Brayton Case and a helper at Pyinmana Agricultural School

proudly display some "Christian" chickens.

HUNGER

FIGHTER
IN BURMA

The Story
of Brayton Case

by
ROBERT

F. CRAMER

Friendship Press

New York

All Bible quotations used

Revised Standard Version,
by the Division of Christian
Council of the Churches of
of America.

in this book are from the

copyright 1946 and 1952,
Education of the National
Christ in the United States

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:

68-18732

Copyright 1968 by Friendship Press, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

15

Chapter 3

21

Chapter 4

32

Chapter 5

46

Chapter 6

62

Chapter 7

79

Epilogue

89

Reading List

94

'To Terry
who would have been great, too

70REWORD

Greatness is peculiar.
Brayton Clarke Case was great. Few would deny it.
He was also peculiar in many ways. A unique combination of his peculiar qualities and certain circumstances
in which he found himself made it possible for him in
thirty-one inventive years to have the kind of lasting
impact on a nation that many men have sought but
very few have achieved.
None of his qualities was by itself terribly peculiar .
. Guts-raw
courage-anyone
can have or develop.
Gusto-a
zest for cramming two days' excitement into
one-likewise
is not all that unusual. And the grace of
God-a
gentle reverence you could sense even in the
midst of hearty, joking laughter-a
lot of men and
women have shown this quality of spirit.
So it must have been the combination that made

him such a success. Since each of the qualities can

cultivated and strengthened by almost anybody, it
hoped that this book will stimulate some others
move into the free-swinging, inventive, gutsy style
the modern frontiersman, Brayton Case.

be
is
to
of

CHAPTER

ONE

Brayton Case was just a little boy, not even old

enough to go to school, when the first of his Burman
playmates died. It broke him up.
He sobbed. Then, as outrage grew within him, he
chomped his teeth down hard so that his mouth looked
like a ruler. The sudden quiet he produced was somehow louder than his sobs.
He quivered, thinking not so much about his own
personal loss as about the senseless waste that struck
down little children.
It was Brayton's first experience of starvation. And if
God's ways were as simple as a four-year-old's prayer, it
would have been his last such experience.
His mother, perhaps sensing that this kind of rage
could last a lifetime (little did she know!) encircled
him with her gentle arms of missionary faith.
9

Wise enough already to understand at least a bit of

what she told him, he listened to his mother say that
death is part of life. But he was thinking of the grief in
his heart and the sorrow in a Burman home, and he
wondered if life must always be that way.
Brayton Case was born August 18, 1887.
He inherited a pioneering spirit from both his
parents and their families, and an extra measure of
frontiersmanship from his namesake, the great Burma
missionary, Durlin Brayton.
He had a brother, Russell, two years younger. Together, they heard their heritage recounted at ta ble and
bedside, and they took it in eagerly.
Brayton thought his Grandfather Case would have
been wonderful to know. Grandfather's churches had
numbered seven and were on a lonely circuit of Maine.
"He wasn't like so many of the preachers of his time,"
Brayton's father told him.
"City pastors wore long, dignified frock coats but
your grandfather wouldn't," John Case said. "His minister friends liked the city churches where they could
climb into polished pulpits and look down on row
after row of frilly hats. But not your grandfather.
"He liked to ride his horse among the lonely people
in the wooded hills.
10

"His saddlebags were loaded with Scripture portions.

His head was full of the things people had told him
along the route. And he saw the newspapers more often
than most people, so he could bring them all kinds of
news-of friends, of the state of the nation, and the
good news that helped make sense out of the rest."
Brayton often thought of the people of Maine. Living
in the country was great-but
those people often were
lonely. It's nice to have open space and freedom, to
grow your own food and erect your own shelter. But
those who lived in the wilderness were almost under
a life sentence of loneliness.
Sentence. Brayton's quick mind thought of the word
another way. Without punctuation, a sentence goes on
and on and doesn't have much meaning. His grandfather brought meaning to people because he was
willing to go where they were, and he didn't care about
moving up the ecclesiastical success ladder. His grandfather had stood out like a punctuation mark-and
that
was a good way to live, Brayton thought.
Brayton's parents both were pioneers, too.
As Miss Lily B. Clarke, his mother had left a comfortable home in western New York state to go to
Burma alone.
It wasn't yet a popular thing to do. "Women's auxiliaries" to the established foreign mission boards had
II

