More Than a Peanut Farmer

Yesterday I finished reading (listening to) a truly inspirational audio book by Tony Dungee called Quiet Strength. At the outset he explains that this book is not about football. It is about the meaning of life, faith, God, truth, and all the lessons of his lifetime, both on and off the field. Dungee was an athlete who became a coach, and the first NFL coach to lead his team to the Super Bowl.

I would say more about this book, but his numerous George Washington Carver quotes, from whom he’d clearly found inspiration, led me to make Carver -- whose image graces this page -- the topic of today’s blog entry.

I’d read a Scholastic Book Club book about this remarkable man when I was young. I remember it making an impact on me at the time. George Washington Carver, though born a slave, grew up to be a prestigious scientist who made significant contributions to agriculture in the South. He learned about crop rotation and how to restore the nutrients which had been depleted from the soil during decades of growing cotton.

What he’s possibly most remember for is his creativity with regards to the peanut. He had purportedly discovered over 300 uses for the peanut. The story I most vividly recall from the book was the banquet he served on one occasion, all dishes being some kind of peanut variation. You might say he was nuts about peanuts. It wasn’t just foodstuffs that he made from nuts, however. Adhesives, fuel briquettes, ink, linoleum, shaving cream, talcum powder and wood stain were just a few of the kinds of innovative uses he developed.

His Christian faith was also central to his personal life. Perhaps it was this, as much as the fact that Carver was an influential black man and role model, that led Tony Dungee to find such encouragement and inspiration from Carver’s life and work.

Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia. “Dr. Carver's faith was foundational in how he approached life. He viewed faith in Jesus as a means to destroying both barriers of racial disharmony and social stratification. For Dr. Carver, faith was an agent of change. It increased knowledge rather than competing against it. The greater his faith increased, the more he desired to learn. The more he learned, the greater his faith became.”

Many chapters in Dungee’s book began with a quote from one source or another. A few of these were from Dr. Carver. I share several here. For more check this website.

"Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom."

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these."

"I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in."

"Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses."

"No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving something behind."

"There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation - veneer isn't worth anything."

"Where there is no vision, there is no hope."

And last, but not least, the one most frequently cite in Quiet Strength: "When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world."