My mother was an only child, whereas my father had a brother and two
sisters. As the saying goes, single children tend to be spoiled. My father
certainly spoiled, or at least indulged, my mother not only during their
courtship, but throughout their life together.
What other man would accept, after marriage, both his motherin-law’s
and her mother’s moving with him to another town, then living under the
same roof in a small apartment? This may have been another reason he
became a life-long workaholic—anything to get out of the house.
After I was born in 1938 and was barely old enough to start talking, I
named my parents by mutual consent. My grandmother, Mildred Goodwin
Dent, was trying to teach me to say “Daddy,” and it came out “Dottie.”
But I could pronounce “Pops,” so my father became Pops, and my mother
became Dottie, which was close enough to Dorothy for her. She preferred
that to “Mom,” anyway, so the name took, and my father preferred “Pops”
to Dad. My grandmother, by the way, became “Mimmie,” as close as I
could come to Mildred. Thus our communication links were established.
CHAPTER 2: BRANCHING OUT
Pops stayed with Carolina Cotton until 1942, but during this time he
had also started to branch out into operations for himself. In 1937 he
worked on the side for a year as senior editor for the Rural Electrification
Administration of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC,
and from 1938 to 1942 published their Rural Electrification Guide.
In 1939, he purchased an agricultural trade magazine, Cooperative
Digest and Farm Power, directed to leaders of the state’s farm
cooperatives, and also published it on the side. This magazine, which he
eventually took with him to Ithaca and published until 1966, as well as his
successful promotions with Carolina Cotton, earned him a reputation that
brought him to the attention of the head of what became known as Agway
in New York State.
In fact, Cooperative Digest became so widely read among farm people
that once, when it printed a story on farm co-ops that had run in the
Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post, its author received more
mail from its readers than he had received from readers of both general-
circulation magazines.
The author of that article was H.E. Babcock, in 1921 Cornell’s first
professor of farm marketing, who had resigned to raise the initial capital
for, and to manage, the Grange League Federation. Known as the GLF, the
organization became one of the largest farm producer and consumer
cooperatives in the world. Ed Babcock also served for many years on the
Cornell Board of Trustees, becoming chairman during the 1940s,
