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General News: General Petraeus Talks About Early Influences
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| General Petraeus talks about his childhood |
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| Millions of Americans planted gardens in the 40s |
September 27, 2007
AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW FROM THE FRONTLINE IN BAGHDAD
Part 3 of 4
In an exclusive phone interview with this website last Friday, General David Petraeus took time to talk about growing up in Cornwall-on-Hudson, the village he calls home. Here’s the third of four parts of his story.
Much has been written about the athletic abilities and intellectual sharpness of General David Petraeus, head of the multi-national forces in Iraq, but few know that he once embarked on an entrepreneurial venture as a child in Cornwall-on-Hudson.
His parents, he told Cornwall-on-Hudson.com in a phone call on Friday from Iraq, were avid gardeners, growing vegetables in their backyard on Avenue A. Like many of their generation who lived through the Great Depression and World War Two, Marion and Sixtus Petraeus were practical people, General Petraeus said. “They became people who, actually bought everything without credit,” he said. “They paid cash for their house, they paid cash for their cars. I don’t think it is unlike a lot of people who experienced the Depression and saw their familes work hard to re-establish themselves."
During the second world war, when Sixtus Petraeus was manuveuring through the dangerous North Atlantic seas on behalf of his home country, the Netherlands, his future wife may have been growing a victory garden at her Brooklyn home. Some 20 million Americans responded to the government’s call to plant gardens during the war as a means of cutting the cost of trucking fruits and vegetables.
General Petraeus remembers the family garden in Cornwall-on-Hudson, where they planted corn, tomatoes, string beans and zucchini. He recalls a couple of summers when they used fish for fertilizer, what he calls “the old Indian way.”
“Back when I was a kid, the shad ran up the Hudson and up the creek, Canterbury creek,” General Petraeus said on the phone, “and you could get them in buckets. We actually did it like the Indians and put fish around the corn as fertilizer. It was great fun.”
Good fertilizer results in a good harvest and many years the Petraeus family had more produce than they could eat. They gave some to their neighbors, like the Knapps, he said, and brought some to the Cornwall Presbyterian church to share. But there was still more left over so young Dave Petraeus had an entrepreneurial idea.
“So I thought, ‘why not put some in bags?’ And I took it down the street to sell it for 25 cents a bag or something," General Petraeus said, noting that it was a great experience for a kid, like having a lemonade stand.
“It is the kind of experience that a little town, a village, can afford you and those are very useful, “ General Petraeus explained, noting how they build character in a future adult. “You know, to deliver the paper for two-and-a- half years, in the morning, in the winter, as you know, that can be close to a religious experience in the Hudson Valley.”
Click here to read Part One, Part Two or Part Four of this special interview with General David Petraeus.
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