come into being only a few years before she sought

appointment
under one of them. She wanted to help
women and children in Burma. She knew that in the
Orient the women usually were second-class citizens
and children had pitifully poor chances to grow to
adulthood and become useful citizens, because the death
rate was high and education was only for a few.
She was commissioned just after Christmas in 1884.
She worked on the field almost two years before she
married the Rev. John Elijah Case, missionary of the
American Baptist Foreign Mission Society.
People always said John and Lily Case didn't think
about
marriage
until
their friends,
the Durlin
Bray tons, got the idea.
Maybe so. Maybe not. At any rate the Cases and the
Bray tons were close friends, and when the first Case
child came along, it was in Rangoon in the Brayton
home. That's where Brayton's name came from.
His parents were among the earliest of missionaries
to go up the Irrawaddy
River to an area near
Mandalay. Burma was becoming, after long isolation,
exposed to outside influences. So missionaries were
able to move into new areas and the Cases went to
Myingyan, where Brayton spent the first dozen years of
his life.
It was a daring venture for a young family to move
12

to Myingyan in the 1880's, because for years Burma had

been warring with the British, who were established in
neighboring India. The area's political future was still
in doubt. Western families had been evacuated at times
from various places in Burma, and it might happen to
the Cases. But there was a job to be done and they
were not afraid.
Brayton always liked to hear his parents talk about
the Bray tons. Durlin Brayton, they told him, was a
great missionary. He had invested a lifetime among the
backward Pwo Karen people. From living closely with
them he had learned to know their language so well
that he was able to translate the Bible for them.
Brayton marveled at that. He knew the language
never had been written down before, but that hadn't
stopped Mr. Brayton from doing what needed to be
done. Brayton could see that a man who could do what
this missionary pioneer had done must be two kinds
of man all at once-patient
and scholarly and determined, so as to be faithful to the Word of God he was
translating,
and on the other hand ordinary and
"human" enough to be thought of by the Pwo Karen
people as one of their own number. It wouldn't do
for the scholar simply to give them something; he
would have to be such a man among men that they
would want to take what he had to offer, to use what he
13

was gwmg them, to accept as important what he

thought was important.
His namesake made a great impression on the little
boy.

14

CHAPTER

TWO

Brayton Case spoke Burmese before he learned

English.
One of the things a mission board insists on is that
its missionaries thoroughly learn the language of the
people among whom they work. John and Lily Case
had only been in Burma a very few years when Brayton
was born, so they were forever practicing Burmese in
their home as well as at work.
No doubt Brayton helped his parents learn the exquisite, curlicue language. Children pick up the spoken
language easily, and Brayton had many friends in the
community. He and Russell were the only "foreigners"
in the toddler-to-teen set in Myingyan.
Brayton thus had almost a Burmese mind. He understood what was important
in the thinking of the
Oriental, and why.

Some of this knowledge came from playing games

with his Burman friends. On the grounds of the mission school were parallel bars. Everybody played on
these,
the light-brown-skinned
Burmans
and the
slightly lighter Americans all looking at times like a
pack of exuberant monkeys. Likewise, there were places
to play marbles-and
whether you played by Burman
or American rules, the point was the same.
But most of the time the games were strictly
Burman-"Tut
Tut"
and "Kyi Da," for instance,
which were great favorites before the turn of the century. Brayton didn't know it, but those play times
formed the most basic part of his education.
The
human mind is always analyzing its way through some
problem, whether consciously or unconsciously. To engage in a game is to solve a problem, and the logic
learned is unconsciously applied to one's problems all
through life. People with the same logical patterns are
said to "think alike," and Brayton Case thought "in
Burmese."
He learned to believe that practical experience was
the best form of education
for learning to live with
people. Certainly the time he and his friends spent
outside school telling jokes and stories was time well
spent, for later on it was said that Brayton Case would
enjoy jokes with the Burmese as could no other man.
16

