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Once, --there was a stream. The name of the stream was Indian Creek. It was named Indian Creek (once), only after all the Indians had been killed or forced to leave and their sprawling orchards were burned. The people who named it (whoever they were) were obviously rather simple-minded people, not literally simple, but simple as in unreflective. They didn’t make up names just to mock that thing they had named, as subdivisions often do now, and to wax ironical but the names nevertheless rang with irony and whispered mockery. Once the Indians were gone this made it a very desirable place to live and New York’s Provincial Government finding itself rich in land and poor in money, in its infinite wisdom and sanity, gave all the land to anyone who had been a willing participant in killing and driving off those particular Indians and burning their abundant orchards, this, in lieu of rapidly depreciating Continental currency-(upon a time). The Seneca Indians therefore have a saying ‘Inflation is a bitch,--just ask Alan Greenspan". (Once), this creek emptied into a beautiful pristine glacial lake. The name of the lake was Seneca, named also after the respected departed chief that had governed these tribes, Sanake. The place was important not because a bunch wise cracking Indians once had their orchards and lived there, but because afterwards there was, (upon a time), upon this ground, built a college that lasted one year and an insane asylum that lasted a hundred.

Several colleges have grown up nearby since and some twenty five miles to the South is the bustling and mammoth Cornell University and indeed the area in general has since become known as the cradle of the New York University system. The local inhabitants of this area, as opposed to the academics, region have only two real persistent enemies; Liberals and Snow. Both, mostly white. They have consequently long since learned the life skill of living side by side with large numbers of highly educated, well intentioned, but ineluctably self involved people with whom they cannot converse at length on a level meaningful to both for any period of time, parties with whom in fact, if they did engage even in a narrowly defined discussion would, most likely be proven wrong almost all of the time and rather quickly in a particularly overbearing and superior fashion. The mere presence and proximity of such a crushing weight of undifferentiated intellectual energy and machismo, and snow, well beyond that which most normal communities must bear, could easily have driven anyone crazy, hence, the propitious location of the Willard Insane Asylum here, its origins happily exactly coinciding in fact with the birth of the University system.

Willard State Asylum was originally designed in 1865 to accommodate mostly the local residents of Seneca and Tompkins County and the surrounding areas many of whom were already crazy and others, having not yet been perhaps driven insane by the abundant dysfunctional geniuses alongside whom they were doomed to live but whom were to glad to have a place close by, just in case. Many of these, found employment in Willard’s therapeutic workshop industries that grew up on the sprawling hillside as day laborers, who had quickly realized that they did not have to move, or at least not move far to live out their years in a productive manner. Indeed, the mere fact that eventually the farmers and the ex-farmers who were not inclined to be semi-institutionalized learned to live and even thrive alongside this group of people whose scholarly obsessions might suddenly, without notice erupt, sending all those in proximity hurtling off some intellectual or literal cliff or bridge or into one of the numerous beautiful, also not quite pristine anymore gorges, is not only a credit to them as individuals, but also to the foresight of Ezra Cornell who had the singular genius to couple the birth of the academic institution with an agricultural outreach program and a first class nut house. Both these facilities long since have proved their worth not only to the members of the local agricultural community, but to the State as a whole as a means of facilitating the grafting of the necessarily more self involved and ‘rococo’ mental habits of a research community onto the smoothly glacial local manners in the end, providing somewhat less patently contrived point of contact, and thereby making the entire situation more palatable to both.

This aforementioned league of intellectuals and academic mandarins (IAM), the most egregious of the matched pair at least as far as lack of social skills, also readily adopted this patently valuable compromise, eager to engender and cultivate even a false sense of camaraderie, this mostly just so they could go to the Seven Eleven for cigarettes without it being an existential crisis. In short, an unspoken underlying social convention evolved which not only encompassed all University non-University social interactions in a manner providing a clear framework, personal direction and economic benefits for both sides but which in addition maintained clearly defined boundaries between the two, two distinct ‘personalities’ for the region if you will, so that it might function reasonably coherently on the whole, harboring both types harmoniously, a kind of mutually agreed upon semi-permanent state of functional schizophrenia. This remarkably successful strategy has been informally codified into a transmissible set of social rules. It was and is called ‘the innocuous convention’, and though there is no course by that name at the university that one can find in the catalog, it is certainly taught and it is the contract under which these two parties have lived amicably for many years as both would have long ago realized had the parties only had the courage to step back from the precipices of mockery and turn each other loose them from the grip of their ironic gazes. It was in short a form of detente that would work to the satisfaction of both for many years.

