354 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1945 



It was this seed that the Government was principally after when 

 the deal was made to take over the Intercontinental properties. The 

 deal had been in the making even before the outbreak of the war. 

 Representative John Z. Anderson of California had introduced a bill 

 on June 12, 1941, for that purpose, but nothing came of it. When war 

 was declared he reintroduced it and on March 5, 1942, it became law. 

 It provided for purchase of the Intercontinental properties and pat- 

 ents in this country and the growing of 75,000 acres of guayule. The 

 company received $1,721,235. 



With the signing of the Guayule Act there was launched an epic of 

 construction activity that I am sure has not been topped during the 

 history of this country's war effort. The time was already at hand 

 when the guayule seed must be sown and there were no nurseries in 

 which to sow it. 



Under the dynamic hand of Maj. Evan W. Kelley, sent from his post 

 as regional forester at Missoula, Mont., to head up the job, and the 

 organizational genius of Paul H. Roberts, erstwhile director of the 

 Midwestern Shelterbelt Project, that situation was soon remedied. 

 In the face of almost incredible difficulties in respect to procuring 

 material and help, 600 acres of nursery land were leased, leveled, 

 equipped with overhead irrigation, buildings, and windbreaks, and 

 seeded. A thousand-man labor camp was constructed and equipped, 

 and 905 acres of fields were planted with stock ready for transplanting 

 in a small nursery operated by the company. And over all was the 

 necessity for recruiting, often sight unseen, a corps of men who knew 

 nothing about guayule but could nevertheless be trusted to go ahead 

 largely on their own without disastrous consequences. 



The author can record all these heroic achievements with perfect 

 modesty; he was not there until they were nearly finished. But the 

 record speaks for itself. The 23,000 pounds of seed got into the 

 ground in time, and in due course, while everyone hung breathless 

 over the beds, emerged as some 300 million healthy plants. Carpen- 

 ters on the camp job kept one jump ahead of incoming laborers, and 

 the organization — mainly by virtue of the 7-times-a-week "breakfast 

 conference" — managed to correlate its myriad activities into some 

 semblance of homogeneity. Salinas is a small town, so personnel 

 lodged wherever it was lucky enough to find room, and the project's 

 offices were at one time scattered out in 14 places, including cottages 

 on the edge of town. 



HANDLING THE NURSERY CROP 



When the guayule plants came up in the nursery beds, weeds came 

 too, and since the young rubber plants start slowly, there was a giant 

 weeding job on hand. Some 3,000 people were engaged in that back- 



