THIRTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART V 221 



the road. I think the type of roads they are adopting now in 

 Wayne county, IMichigan, and in some parts of Ohio, of dirt and 

 brick with dirt and gravel roads alongside for dry weather 

 travel is a better proposition by far for such a state as we 

 have. With gravel you can make use of local material for 

 concrete roads, or concrete with dirt tops, and I believe that 

 this is the type of roads that will be more satisfactory in this 

 state. 



The Chairman: In preparing our program we had two propo- 

 sitions — two live questions for Iowa people to consider, and upon 

 the first one Mr. MacDonald presented the question of good roads. 

 Our next paper is the question of publicity and advertisement by 

 the state, and I have the pleasure in presenting to you, gentle- 

 men of this convention, Mr. F. W. Beckman of the Department 

 of Agricultural Journalism and Publicity at Iowa State College. 



Prof. F. W. Beckman: I am going to talk to you rather informally be- 

 cause I have not had time to put what I want to say about advertising 

 Iowa into a formal paper. I shall not pose as an authority upon ad- 

 vertising. I have been a newspaper reporter or editor ever since I left 

 school and I have filled acres of space with news and opinions and other 

 publicity matter, but I have not been in the business of advertising as 

 such. At the same time, advertising has been more or less of a hobby with 

 me and has received such study as a man gives to a hobby. There are 

 some things, however, relating to this proposal to advertise Iowa that 

 are so plain that any man of common sense, whether he.be an advertising 

 expert or not, is qualified to discuss. It is about those things that I 

 want to talk this afternoon. 



You will be interested, first of all, in two stories of real life in Iowa. 



One is the story of a man in western Iowa who became dissatisfied with 

 Iowa conditions some years ago. While in this frame of mind, he read 

 glowing advertising accounts of the Wenatchee and other far western 

 apple growing districts. Inspired to believe that he was wasting his 

 abilities in cultivating mere Iowa soil, he determined to go west and find 

 fortune there;. He sold his land for something like $20,000 and invested 

 most of it in twelve or fifteen acres of land in Washington at something 

 like a thousand dollars an acre. He bought it at that price because it 

 had been demonstrated that upon one-tenth of an acre a man had grown 

 a crop of apples worth $50. Upon ten times that, or an acre, he could 

 grow $500 worth, and upon ten acres he could grow ten times that, or 

 $5,000 worth. So this Iowa man was thoroughly convinced that the land 

 was worth a thousand dollars an acre at least. Only a year or so ago, an old 

 neighbor visited this Iowa man who had gone west. To that old neigh- 

 bor, he made this surprising statement when the two began to exchange 

 confidences: 