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On the other side of this equation, having been forced to live in close symbiotic proximity for many years with the IAM and without much else to do in the evening hours, the locals have honed these various social conventions to a fine edge, perfecting the patina of polite and intellectually inoffensive patter. Indeed, if one listens closely at the threshold of one of the many neat clapboard residences lining the streets of one of these university towns one may hear the whispered refrain ‘Have a nice day’ being repeated over and over, like a fierce mantra. So, rather than providing a strain, this long acquaintance has served not only as an inheritable social skill, a source of local pride, but indeed a means of sustained self-preservation here in the glacier’s art studio, an essential tool for extricating oneself gracefully from unwarranted conversations, conversations which, like the ancient glacial pathways themselves may suddenly and unexpectedly sink to plumb unfamiliar depths and indeed these good people, and their children seem to have all become experts in this one particular arena, that of wielding innocuousness as a lubricant for social interaction. Another part of this Faustian bargain is that when the academics appear to be just way too crazy, the locals will pretend just not to notice. This second strategy seems to work equally well.

Although the Willard State Hospital for The Chronic and Indigent Insane on Seneca Lake has ceased to function as such for well over a decade, the hum of it’s therapeutic home industry workshops silenced long ago and converted into an extension of the New York penal system for low level repeat drug offenders, the Finger Lakes region as a whole, even today, retains this somewhat genial air of well meaning and slightly-camouflaged but adamantly socially productive schizophrenia. Its dual character forming atop this fault line fashioned by the region’s two distinctly divergent defining activities; grape growing and the business of shaping of young minds.

The lakes themselves and the surrounding slate hills and brief flat interstitial meadows giving way to the gentle slopes leading to those lakes are bejeweled with excellent institutions of higher learning each brimming with all manner and variety of intellectual activity, and we find interspersed between, them the more practical vineyard operations that on the whole taken together, lend this region from south of Syracuse to North of Elmira all and all an air of a modern day Jeffersonian Athenian agritopia,-that is if one can ignore the implied elision to agri-vation and focuses more on the ‘topia’.

Cornell Cooperative Extension the designated aforementioned agricultural outreach agency of Cornell University, is located in Geneva, perched somewhat tentatively at the head of Seneca Lake. It gazes tranquilly over this dual domain like an aging matronly debutant with a vague but no longer biologically compelling interest in such matters as may fall within a rather dilettantish purview. Having been chartered late in the nineteenth century to act in concert with the local population to promote and improve the practice of agriculture in the State the substation serves as the premier contact point between the University and its environs and nowhere was the unspoken social compact, ‘the innocuous convention’, more in evidence than at the Geneva Agricultural Experiment Station in 1951. The sub-station, located only ten miles from ‘the Willard’ as it was known, was by the 1950s a irreproachable bastion of sanity and utility in the midst of an otherwise purposeless and dysfunctional and slowly dying city, presenting a stark modernist and cheerfully salutary contrast to the morose asylum just down the lake, its busy workshops, now long abandoned. It seemed bent on proving, this in the face of all evidence to the contrary, Ezra Cornell’s maxim that the best defense against going cuckoo was to grow something, anything. Indeed, some decades earlier as the ice age of prohibition dissipated leaving the area like the retreating glaciers one had, small vineyards began to spring up like charms in an invisible necklace of agriculture surrounding the Lakes, with Geneva as the even then, slightly broken catch.

