Damon Runyon

Lancaster New Era/January 3, 1933

MIAMI, Fla., Jan. 3—I met a man the other day who has sold nearly 60,000 farms in his time, and has upwards of 40,000 other farms for sale right now.

“How big is your own farm,” I inquired.

“Oh, I haven’t any farm of my own,” said the man cheerfully.

“Do you mean to say, you haven’t any farm of any kind whatever?” I demanded. “”ot even a teenty-weenty little old chicken farm, or pig farm, or duck farm, or a farm for ball players, or nothing?”

“No,” said the man. “Not a farm. I’ve got a boat house landing, however.”

I mentally declined to accept a boat house landing as a compromise for a farm. I reached for my hat. I had suddenly commenced to wonder if a farm was what I wanted, after all. If Mr. E. A. Strout, who has 40,000 farms for sale, doesn’t own a farm, what was wrong with the sketch I had in mind of life among the daffydills, and the hayseeds, and the cowslips.

“But I once owned a farm,” added Mr. Strout, suddenly. The yearning in his voice detained me. “Yes,” he continued, gazing dreamily from the heights of his office windows in Fourth avenue, out over the tall towers of the town, “I once bought a farm up in Massachusetts and set out a lot of fruit trees, and put in some fine livestock, and about $30,000 cash money and went in for farming de luxe.

“It was a great life,” Mr. Strout went on. “But my business wouldn’t permit me to live so far away, so I sold out and moved back to New York. I’ve always regretted that farm. I understand the man who bought it got $70,000 for my orchards when they matured.”

Brings Back Smile

Well, this narration sort o’ renewed the joyous hope with which I had gone bounding up the stairs to Mr. Strout’s office, a spring in my heels, and a song on my lips. I believe I was singing Mr. Walter Donaldson’s old ditty:

“I’ve got a thousand

Cows and

Plows and

Chickens

On the dear old farm!”

But no matter. I was enjoying my periodical yen for a farm, so I betook myself to Mr. Strout, whose ads about Farms For Sale in the newspapers are mainly responsible for my occasional longing for life as a sod buster. I rather misdoubted that there was any such person as Mr. Strout. I thought it was probably just a firm name, but they led me right into the presence of an urbane, well-dressed man of perhaps sixty, who sat in a spruce office on the wall of which hung the picture of a farm in Readville, Maine, the first farm Mr. Strout ever sold.

Natural Born Seller

That was back in 1900. Since then he has sold, as I have said, nearly 60,000 farms in different sections of these United States, all as a broker, He doesn’t go trading west of the Mississippi, though once he had an office in Los Angeles for a spell.

His field of greatest activity now, he told me, is New England. He comes from up Maine way himself and his early career was devoted to selling window screens, or anything else that people would buy. I judge that Mr. Strout was just a natural born seller of things.

He got into the business of selling farms largely by accident. He started in a small way, sticking to his home section, but gradually expanding until now he has branch offices all over the East. “I was raised on a farm, and I know how to run a farm,” said Mr. Strout, proudly. “I could go out and make a living on a farm right now.”

Mr. Ryan Speaks

I gathered from what Mr. Strout said that a lot of folks are going from the cities to the farms, but he added that a lot are also going from the farms to the cities. This is a break for Mr. Strout, otherwise he might not have any farms for sale. He rather thought the call of the land was louder than the honk of the town.

He didn’t recall, offhand, the names of any sports writers who had harkened unto the call of the land, however. At least not lately. Still, didn’t know of any law against a character of that kind going in for farming, so he called in an obliging man, and the obliging man showed me many photos of farms, none of which were just to my liking because in no picture of a farm that I saw could I detect any theatres or hotels in the immediate vicinity.

Some of the roads approaching the farms seemed to me quite unpaved. However, my greatest difficulty was In trying to settle on a definite locality. I got to thinking of what Mr. Palmer House Ryan told me when I asked him why he didn’t buy a place somewhere, and park himself permanently. Mr. Palmer House Ryan is a famous Chicago sporting man who hasn’t lived anywhere else but the Palmer House in over thirty years, though he has spent the past in the George Vth Hotel in Paris.

“I’ve often thought I’d like to do that, Damon,” said Mr. Palmer House Ryan, “but there are so many different places I’d love to live I can’t settle on any one of them.”

P. S.-No, I didn’t buy the farm.