 What’s the deal with the black & white saddle shoes?  Click here for the story of our farm in Greene County, Iowa. Here's looking at life at Simple Serenity Farm  Carla’s sister & brother-in-law Chris and Tony Woods, of Des Moines, were at the farm on Sunday, August 22, helping Carla do the lawn mowing and other yard work that we’ve struggled to keep up with lately, with all our medical appointments. The Woodses brought along their 18-month-old granddaughter Ari, who was a delight watching all the action from the porch with Chuck, catching up on her reading and then getting a moment on the lawn tractor seat! Click here for larger format Earlier photos in this series Iowa Hall of Pride netINS, Inc. Butler House on Grand B&B Sam's Barber Shop Douglas T. Bates III, Attorney KMA Radio's ''Chuck & Don Show'' Barack Obama story & coloring book The Monks of New Melleray Abbey RELATED LINKS About Offenburger.com Biographies Want to Reprint? Want Updates? ARCHIVES Chuck Offenburger's columns Christie Vilsack's columns Carla Offenburger's columns Carla's book reviews Jared Strong's columns Guest Columns The Simple Serenity Farm columns Farm Photos, 2006 - 2008 Our Iowa News Digest Along Our Way 
|
|
 Remembering the time 50 years ago when little Coon Rapids, IA, made news ’round the world By CHUCK OFFENBURGER August 25, 2009 COON RAPIDS, IOWA They’ve always been big thinkers in this western Iowa town of 1,305 people, and they’re proving it again this Saturday.  Now, you undoubtedly have read and heard a good deal about that ’59 visit in recent days, as the anniversary celebration approaches. But in this modern time when so much shocking news seems to happen that we’re almost numb to it, you may have difficulty understanding just how stunning the Khrushchev visit was a half-century ago. Why? Basically, there is no hostile nation today that is as fearsome to most Americans as the Soviet Union was back in that time. IT WAS SCARY, ALL RIGHT. The USSR and the USA were officially enemies in those “Cold War” years. There was constant saber-rattling, with threats of rocket attacks and the ultimate scare tactic – that either nation might use their A-bombs and H-bombs. We built bomb shelters everywhere, and hid our own rockets in silos scattered in a 60-mile circle around Omaha, where the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command was located at Offutt Air Force Base. We had another chain of missile silos tucked away along the northern border of the U.S. As a kid growing up in the southwest Iowa town of Shenandoah, 60 miles from Omaha, my pals and I would speculate whether, if the Soviets bombed the SAC headquarters, we’d be in the crater from the bombs or just in the fall-out zone. The reality of the international situation then was that the U.S. was still way ahead of the Communist-controlled Soviet Union economically and maybe educationally, but the Soviets were clobbering us in science, space technology and defense spending. The week before the often-bombastic Khruschev came to Coon Rapids, his nation landed an exploratory missile on the Moon. Seven months after the visit, the Soviets shot down an American U2 spy plane flying over their territory. That prompted Khrushchev to storm back to New York City, and appear at the United Nations, where he took off a shoe and pounded the podium, screaming in the Russian language, “We will bury you!” It was indeed a frightening time. A CORN-FIRED THAW IN THE COLD WAR. Yet in the middle of all that conflict and hate, here was the Iowa corn farmer and seed salesman Garst, who not only had access to the leader of an “enemy” nation, but he also had that leader’s respect and friendship. Garst is generally remembered today as often being bombastic in his own right. In fact, he was a lot like Khrushchev in many ways. And the two of them brought at least a temporary thaw in the Cold War, a brief easing of international tension. They did that by coming to an agreement – with cautious consent at the highest levels in both governments – that rebuilding Soviet agriculture with American seed, grain and know-how would be to the benefit of everybody. Khrushchev, the Communist, saw a way to feed starving people in the massive Soviet Union and stave off the threat of uprisings or worse. Garst, ever the capitalist, saw a way to do some humanitarian good while also opening up a huge market for American grain, and that would benefit not only farmers here, but also owners of seed corn companies, too – like himself!  What really started the idea for the visit was a Des Moines Register editorial written in early 1955 by Loren Soth, the newspaper’s editorial chief, who had a deep understanding of agriculture. He had noted news stories coming out of the Soviet Union saying that Khrushchev, who was then chairman of the Communist Party but not yet Premier of the nation, was urging increased use of hybrid seed corn and other expansion in the Soviets’ agriculture system. Soth’s editorial was headlined, “If the Russians Want More Meat…,” and in it he advocated for exchanges among the two nations’ ag experts. He said Khrushchev should put together “any delegation (he) wants to come to Iowa to get the lowdown on raising high quality cattle, hogs, sheep and chickens. We promise to hide none of our ‘secrets.’ We will take the visiting delegation to Iowa’s great agricultural experiment station at Ames, to some of the leading farmers in Iowa, to our livestock breeders, soil conservation experts and seed companies. Let the Russians see how we do it.” So that’s what triggered Garst and others to travel to the Soviet Union, and to host many Soviet delegations in the next few years. In March, 1958, Khrushchev became Premier, and a year later, negotiations began for him eventually to visit the U.S. and for American President Dwight Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union. All of that was the run-up to Wednesday, September 23, 1959, the biggest day in Coon Rapids’ history, for sure, and one of the biggest ever in Iowa. Khrushchev and his delegation came to Iowa in the middle of a two-week trip across the U.S. GOD BLESS THE PRESS! More than 400 journalists, among them the leading reporters of the era, had requested credentials for the trip to the Garst farm, and they came out from Des Moines in seven chartered buses. The official escorts from the U.S. government, traveling with Khrushchev, were led by United Nations Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. Garst had invited a special friend of his, Adlai Stevenson, the former Illinois governor who had been the Democratic Party’s nominee for President in both 1952 and ’56, and later would serve as U.N. Ambassador himself. Liz Garst, the granddaughter of Roswell Garst, was only 8 years old back then, but she’s done extensive research into the visit. She says that the delegation made a couple of ther stops at farms between Des Moines and Coon Rapids, including at the farm of the late Max Naylor here in southern Greene County. At the Garst farm, the conversations, tours and even a big lunch served to the special guests in a tent in the yard, all were apparently somewhat hindered by swarming reporters. That angered Roswell Garst to the point he urged the Greene County Pleasure Riders saddle club, which had mounted riders there to help with security, to charge the press and “ride ’em down!’’ Before long, Garst was picking up handfuls of smelly silage and throwing it at the reporters.  A few hours later, the delegation moved on to Iowa State University in Ames, then back to Des Moines. THE MOST SIGNIFICANT IMPACT? Fifty years later, it seems to me that the real importance of the visit to the Coon Rapids farm was probably: -- The personal friendship between Roswell Garst, his wife Elizabeth, Nikita Khrushchev and his wife Nina was affirmed for the long-run. Ditto for their families. -- That led to many more agricultural exchanges, as well as huge sales of grain and equipment, between the two nations. -- It may have signaled the actual start of a big stride by American agriculture into the international arena, and that forever changed farming across the Farm Belt. -- It certainly gave Iowa a global reputation as the place to go if you really wanted to see and understand agriculture, or to buy the top seed stock, finished grain and equipment. All of that is my analysis of the Khrushchev visit on the “macro” level, from all I’ve read and heard about it. That includes conversations with both Liz Garst and her sister Rachel Garst, who have coordinated the 50th anniversary celebration. But the truth is that my two favorite parts of the whole story happened on much more a “micro” level. WHO HAD AMMO AND WHO DIDN'T? One involved the Iowa National Guard and the other was the bold but foolish actions of a “gate crasher” from northern Iowa who somehow sneaked past security and on to the Garst farm – and in fact, shook hands with Khrushchev and was pictured around the world with Khrushchev patting his stomach! First the story about the Guard. Security around the visit was probably the tightest that anybody in Iowa had ever seen. Peter Carlson, a former reporter for the Washington Post and People Magazine, authored a new book about the Khrushchev and it was published this year under the title “K Blows Top!” That came from a headline in one newspaper after Khrushchev got mad when he was told that security concerns would make it impossible for him to tour Disneyland when he was visiting California. Carlson, in a talk in Coon Rapids this past July, said that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover “had told Congress that there were an estimated 25,000 Americans who might want to kill Khrushchev” if they had the opportunity during his visit to the U.S. Carlson noted that a Soviet general, from their KGB security bureau, was here advising the Americans on protecting his leader. Through an interpreter, the general told his American counterparts, “If anything happens to Chairman Khrushchev, that will be the end of us all,” Carlson said. “The general then took his hands, formed a shape like a bomb cloud and said, ‘Boom!’ ”
