His obsession with corn began during his boyhood days on the family farm in Wahoo, Nebr. Now he is raising it not as a cash crop but to continue some detective work on its genealogy. While a graduate student in genetics at Cornell in the '30s, Beadle developed a theory that Mexican teosinte—a wild grass—was the ancestor of modern-day corn. When a fellow geneticist dismissed the theory as a myth in 1966, Beadle decided after his retirement he would try to prove himself right.
So it was that Beadle and Muriel, his wife of 22 years and a writer, exchanged the 16-room president's home for an eight-room Victorian row house in Hyde Park. With the university's blessings, he planted corn on little patches of ground all over campus. Now, seven years later, he is more convinced than ever and says the doubting colleague is "pretty well converted" to the teosinte-ancestor theory.
Farmer Beadle is a true nut about corn. In season he eats boiled and buttered corn-on-the-cob for breakfast, lunch and dinner. For poker games at Caltech he had a reputation for showing up with five gallons of popcorn. Farmer Beadle rises at 6 a.m. and, after a hearty breakfast, he dons a tattered hat and heads for his fields. Afternoons he often photographs his prized ears in a basement studio to document his studies and prepares the lectures he gives to audiences of genetic and botany students all over the nation.
As a hard-working man of the soil, except on the evenings they visit friends, Beadle is in bed by 8:30. "It's a typical farmer's routine," says his wife—not in South Forty, but south Chicago.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