He understood the subtleties and nuances of Burmese

humor.
Later on, Brayton had to take Latin. He always
regretted the time he spent studying it and often criticized the custom of studying Latin in order to trace
the Latin roots in English words.
Still, he did profit greatly by his formal schooling.
Burmans who knew him said that if you heard Brayton Case speaking in another room, you wouldn't know
a "foreigner" was there. He spoke the language better,
in fact, than many of the Burmans. He knew the fine
points of its grammar and he learned it by diligent
study. To him it always was important to do well whatever one set out to do, and he meant from early childhood to be able to communicate persuasively-whether
in Burmese or in English!
It was not easy to get a basic education in Burmese.
The mission school consisted of two dirt-floored enclosures under the Cases' mission house. The Burmans
built their homes high up off the ground for a variety of
reasons, and the mission house followed the pattern.
The Burmese language is no playground for the
simpleminded, either. Its curlicue script consists of
circles, part-circles, combinations of the two piled atop
each other, and additional lines-upright,
slanted and
curved. The novice can't possibly tell when a printed

17

sheet of paper is right side up. Of course, once the

basic characters are learned, the study of vocabulary
and grammar proceeds as in any other language. But
Burmese is a language in which a child must learn to
make rather fine conceptual distinctions at an early
age. Failure to master this at the outset would have
made Brayton a candidate for the dropout set. He
learned the language through stick-to-itiveness and
enthusiasm.
Of course Brayton was also studying English by the
time he was of school age. Teaching in the mission
elementary school was probably in both languages.
When he was five years old, Brayton became a world
traveler. With his mother and a teacher, Ma Me Bwin,
he spent a year in the United States, where he attended
school.
An uncle and aunt in Rochester, New York, took care
of him while he went through first grade. How he must
have envied his mother and teacher, for they spent
part of that time in ] 892-93 seeing the sights, especially
the great Columbian Exposition in Chicago!
Back in Burma, Brayton moved right into second
grade in his mother's school. There he made steady
progress; in fact, when it was time for him to leave
Burma again at the age of twelve, he had finished the
seventh grade.

]8

As an adult, Brayton Case was six feet, one inch tall.

As a youngster, he was sturdy enough to earn a most
unusual experience.
"How would you like to spend the hot season vacation on a hunting trip with me?" a missionary named
Valentine asked him.
No need for time to consider a reply! Hot seasons
usually were spent packing up to go to a cooler resort
area, making the sticky trip, unpacking, finding things
to do in unfamiliar surroundings, packing up again,
sticky-trekking again, and finally unpacking at home.
'Would he go? Nothing could stop him!
Brayton Case felt that his roots were in Burma, for
religious reasons as well as the happenstance of his
birth and childhood. All the while he was growing up,
his faith was growing with him. He had the good
fortune, denied to so many Americans, of seeing the
Christian faith projected in a non-Christian land. As he
was later to write most compellingly, the Christian faith
does make a difference in life and he could see its
power all around him as a youngster.
So in the last year of the nineteenth century, when he
was eleven years old, he was baptized with his brother
and a group of other schoolboys.
The setting was one made necessary by the Baptists'
practice of total immersion. In the great Irrawaddv
19

River, symbol of life to the whole nation, his father and

an ordained Burman preacher led each boy through
the symbolic rite of complete burial of the old life and
resurrection into a new dimension. He never forgot
that he, his blood brother, and his Burman brothers in
the spirit had done this thing together. It welded into
a single attitude all his many experiences and feelings,
so that many years later when he was commissioned by
the American Baptists to return to Burma, he said,
"I am going back to the land where I was born. Hereafter it will be my native country."

