NONFICTION - Nov. 15, 1992

LIFE ON THE DRY LINE: Working the Land, 1902-1944 by Harry Morgan Mason (Fulcrum Publishing: $19.95; 197 pp.). A familiar truism about farming life is the idea of self-sufficiency--that farmers were often so isolated, and so cash-poor, that they had to learn to do most everything for themselves. The details of such self-reliance are rarely specified, however, which makes Harry Morgan Mason’s “Life on the Dry Line,” an account of his youth in a Kansas farm town in the first half of this century, a welcome addition to the field. The book is no page-turner, but it’s hard not to get caught up in the authenticity of Mason’s descriptions of individually welding 40 teeth to the stripped gear of a corn planter, making new piston rings out of a length of iron pipe, rebuilding tractors after a John Deere dealership fire--and selling the rebuilt tractors as new. Mason was a more equipment-savvy farmer than most--and more ambitious, too, judging from the fact that he later earned a doctorate in experimental psychology from Purdue--and the best parts of “Life on the Dry Line” deal with his years running the commercial garage owned by his father. In many ways the book is homage to Mason’s father, a farmer who managed to survive only by becoming an entrepreneur--which meant, among other things, giving up wheat cultivation for pig-raising during the Great Depression, since wheat transformed into pork brought a better price. “A whole wheat pork-chop sandwich did not need bread,” writes Mason, in his typically straightforward manner. “The bread flavor was in the meat.”