Snookered: how small farmers and big-city lawyers dug up a way to hoist Navy brass with their own petard.
Business North Carolina › Vol. 25 Nbr. 9, September 2005
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Snookered: how small farmers and big-city lawyers dug up a way to hoist Navy brass with their own petard.
Kiran Mehta casts about, scanning the folks filling rows of brown plastic seats and squeezing in folding chairs along the walls. Outside the Washington County Agricultural Center, pickup trucks are still easing into parking spaces on Plymouth's Water Street. More than 100 people, many of them men with weathered faces wearing overalls or khaki work pants, will pack this place tonight. With their starched white shirts, dark suits and ties, Mehta and his companions stand out like neon in a church.
Bill Sexton, a cotton farmer who is chairman of the county commissioners, sits at a table up front. In the crowd is Doris Morris, wife of a commercial fisherman and president of her church circle. Ronnie Askew farms 600 acres with his 80-year-old mother. Gerda Rhodes, the local livestock extension agent, lives with her family in her home-place, built in 1927 near the Washington-Beaufort county line. [GRAPHIC OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Forty years ago, just down the road, Sexton's dad told his own father he would convert swamp to cropland. He got a one-word reply: "Crazy." Sexton wonders how his granddaddy would descr...See the full content of this document
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