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Orrin T PiersonScope and Content
Farm Editor, Dies, Victim of Polio By GLADYS de FREITAS
The voice of the Gleaner, whose tales of homely happenings were burnished with humor and mellowed with a love of fellow-man, is forever stilled.
Orrin T. Pierson of Otisville, Times Herald farm editor and columnist, farmer and philosopher, died last night at Horton Hospital, a victim of infantile paralysis. He had been ill only two days.
In taking Mr. Pierson death struck deep into the Times Herald family which had cherished his lovable qualities, laughed indulgently at his foibles and respected deeply his mastery of the writer's craft.
A score of organizations, farm, community and church—will be poorer through his loss. No mere lip service was his. Mr. Pierson threw himself with enthusiasm into whatever undertaking enlisted his participation, whether it was Four-H, Soil Conservation or the Otisville Board of Education.
The Times Herald farm editor had been a leader in Four-H work, expanding his interest in son, Steve, to encompass a large group of rural boys. He was a member of the Board of Directors of Horton Hospital, the Farm Bureau, the Dairymen's League, the Kiwanis Club and the Community Forum Committee. He also was a member of First Congregational Church and its Men's Club.
Known Through Column
The grave sense of loss felt by the Middletown area is almost a family feeling. Through his Gleaner columns, which have appeared on The Times Herald editorial page three times weekly since 1935, the Otisville farmer became well-known to hundreds of families. He shared his problems with them, he exposed with unabashed frankness the trials and tribulations of a farm household, he related the vexations of child upbringing in a way both tolerant and humorous, so that the reading world of The Times Herald felt kinship to him and his wife and their children.
With a rare gift for making the commonplace and the routine sparkle, Mr. Pierson drew aside the curtain of his daily home and farm life and with a deprecatory smile invited the world to take a look. In him the writer and farmer were so inter-mingled that one without the other was incomplete.
Born in Denver, Colo., May third, 1902, he attended Colorado Agricultural College and then returned to the ancestral Pierson acres near Otisville for a trial fling at farming.
Pen Won Over Plow
The pen, however, drew him away from the plow and Mr. Pierson sought the atmosphere of printer's ink. He spent two years at the Columbia School of Journalism in New York and a year in Europe on a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. He worked on the old Times-Press in Middletown and subsequently was on the staffs of several leading New York, Boston and Denver newspapers, including the New York Herald-Tribune and the New York Times.
But in 1930 the journalist again heeded the call of the land when he was given an opportunity to take over the Pierson homestead, where he and his wife, the former Edna Engle, and their family since have made their home.Relationships
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