The Cooperative Extension’s agenda for the local area which had been pursued from the early days of the century mostly concerned devising methods for increasing production of the barely jug wines being mass produced by Taylor or the production of a variety of grapes suitable only for juice or jellies. Indeed the grape jelly and juice concerns like Welch’s had grown up alongside the vineyards. These latter enterprises due largely to the effects of prohibition had come to dominate the local economies and hence mostly the highly productive and hearty Concord and Delaware vines suitable for these products were being widely planted on the broad loamy former cow pastures. As longtime head of Geneva’s grape program, Dr. Nelson Shaulis’ efforts in promoting these varieties and their cultivation, therefore, fell well within his charter, pursuing as it were an inoffensive, industry supportive paradigm that seemed to mesh well with the local economics trying to maximize the production of the types of grapes for which there was a proven existing local market.

To the trustees of the University at least, it was and had been abundantly clear that the vital and somewhat messy process of intellectual innovation required a less somnolent and sterile incubating environment than the society at large and so, as any organism might, the University and even while attempting to leave the enveloping social contract inviolate, took steps to protect itself from this infusion of mediocrity and it did so like any good grocer meting out a just measure of product by providing counterweights, hiring on such eminent lights as Vladimir Nabakov and others like the leftist economist Doug Dowd, intellectuals whose ‘avant garde’ credentials and reputations were unassailable having stood up remarkably well, like Reese’s pieces, to the Dairy Queen milkshake wave of conformity, unfortunately, in a moment of panic hanging them in the window somewhat like Christmas ornaments was not really all that effective despite the fact that Dowd’s complexion closely suggested that of Santa Claus.

However, no doubt to the University administrators’ chagrin, it seems, instead of reversing the tsunami of ‘blah’, under this constant influence, the coterie of assembled ‘avant gardists’ finding themselves now assembled, conscripted as it were to rebuild a core sense of intellectual identity while still enveloped in the saran ‘haveaniceday’ social compact haberdashery shortly came to adopt this same ambient protective coloration, becoming at least stylistically inoffensive, resorting to sporting tweed jackets with elbow patches and pipes this to simultaneously to lend credence to their vaunted eccentricities (as job security), but also as camouflage to obscure themselves amidst the sudden cornucopia of somewhat banal intellects, introduced into their critical contemplations mostly by overeager grad students, thus in the context of the culture of superficiality which had been engendered, they became essentially useless as the poster boys of intellectual independence. As the flesh eating bacteria of intellectual conformity continued to eat it’s way ever closer to the seat of ostensible intellectual ferment, the hill on the which Cornell situated high above Cayuga’s waters, indeed seemed not high enough as the flood waters of the patently self satisfied Ozzie and Harriet mentality increasingly through the late 50’s and early 60’s lapped ever closer to its esteemed limestone portals and somewhat smelly vaulted chambers.

Because it is forced to in varying degrees by its charter, to be not just located in, but actually part of the local agricultural communities the Cooperative Extension was constantly exposed to the ambient cultural ‘avian flu’ and in the 1950s, it was open season for this ‘flu’. As the least isolated and most exposed organ, the Cooperative Extension, the nasal passage of Cornell University was most virulently infected and consequently became the breeding ground for intellectual conformity, knuckling under to the grape juice cartels, as the agricultural intellectuals located closer to the heart of the great University in Ithaca all looked on in helpless horror. But what, you may ask, does all this ‘drahmah’ have to do with either viticulture or the former nut house over on Seneca Lake? Wellll, I’ll tell ya’.

The point I am (admittedlysomewhat tongue in cheek) trying to make in a nutshell is that Cornell Geneva agricultural sub-station, mostly under the guiding hand of the aforementioned, esteemed and well-loved Professor Nelson Shaulis, had been, until the mid 1960s focusing almost exclusively on promoting an agenda that was not in the long run serving the interests of the vineyard owners of the area so much as the large commercial interests in their midst and this policy was like an acid eating away at the social contract, causing them to be driven slowly crazy despite the punctilious observation of the contract of protocol. The cultivation of American hybrid and Concord grapes had become increasingly economically unviable as its only purpose, to supply the juice and jelly market, came under price pressure, with Welch’s controlling the price per ton, at one point driving it below four hundred dollars making it barely possible for the growers just to break even and then to make matter’s worse, Welch’ converted the juice arm of its cartel into a buyer’s coop, finessing its role of bully, leaving the farmers now with no one to blame but themselves for their plight.

