The Delmarva Farmer was born in a sun-splashed room on the 11th floor of a conference center hotel in Ocean City in November 1977.
The precise date escapes me, but no matter.
Three sketches of the flag (the name of the paper which would appear at the top of Page 1) were spread on the bed.
We picked one.
It appeared on the first issue of this newspaper, which came off the press early in March of 1978 — again, don’t hold me to the date. — and that flag is still there today.
There, in that hotel room, the mission of this newspaper also was framed.
We would become a voice for farmers, not only across Delmarva but across the Mid-Atlantic.
The mission would be, we resolved, no less irrevocable, no less inviolate than the flag.
We have never wavered from that mission.
And now we come to The Battle of Ruthsburg.
Never, in our experience, in our plus-30 years of publication did more farmers need a voice than in that battle.
As the editorial staff of The Delmarva Farmer gathered, we resolved, anew, to carry the banner of the farmers — whom one of the opposition would call, degradingly, “the Ruthsburgers.”
By the way, the Ruthsburgers won.
It seemed preposterous, indeed ludicrous from the start, that the feds — the General Services Administration and the Department of State, even after an all-night partisan binge — could settle on Ruthsburg as the site for a war games playground.
Good heavens!