CHAPTER

THREE

One of the great problems of missionary service is

that when one goes to a faraway place to share Christ's
concern for the health of the whole man, his own
family must be ripped apart.
In 1900, it was time for John and Lily Case to send
their two boys back to America to continue their education. Rather than to go through the shattering experience of separation twice, they sent both boys together, turning
them over to the care of two
missionary families who were going home for furlough.
Brayton was twelve, Russell was ten.
There are those who say that such parting is harder
for the parents than for the children. Brayton was to
have his own chance to find out, a generation later.
But the parting seemed hard enough to him then.
First there was the loss of family, for all practical

21

purposes. In Rochester, when he was five, it had been

great fun to live with several cousins and to go to school
in a great city. That separation from his parents, however, had been for a comparatively short time. The one
that loomed now seemed endless.
There would be a loss of freedom, too. In Myingyan
the days were long and busy but the place wasn't
crowded, as the school in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, was sure to be. He thought about having to raise
his hand and ask permission every time he wanted to
sidestep school and dormitory routines. For one thing
he was glad. He'd heard Newton Centre was a green
suburb, and the Home for Missionaries' Children
wouldn't be so hemmed in as the homes he'd seen
during a visit to Boston. It should be possible for him
to walk in the fields all by himself on weekends.
He wondered if the Burman children would miss
him. He'd miss them, he was certain. Right now, they
were trying to get him to promise he'd come back.
"Brayton," they said to him several times-and
even
as the train pulled out of the station-"come
back to
us some day, and we will work with you!"
What if he did come back, he wondered. Would they
remember?
His mother cried.
His father faked sternness.

22

"Be on your best behavior with the Sharps and the

Harrises. And when you reach Newton Centre, settle
right in. Don't get off on the wrong foot with your
daydreams. You're going back by yourselves so we can
stay here to work-and
so you must work hard, too. You
will, won't you?"
Brayton promised. And the train whistle told them
it wouldn't
wait any longer, even for American
missionaries.
As it turned out, the separation wasn't so long after
all. The boys spent a year in the Home for Missionaries' Children and the Mason Grammar School.
Then John and Lily Case came home for a furlough
that lasted three years. By the time his parents returned
to the mission field in 1904, Brayton was halfway
through Newton High School.
Back in the home now, Brayton began to experiment
with rules and regulations. He could see they were
necessary, but he felt some made less sense than others.
He was pondering this one morning when the wakeup bell rang. He hated that sound. He told himself his
growing frame, now nearly six feet, needed more sleep.
Let the others pile out of bed like obedient-and
bleatingl-sheep.
He'd stay a while. There wasn't any
way to get out of going to school on time, but he could
go without breakfast.

23

He tried that-but
not for long. The only way to
travel to and from the school was to ride on two
peculiar contraptions provided at birth, with heels at
one end and rows of toes at the other. It was a mile and
a half each way, so by the time he got home for lunch
he was nearly starved. The bit of independence gained
wasn't worth the effort. But it set a successful pattern
of life for him.
He developed another life pattern in high school. He
liked to be by himself, largely to think. Although he
was outgoing and fun-loving, with the quickest laugh in
the East, he withdrew for long periods of time to those
fields around Newton Centre which were as green as he
had hoped and most inviting to a boy who had great
decisions to make.
Why was he here in America when his parents were
in Burma? To get the best possible education-that
was easy to see.
But education for what? Brayton was not a professional thinker; he was by nature a doer who thought
in terms of action.
He lined up his interests and his abilities and he
thought of fields where he could be creative and useful
and somewhat independent. Friends in school and in
the local Baptist church were now consulted, and they
helped him decide on engineering.
24

Brown University was the best school he had heard

of. But Brown was in Providence, some distance away,
and Brayton would not commit himself finally to a
school he had not seen.
He determined to make the forty-five mile trip as
cheaply as possible, so that his "independence" would
not in reality mean that he was being a burden to
someone else.
The cheapest way was to walk-so he did. Carrying
a pack on his back, he went to Brown, decided to
enroll, and returned to Newton Centre convinced that
he could do a great many things through determination
and willpower.
He proved it by not accepting financial help from his
parents for his higher education.
Brayton was graduated from Newton High School,
and enrolled at Brown, in 1906.
He stayed at Brown through his sophomore year.
Then an aunt offered to take care of his room and
board if he would transfer to the University of California. Yes-she'd pay his way to go West and look, first!
He liked it. There in Berkeley, he began to study agriculture and to work on farms during vacations. And
there, close to the soil, he found himself at last.
One day in 1908, Brayton Case stood by an irrigation ditch in California's Imperial Valley and thought.

