned this coffee shop. His mother took care of all the food they cooked and the student workers. They were trying to help students, but just to give you a feel of how bad things were, our breakfast was a cup of coffee, two pieces of toast and six prunes. That was our pay for working an hour-and-a-half for breakfast.

But it was bonding together many of these emergency programs that put me through the University. By that time things were so bad that Eleanor Roosevelt, especially, the wife of Franklin, she said, "We're going to lose a whole generation of young people unless we give them a chance for education." And from her activity came the NYA: National Youth Administration. This led to each state appointing a director of NYA, and they got a certain sum of money to be used by university professors. They would pick a good student -- you had to have a B-plus average -- and you would go for an interview and they tried to find out why you were ticking. The first year I got assigned to the Department of Entomology, pinning up those little bugs. This graduate student was working on his doctorate degree, so I pinned up his little bugs. This was a Japanese pine sawfly, a very small insect. Then I cleaned up the labs for all the other professors.

So how did you meet your wife, Margaret?

Norman Borlaug: At that university coffee shop. Generally, all of the students were working toward their board, and the breakfast was what I told you: two pieces of toast, a cup of coffee and five prunes. That was not because they were bad people, but they were in financial trouble, and before the beginning of my second year they went broke. So things were bad everywhere.

But by that time, the NYA -- the National Youth Administration -- and many of these other jobs were opening up, and so I shifted to those. But I met Margaret, and she was working for her board also. She was two years ahead of me in the College of Education to become a teacher. She got to Minnesota because of her two brothers. Bill, the eldest of the family had graduated from Michigan in communications, and he was in charge of the alumni publication. But her second brother and third brother were football players. George was captain, I think, in 1929 of the football team.

And Margaret began to work with her brother on the alumni publication?

Norman Borlaug: Right. So I used to see her every day, and she asked what I was studying. By that time, I had decided I wanted to be a forester, and she didn't know anything about that. But we kept talking, and she was as poor as I was, although she had better contacts because of the three brothers. But eventually, when the coffee shop went broke, she was in trouble also before she started working part-time as a proofreader on the alumni magazine with her brother.

In another job, you worked with the Civilian Conservation Corps, and you worked alongside people who were starving, and saw the impact receiving food had on them. What do you think you learned from that?

Norman Borlaug: Well, I saw this happen before my own eyes. The Civilian Conservation Corps was the outgrowth of Eleanor Roosevelt's ideas of saving a generation of students during the worst of the Depression. It so happened that conservation at that time sounded pretty good -- saving wildlife. It had public appeal. I guess it was my third year that the Civilian Conservation Corps had expanded greatly as one step towards doing something for the young.

And so that's when I wrote those 56 letters and I got one answer from Dr. Ed Berra from Connecticut. At that time, the Forest Research Center was in Yale, and he was professor there. But he was looking at the social problems as well as the technical problem. That summer I think there must be 15 of we undergraduates that were there with him, and he gave us responsibility that nobody at our age ever had before.

I was a leader in two of those CCC camps. I was a leader after a weather disaster, the hurricane of 1938. Ordinarily, the hurricanes come up the coast and go off into the Atlantic, and New England doesn't suffer. But this time there was a tremendous low pressure area in New England. So this hurricane in 1938 that had gone out to sea was sucked back and it hit Rhode Island first, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire. Tremendous destruction. So the Forest Service organized the Timber Salvage Operation.

I came into that and saw these young kids 16 and 17 years old -- that were coming out of the slum areas mostly of Boston and other cities. They were hungry and miserable and I saw them become young citizens. And in the process, we salvaged a lot of timber because you had to do this because all the roads were blocked. And so the Forest Service, when they went into this Timber Salvation Operation, they wanted some people with experience with fire from the west.

And by that time, I had spent a season out in Idaho in Idaho National Forest, which doesn't exist anymore after World War II because it was such a fire trap. It was split up and divided and put into four different national forests, but at that time, it's the most isolated guy in that fire system. And I was located out in Cold Mountain, which was one of the highest peaks in this back country. It was 45 miles from the end of a road. So in New England in 1939, when the Forest Service started this Timber Salvage Operation, the head of the program in Gardner, Pitcher, he wanted some people to know something about fire from the West, so I was one of those. And that's where I saw these students, or these young people, come out who work in the CCC -- Civilian Conservation Corps. They generally arrived miserable, hungry, and you saw them change as they got food. And many of them came from bad backgrounds, so you were also not only working on fire, but training these people to think differently.

When you graduated from the University of Minnesota, you received a job offer from Idaho Forestry. But then there were cutbacks and you lost that job, so you decided to continue with your education.

Norman Borlaug: Yeah, I'd done a good job in 1937 in Idaho, and so when I left the supervisor of Idaho National, he said, "Well, I have a job for you the first of next year," which was the first month of '38. But then I got a letter about a week before, saying would it be all right if I came June first rather than January first because of budgetary problems.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. So I went over to see Dr. Stakman, who I had only met once about three weeks before the end of the term when I saw that this Dr. Stakman, a world famous plant pathologist, was giving a lecture on these shifty little enemies the fungi -- rust fungi -- that destroy our crops. So I went to hear this and he was one of the old storied professors. He'd move into a history of background of parasiticum, of the rust fungi, other fungi that were dangerous from the standpoint of our cereal crop, and I was fascinated. And I said as I left that room in mid-December of 1937, "If I ever have a chance to study in graduate school, I want to study under a person like this."

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