Ok, now I can raise 'em back up again. BOS JCM at his angriest.
Did I ever tell y'all the Schroeder family connection to Farm Aid?
Tell us, Uncle Mark, tell us!
My dad was born & raised on a family dairy farm just outside Rock Island IL, the 5th of 7, only 1 sister. My youngest uncle Dave was (& still is) running the farm, and he was in the strife typical of the period. My oldest uncle, Ed, a seminary professor who lived just a few blocks from us in St. Louis took out a personal ad in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which read something like:
WANTED - Philanthropist
Willing to make low interest loan to
struggling 3rd generation family farm.
This got picked up by the wire services & it became the hook for many articles written about the plight of the American farmer, incl. NY Times, Washington Post, Newsweek. Shortly thereafter JCM & Willie Nelson announced that they were teaming up to do FarmAid, to be held at the Univ of Illinois, about 140 miles from the Schroeder farm. Connecting the dots, People magazine did a FarmAid issue & put my uncle & cousins on the cover milking cows.
Reagan was shamed into taking some action and made a big deal of some programs to give loans/interest credits to farmers, but when the dust had cleared, out of the entire state of Illinois, which if you don't know is a HUGE farming state, the only family farm that received any actual money from the US gov't was, you guessed it, my uncle. It definitely helped them, but times were still real tough for many more years.
There is a whole generation of midwestern farmers who had voted Republican faithfully up to 1984 that have never done so since.