25

His job that first summer was beekeeping, and while

his charges droned, his memory took wings.
He thought about the Burman people among whom
he had been born-the
ones who had been his playmates and who had died of starvation, and the ones
who still lived. Those who lived in Burma's remote
villages were still penned within the patterns of the
past, he knew, and still would be straining against the
natural forces that threatened them and their undernourished children. They lived with nature, but had
never harnessed her.
He thought about the place where he now surprisingly found himself. California was as different from
New England and New York as was a land like Burma.
Back east, rich fields and bustling towns seemed natural
-God-given.
Out here the conditions for prosperity
had to be man-made, in a sense. He was standing right
at the edge of one of the human-contrived ditches that
made such a difference.
He reflected. Years ago he had seen children die
because, in that not-unusual year, the floods had come
to parts of Burma and had left debilitating disease in
their swampy wake. Not only that; the floods had
dragged the little bit of half-tilled soil from the farmers'
land and left a hardened gumbo to be scratched again
with a straight wooden "plow." Then the rains had
26

failed. The little water that dribbled into wells had

to be used both for families and for fields. You
couldn't carry enough water for rice, anyway, so most
of the harvest had been extremely light. Thus famine
had followed, and death, destitution and disease.
Still more reflection. Out here in California, too,
there might be only ten inches of rain some years. Here
colleges of agriculture had been established to put dry
farming on a scientific basis, and they were succeeding.
Water was obtained and was put where it was needed.
The reclaimed land was scientifically farmed in such a
way that it kept renovating itself and producing the
maximum of crops in every season.
"Someone ought to do something like this for
Burma," Brayton Case said to himself.
He thought of his friends and of the ten million
farmers of Burma who needed scientific knowledge if
they ever were to spring the trap that kept them from
fulfilling the dignified purposes for which God had
created the human race.
Actually, the thought had been in his mind for
some time. And so, while taking care of some bees along
an irrigation ditch, Brayton Case decided to be that
"someone" who would help the Burman farmers do
what God had said: "Be fruitful and multiply, and
fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over

27

the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and
over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant
yielding seed which is upon the face of all the
earth ... " (Genesis 1:28-29 RSV)
"Fill the earth and subdue it ... "
"Dominion ... "
"I will go to Burma as a farmer-missionary," vowed
Brayton Case. And, like nearly everything else he ever
vowed to do, he did. Yet there remained two major
detours along his route.
The first was still more education. Much as he disliked formal schooling, he had to admit he needed
some theological training if he were to be a missionary.
Besides, he had learned how to farm scientifically, but
he really needed to learn how to teach.
The way ahead looked difficult-but
perhaps the
very difficulty was enticing, for he liked ironing out the
difficult things in life.
He would not have been content to return to Burma
just to scratch dirt and bow to fate with the Burmans.
In California he found the way to lead people to a
higher material standard of living-not
luxury, but
freedom from the threat of early death. It was the
possibility of bringing this freedom to others that made
him free-free to serve.
28

second-oldest mission board in all America. The Burman people already were farmers, after all.
Brayton held his tongue as the board, wrapped in
frock coats and great dignified thoughts, looked him
over and finally approved his going, though not primarily for agricultural work.
By the time he left America, in 1913, he had worked
out an answer to those who feared that mission money
might be wasted on agricultural work.
"What did Jesus mean when he said, 'I came that
they may have life, and have it abundantly'? " he would
ask. "Only a ministry to the whole man will do if we
are to follow Jesus." And he would recount the terrible
days of famine for any who had not heard him tell it
before.
After his commissioning he had prepared a little
speech and had given it twice--once before the meeting
of the whole denomination in Detroit, and again when
the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society staff bade
him farewell at Boston.
"I shall attempt to be a specialist.
"My first aim is to make impossible more famines in the
Indian empire, of which Burma is a part. In the past five
years I have searched for ideas on this problem from the
Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to Panama.
"My second aim is to prevent the large-unit factory system

30

of the West from laying its blighting hand upon Burma. I

desire to preserve that element in their life which gives
dignity to the individual, cherishes native culture, demands
time for the spiritual and will not be driven to distraction.
"My third aim permeates and controls all my effort. It is
to bring Burma to adopt the ideal of manhood as revealed in
Jesus Christ and to give its devotion to the God whom he
served, so that love for man and God and not mere selfish
gain shall be its motive for action. I invest my life in this
work. It is all I have and when my life draws to its close I
trust my venture of faith will not be in vain."