The recovery of the region from the effects of prohibition was slow and it was not until the 1950s that there was again a robust regional industry to speak of. It was in this era that began the tenure of Dr. Shaulis at the Geneva substation and the growers under his guiding hand settled into the comfortable niche that would carry them well into the 1950s as suppliers to the non-premium wine market and the juice and jelly makers growing mostly Concord, Niagara, Catawba and the other varieties known to be suited to the topography and climate. In the meantime, the more far sighted economic realists of the region had not been asleep. Recognizing exactly how precarious this niche was they had begun lobbying for a bill in the state legislature that would make it possible for the growers to take control of their own destinies. Finally, the year before the takeover of Taylor they managed to get a winery bill passed in the New York State legislature that would make it easier for growers to go into business for themselves. This event, engineered partly by John Dyson and Mark Miller of the Hudson Valley, was in fact the culmination of a campaign, more a revolution that had been led by, to say the least, an extremely unlikely duo. It was through the efforts of an iconoclastic Ukrainian emigre with poor interpersonal and haberdashery skills and possibly depth perception, and an idealistic, somewhat lonely French champagne expert inclined to bowties and natty sport jackets, that that industry was brought to the cusp where they would be able to benefit from this legislation in the open market. These two men were, Konstantin Frank and Charles Fournier.

When Konstantin Frank arrived there in the early nineteen fifties, he might have fit right in with the ambient ‘cliffdiving-have-a-nice-day’ mentality, except for the fact that he was in the habit of attempting also to push everyone off with him and, he was as far as the intellectual community was concerned on the wrong side of the equation, an intellectual with manners burnished by more by Stalin’s rather than Amy Vanderbilt’s view of steak knife etiquette. He had been a grape cultivar researcher in Odessa, Ukraine, moved to the area some eighteen years after Fournier and by contrast looked more like a protection money collector for the mob than a tweedy professor and as we have said, in the Finger Lakes, appearances can be everything.

These comments, coming as it were from an outsider, someone with no American university credentials or experience, indeed his last job having been janitor in a Horn and Hardardt’s cafeteria in Manhattan, were met, not surprisingly, with both derision and defensiveness by the Geneva scientists. The varieties Frank was now publicly warning people against as toxic for human consumption, had been the basis of Fournier’s Champagne business that he had developed almost single handedly at Gold Seal. One might have suspected that Fournier also should have taken offense. He had been the premier advocate of the Hybrids in the region proposing as a viable solution to the economic strait jacket the New York growers had found themselves in and despite his somewhat professorial demeanor, he was a heavy hitter in the industry. Something however had occurred that changed Fournier’s mind, something that caused Fournier to come to look at Frank not as a potential threat as Geneva did, but as an ally.

Retro-cross pollination, reverse lend lease,--this is a very descriptive and useful concept and it aptly characterizes the outcome of the University’s attempt to maintain its intellectual credentials by importing those high profile avant-gardists in the early sixties. And look at the harvest they reaped! So who then can really blame the less visible Ag School professors at Geneva for not leading a revolucion de niveau mental, as the French would say, when Konstantin Frank had shown up waving a red flag of viticultural heresy ready to storm the barricades when his countryman and fellow Russophile, Vladimir Nabakov, the author of Lolita was busy teaching Dostoyevskii to undergraduates in turtlenecks. Here, in the supposedly tamer arena of agricultural was a virulent imported strain of anti-conformity that had the potential to effect not just the reputation but more importantly the University-non-University status quo, to infect the very agar-agar medium in which the university blissfully floated with some untested strain of poorly dressed bacteria,--and it had just jumped quarantine.