“There were hundreds of National Guardsmen who were on duty that day,” Liz Garst said. “They were not only on all the rooftops, at every intersection and in all the box culverts around Coon Rapids, they were also strung out along Highway 141 all the way to Des Moines. It wasn’t like just one Guardsman every mile, either, there were way more than that, much closer together. They all had rifles, and some had machine guns.” There was a legitimate question, of course, about whether American citizen soldiers should be carrying live ammunition when the visiting Premier of the enemy nation would be traveling right in front of them. “I was told through the years that the Guardsmen were not issued bullets for that day,” Liz Garst continued. “But, you know, I’ve been disputed a couple of times recently by people saying that just is not right. So I’m not sure.” It still makes for intriguing speculation. SNEAKED IN ON A DARE! There is no doubt, however, about the activities that day in 1959 of one Jack Christiansen, then about 30 years old, who may have been living then in Mason City but was a native of the small North Iowa town of Thornton. “Jack Christiansen was famous, at least among his friends, as a gate crasher,” author Carlson said in his remarks here in July. “He apparently had managed to crash the Democratic National Convention in 1956, hanging out with the Pennsylvania delegation.” Other reports back then were that Christiansen had also sneaked in to some major college football bowl games around the nation. At the Garst farm, Christiansen not only managed to sneak right on to the farm, he also ended up coming face to face to Khrushchev. “Khrushchev was going down a line of people, and there was a big local farmer in the line who had permission to be there,” Liz Garst said. “So as Khrushchev approached him, he noticed that the guy had a pretty big stomach. He was just reaching out to shake hands with him, when this Christiansen guy suddenly stepped up in front of the farmer and shook Khrushchev’s hand. Khrushchev was distracted enough by all the reporters and other people that he must’ve thought he was shaking hands with the farmer, because he suddenly patted Christiansen’s belly, turned and said to press, ‘Now there’s a real American!’ ” The photograph of Khrushchev patting Jack Christiansen’s stomach was published and republished around the world. Only recently has Liz Garst learned that when the Soviet delegation moved on to Iowa State at Ames, Christiansen showed up there, too. “I don’t think any of us in the family ever heard any more about Jack Christiansen until just recently,” she said. “But I’ve always wondered about him, so through some friends up around Mason City, we did some checking and learned that he is now dead but that his twin sister still lives in Minnesota. I finally was able to talk to her on the phone.” The sister reported that she and her brother Jack were born in 1929 and grew up in Thornton, a town just south of Mason City that today has a population of about 400. “She told me that Jack did well in school, but he didn’t work very hard at it,” Liz Garst said. “She said he had joined the service, and had not been out very long when he came to Coon Rapids. She said for a time he ran a café in Thornton and a drive-in in Clear Lake, and that he may have been managing a swimming pool at the time Khrushchev was here. Later, he moved to Texas and had a bar and grill near Fort Hood. She said he died about three years ago.” The sister said that Jack did at times “crash” events, or at least show up invited and unexpected. She said he was known to attend funerals and weddings where he knew no one, just for the meal. “She also told me he’d gone to Coon Rapids ‘on a dare,’ ” Liz Garst said. “But she was careful to say that he had no criminal record that she ever knew about.” Christiansen’s stunt did earn him a spot on the extremely popular national TV game show “I’ve Got a Secret” on September 30, 1959, a week after the Khrushchev visit. The show’s host Garry Moore presided over the questioning and guessing of Christiansen by the panel of regulars – Bill Cullen, Bess Myerson, Henry Morgan and Betsy Palmer. It’s probably true that if there were somehow a repeat of the whole Khrushchev visit was happening today, and if someone tried to pull off what Jack Christiansen did, he’d probably be shot! A FABULOUS LEGACY FOR THE FAMILY. There will be some high-level visitors around the Garst farm and around Coon Rapids this Saturday, for sure, but none that will bring the level of security that a head-of-state would require today. Meanwhile, for Liz and all the other Garsts of today, it will be a chance to reflect on the unique position their father, father-in-law and grandfather Roswell Garst put them in across the state and nation, and around the world. “I feel lucky to be Roswell’s granddaughter,” Liz Garst said. “It’s a legacy to be really proud of. The ideas that we should reach out to our enemies, try to find common interests, and feed hungry people as a way toward world peace – that’s a fabulous legacy.” You can write the columnist at chuck@Offenburger.com.
|