31

CHAPTER

FOUR

Brayton Case noted the time on his watch as the little

river launch steamed into Rangoon harbor. It was
4 P.M., Monday, December 8, 1913.
He was back in Burma. The fragrance of fresh teakwood from a sawmill on the bank assured him of that.
He drank in the sight of boats and Indian coolies and
hilltops crowned with pagodas. Then he caught the
strong scent of nge-pe, the fish paste used for flavoring
food, and he couldn't wait to get ashore.
The launch had scarcely docked when Brayton
leaped out. At once, a turbaned Indian said to him, in
English, "Mr. Case, do you know me?"
Brayton looked at him, overwhelmed. The smiling
face belonged to Applesamy, cook in the Case home
for years, who had been baptized with Brayton and
Russell.

32

"I certainly dol" said Brayton, grinning broadly and

looking around for other familiar faces.
Next was Ma Me Bwin, the Burman woman who had
big-sistered him in Myingyan. With her was her husband, who also had been one of Brayton's teachers, and
their son, now fifteen years old and a student at
Rangoon Baptist College.
"We knew you'd come back," Ma Me Bwin said, and
Applesamy whispered, "They have been here since
morning, all of them, to welcome you back as they said
they would."
A haze of embarrassment, made golden at the edges
by his inexpressible joy, engulfed Brayton Case, and he
hurried up the bank to prepare his first words of
greeting in Burmese.
The journey was not over. The mission board had
appointed him to supervise the work in Henzada, a
day's journey up the Irrawaddy River from Rangoon.
Dr. and Mrs. John Cummings, the regular missionaries
there, were going home for furlough and this would
make a wonderful opportunity for the brash young
Brayton Case to learn what makes a bustling, wellrounded mission station tick.
That was the mission board's idea, not Case's. Agricultural missions had been heatedly discussed, and the
board had won the first round. Go out and join the
33

mISSIOn staff, they'd said, and do the work assigned

you. If you can establish some agricultural work, so
much the better, but first things firstl
Even in his enthusiasm to start agricultural work as
part of the Christian mission, Brayton had known
that other things indeed must come first. He must reestablish himself among the Burman people. He must
be sure he had correctly remembered the language
(though he had little doubt that his daily reading of a
chapter from the Burmese Bible had kept his memory
sharp) .
If he had doubted his ability to relate, in young
adulthood, to the people in Henzada, it would have
vanished in an instant on his arrival there. His greetings
in Burmese were enthusiastically received. Everywhere
he got a hearty welcome.
The townspeople were all out watching. Someone had
spread the word that the new teacher was coming, and
they formed a procession for Brayton to head the
minute he got off the boat and slithered the thirty feet
to the top of the muddy river bank.
The procession must have been a sight. Tall, chesty
Brayton Case swung along as though the road were a
tasteless entree to be eaten up with the fewest possible
bites so as to get at the dessert. The smaller Burmans
kept pace behind, somehow, winding their way among
34

the tall pa-douk and coconut trees to the brown,

spreading buildings of the mission compound.
There Dr. and Mrs. Cummings waited with their
children. Soon after Brayton arrived the pastor came.
Still more townspeople appeared to exclaim over the
new missionary's faultless Burmese greetings.
Eventually the crowd in the compound thinned.
Evening came, and Brayton went around to the homes
of some of the local teachers and church leaders.
Next morning, he made his first appearance before
the Sunday church school. Then, at the morning service,
the pulpit was turned over to him and he preached
his first sermon in Burmese, using the text (Proverbs
4:23), "Keep your heart with all vigilance."
So, with the old familiar Burmese hymns and prayers
filling the air around him, Brayton Case rounded out
his first twenty-four hours back in the golden land
where the first American missionary, Adoniram Judson,
had come as a fearless pioneer exactly one hundred
years before.
It had started easily, but life soon became tough for
Brayton Case. A missionary, in those days, was a very
special leader whose wisdom was sought constantly.
Brayton was wise, but not in the ways of diplomacy. He
could appreciate the work of a pastor, but he found
the pressure relentless, and some of the problems, for
35

which there were no easy answers, were frustrating.