To understand the basis for Fournier’s personal ‘revolucion de niveau mental’, a little further background is in order. Gold Seal winery had been one of four vineyards to not only survive prohibition but to go on to successfully buck the trend of essentially abandoning the hope of making a premium product by either being or, signing over as a contracted supplier to Taylor or to the grape juice/jelly companies. By following this independent path, they had by the 1950s become one of the major players in the region, a select group that at that time included also Widmer, Great Western and Taylor, but unlike its more pragmatic competitors Gold Seal was the only one of the big three to set its sights on a nationally accepted wine product.

Frank had begun his experiments back in Odessa an area of Southern Russia that has a similar climate to that of upstate New York and he had succeeded there albeit only with certain Pinot Noir clones. Still, up until that point, all attempts to cultivate Vinifera going back to 1825 in New York State had failed and not just failed, but as those who recount the history of the viticultural region love to phrase it, ‘failed miserably’ to the extent that these trials were no longer were even being attempted by the time Frank arrived. Nevertheless, Frank claimed, more than claimed, guaranteed, provided you used certain clones and followed certain cultural practices, vinifera would survive, even flourish here. The growers in the area had been told all along by the experts in Geneva on no uncertain terms that vinifera grapes could not be grown in the Finger Lakes, that they would never survive the harsh winters and even if they did survive they would not produce enough tonnage to make their cultivation economically viable. This was, as it turned out, merely a convenient fable. With Frank’s help, Fournier was going to succeed and beat the California naysayers in their own backyard at their own game, with New York grown vinifera!

However Frank, now, no longer could be regarded by the Geneva substation scientists as merely a relatively harmless eccentric. They were at a lost as to how to deal with him. The scientists now regretted their initial tolerance. Frank was once again on Rosinante promoting his ideas rather forcefully and somewhat tactlessly to any that might listen and what is more now using scare tactics to discredit the hybrids which the Sub-Station had grudgingly accepted. En masse, with all the single minded ruthlessness that can underlie the academic fraternity, they now abruptly turned against him when they realized he was unabashedly serious about his theories and about his plan for replanting the entire Finger Lakes region to vinifera vines and that for the even more grievous offense of, ‘ignoring the social convention’ .

Though a doctor of enology in Russia, without American credentials, Frank was essentially unemployable by any major American academic institution. As far as Geneva was concerned, he was, based on his having worked at Horn and Hardardt’s, barely qualified to provide a recipe for macaroni and cheese let alone a blueprint for future of the entire grape industry of the second largest grape producing region in the U.S. They were no doubt by the mid 50’s hoping he would move to Bucks County Pennsylvania, open an antique store and leave them all the hell alone.

The scientists mostly, for their part were not inclined to respond when challenged by a mere vocally antagonistic ‘local’, they were in fact programmed only to respond audibly when mildly antagonized and then only in response to the almost constant presence in their midst of the mostly white and persistently more familiar twin enemies to most all upstanding residents of the Finger Lakes; liberals and snow.

Finally, probably to put an end to his annoying broadsides, the scientists at Geneva managed to get Konstantin a job at the experiment station,- as a janitor, the only position for which his American work experience qualified him. Instead of mollifying him this only incited him to more strident rhetoric. Using his new position as a soapbox platform, brandishing his mop and his bucket like a bully pulpit, Don Quixote with mop/sword in hard, he used his precarious position only to more effectively pester people about his radical viticultural ideas. This effort, (which would have been no doubt made even more clumsy and bizarre due to his lack of both English and mopping skills), was, for obvious reasons, increasingly ill-received, the sub-station’s attempt at noblesse oblige had failed. In any event, he was soon fired from his janitorial position and this led to the final chapter in the long standing and well publicized feud between Dr. Frank and the Cornell viticulture department at Geneva agricultural sub-station which some say was in fact a short lived plan on the part of Cornell to find him a position at the only other major institution in the area they thought suitable to his personality, Willard State Hospital , the mental institution nearby on Seneca Lake and it was not a staff position they had in mind.

Fournier realized that Frank, a staunch advocate of the viability of the Pinot Noir grape for the region, one of the classic components of Champagne, if he was right, unlikely as that may have seemed to others, could be, at least partially, the solution to his problems. Thus, in what was a remarkably shrewd maneuver in response to what have been could easily have been construed as an uncalled for attack, he chose to support Frank and enlist him to aid his attempts to create a sparkling wine using the classic French components on the French model grown in New York State. Using locally grown vinifera grapes would enable him not only to create a world-class product minus the marketing headache for Gold Seal, California would no longer have an excuse to exclude New York sparkling wines from the State Fair and even if partially successful, a Pinot Noir component in the Champagne would lend it enough credibility to be have to be considered in the Champagne category in fact of any world class wine competition, not just as another ‘interesting’ sparkling wine.

With this approach in mind, the only other main deterrent to producing high quality wines in New York, their high acidity as compared to California grown grapes, and this indeed could easily be turned to advantage as Fournier was well aware, the Champenois process traditionally requires grapes of unusually high acidity to stand up to the sparkling qualities, such as characterize the Pinot and Chardonnay clones grown in the relatively northerly Champagne region. Fournier consequently decided, for whatever reasons, to back the dark horse and in 1953 took the risky step of creating a new position expressly for Frank at Gold Seal; director of vineyard research, a position of sufficient prestige that Geneva could not afford to ignore him. While hiring Frank, given his reputation as an uncompromising iconoclast was a gamble, it seemed neither of the two possible extreme outcomes had ever occurred to Fournier; that he would fail miserably or, that Vinifera would become the foundation of a new regionally based premium wine industry. He thought he was merely expanding the niche market for Champagne. The reason for this was probably not only the well known difficulties associated with growing it, but because there was no economic model to support a localized wine industry. He suspected intuitively he would not fail entirely because in his home region of Champagne the hardier varieties like Chardonnay and Pinot Gris routinely survived winter temperatures of below zero degrees Fahrenheit. He was acquainted enough by then with the vagaries of Finger Lakes weather to understand that the areas where weather was mitigated by the lakes was moderate enough to sustain the tender vinifera. In short, Fournier did not fully comprehend the extent of his influence and the fact that his efforts to create a sparkling wine in the French style with solid international credentials for Gold Seal (and possible Great Western, nominally their competitors), were indeed being watched closely and intently both by all the other increasingly unhappy growers in the region and the skeptical scientists at Geneva.

New York premium sparkling wine already had, largely thanks to Fournier’s efforts, established a market niche of its own, distinguished from the other similarly marketed but putrid low priced offerings of the region and consequently did not suffer to the same degree from the same persistent negative connotations. In fact the objectionable acidic and musky qualities of the hybrid and Labrusca grapes were often somewhat masked by the natural carbonation a fact which Taylor and Great Western both had both used to build a fairly respectable sparkling wine business. While others had used this same characteristic to create other noxious concoctions the distinction was sufficiently clear in the minds of the public to maintain the premium category. So while the reputations of Gold Seal as well as Great Western already rested to a large degree on its sparkling wines they only lacked the ‘apples to apples’ to step up to a pedigree in the world market and this was the single hurdle that had still doomed them to a niche market. This was however, Fournier realized, partly thanks to Frank, now a potentially winnable battle for them, from not only the viticultural standpoint, but also the marketing standpoint as well and one from which they might emerge as players not just on a regional or even a national, but on a world stage.

The rest is, as they say, history. A successful collaboration was born, for Gold Seal and for Frank both and the first wines from Vitis Vinifera clones were released in 1960 and not surprisingly they shortly achieved widespread critical and popular acclaim. Frank however, having a naturally somewhat impatient temperament and ever impervious to prudent advice, having proved his theories, wished to broaden his focus and now moved on to form his own vineyard/winery, which he then did in 1962, called Vinifera Wine Cellars on Lake Keuka which today is operated by this son Willy and grandson, Fred under the brand names Dr. Frank’s and Salmon Run.

While the rocky relationship of Dr. Frank to Geneva has been the subject of perennial partisan interpretation, but what happened next is not open to interpretation and it would serve to broaden the success of Fournier’s gamble from a company based marketing success to one that would revolutionize the entire region, indeed the state and eventually the entire East Coast. In 1976, the New York State legislature with the help and guidance of John Dyson and Mark Miller adopted the Farm Home Winery act. This law allowed small New York wineries to sell wine directly to the public from their premises for the first time. It was a landmark windfall to the industry, second only to the repeal of prohibition itself. Enabled now to sell premium wines at premium prices, direct to the public, the Geneva scientists watched in amazement as one grower after another in the area thumbed their noses at Welch’s and Coke and followed suit planting hundreds, then thousand of new acreage on the new ‘old‘ varieties. Eventually the sub-station scientists realized that their world had changed irrevocably,- and mostly due to the janitor from Horn and Hardardts.

You can call this bad or good luck, but Frank was certainly one of these unlucky-lucky iconoclasts that survived in spite of, rather than because of themselves. Circumstances conspired such that his view of himself as an outsider formed a quantum superimposition rather than a diametric calculable Newtonian opposing force that could easily be cancelled out by another opposing one. Just as the hunting clan displaced the agricultural calendar based priesthood of Chaco, he was someone who, as an outsider, came to point out, a new way, a different angle just at the precise time when the old time honored methods had clearly failed. This was not a reflection on those methods so much as of the fact that serendipity can profoundly affect the fortunes of an entire people or group, (especially if there happens to be visionaries like Charles Fournier, attuned to hearing the modulations in the harmonies of the universe).

The Geneva sub-Station, either inadvertently, or thru policy reinforced the local cultural predilections and prejudices to some degree in the same manner as the agricultural based high priesthood at Chaco Canyon in the 10^th century continued enforcing, or trying to enforce increasingly outmoded agricultural knowledge. Once again preserving a hierarchy inextricably intertwined with the local environment and culture had become an end in itself. Ironically this too became the stuff of legend and just as the Anasazi looked to the new rites of the hunter clan the Geneva Agricultural station became the somewhat reluctant proponents and high priests of the new economic engine. Consequently, we can see even today, that, Dr. Nelson Shaulis, who was almost certainly wrong about the future of the industry, but, who had the proper credentials and required laid back demeanor is still locally revered and beloved, within the cloistered environs of the University (and somewhat less so in the community at large), is regarded as the father of the modern New York grape industry whereas Konstantin Frank is viewed as an almost biblically offensive outsider, a somewhat unwelcome prophet spouting predictions of hellfire and destruction. While great achievement is, in the end, undeniable, the fact that it not always coupled with an endearing personality is equally true.

There was at that time, a joint Russian/American Jewish agricultural cooperative organization, Agarest, who hearing of this dire situation, had managed with somewhat limited resources, to locate two old Ford tractors that could be donated for use by the Ukrainian wheat farmers. In the fall of 1945 they had them shipped there to help bring in this crop. Dr. Frank at the time, though essentially an academic, was appointed by the bureaucrats overseeing the collective farms in his area to be on the receiving end of this deal, this Jewish version of lend lease. When the tractors finally arrived, he immediately and perceptively realized that they were too low on horsepower for the immense task at hand. He decided that if the two machines could be made to work together in tandem, that this would produce sufficient horsepower to allow them to accomplish the grain harvest. Being firstly an innovator and only secondly an engineer, instead of setting them up side by side in tandem like a team of horses, he shackled them together one ahead of the other, like a dogsled team. The result was that the first tractor abruptly and ignominiously pulled the second apart in two pieces, the rear tractor still running but without the benefit of the stabilizing front end it started veering with the thresher in tow in the general direction of the onlookers who quickly dispersed. As Fred put it, his grandfather had the distinction of destroying half the postwar Ukrainian tractor inventory in a single afternoon and also would have destroyed half the Illustrious Glory of Ukraine Soviet Agriculture Committee if his luck had held. (In defense of the Geneva scientists, if they were even peripherally aware of this anecdote, it was not a particularly cogent argument for putting the future of the entire local wine industry in his hands.)