One day, on a tour of outlying villages, he encountered a candidate for baptism who was headman of the
village and the husband of two wives.
"Friend, we must go aside and talk about this,"
Brayton said. The headman agreed, and invited Case
to his home.
"My first wife also wants to become a Christian," the
headman said, pointing to a thirty-year-old woman
with a baby in her arms.
Wanting to be as friendly as possible, Brayton asked
about the baby.
"Oh, she's not mine, but hers!" said the first wife
cheerfully, nodding toward the younger wife, who was
cooking breakfast. "The little boy is, too. That's my
daughter." And she pointed out a pretty little girl who
was watching the younger wife cook.
Somewhat perplexed, Brayton told the village chief
that one of the rules of a Christian household forbids
polygamy.
"But they love each other as sisters!" the man exclaimed. "When one must go on a journey, the other
cannot bear to stay without her. If I would scold one,
the other always prevents me. Each cares for the children of the other as if they were her own. And I love
them both the same."
36

Fascinated now, Brayton asked the two women how

they would feel if their home should be broken up.
"We are good friends," they said. "We never quarrel
or have trouble."
Certainly nothing in the Union Seminary curriculum
had prepared Brayton for this. His own nature pre
pared him to understand that deep love could indeed
exist in such a household, but he felt that if this
Christian faith was to be presented clearly, baptism
and church membership could not be given. Right or
wrong, he must announce that decision.
After explaining the situation, he told them, "By all
means, continue to come to church." But his response
did not altogether please him. He liked things clearcut, and he realized that finding the right Christian
answer in such a case was not simple.
For four years, Brayton did the best he could in the
work of a general missionary. He grew closer to the
people. As he did so, he felt more and more clearly
that he must find time to give them the help in agriculture for which he had come to Burma.
He tried adding some practical instruction in farming
to the program of the school on the mission compound.
It didn't work very well.
"My dear Secretary Baldwin," he wrote to the board in
1914, after a year on the field. "The correspondence I must

37

attend to piles up on my desk while I am touring the outstations or attempting to supervise the schoolwork here in
person.
"Between jumps, I am trying to get in a course in gardening. I have between twenty and twenty-five boys out
digging in the sun and rain, bare except for a garment
around the waist, sweating and smeared with mud just like
common coolies.
"The people from the courthouse across the street stand
three deep to see them at work. But the course is voluntary,
and they enjoy it.
"I am also trying to get a course in gardening started at
two of our outstation schools. The trouble is to get anything
done when I am not present."

A year later things had not improved

time gardener. Again he wrote.

for the part-

"Henzada, December 1. 1915

"Dear Secretary Huntington:
"In agricultural work, I have tried the experiment of
running a vegetable garden. There was half an acre of grassy
ground I wanted plowed for the garden. I was told the oxen
did not like plowing, but day after tomorrow three pairs of
bullocks might be had. The ground, which was just right for
plowing, was getting drier and drier. For months before, it
had been too wet and sticky.
"On the third day the oxen were brought. I hitched them
myself to the plow with chains. At the word 'go' the plow

38

turned its nose up into the air instead of into the groundit was fitted to be drawn by horses, not by yoked oxen.
"I made a different attachment and gave the word 'go'
again. This time when the plow met some resistance, the
oxen spread out on each side, and, facing back around
toward the plow, began to unhitch themselves preparatory
to going home.
"The drivers declared, 'They won't do it. They are only
used to pulling a cart. They can't pull a plow: I could not
drive the cattle or pull the plow. What was to be done?
Must I give up the garden because I could not get a half acre
plowed?
"At last in desperation I had the land dug up, piece by
piece, with mattocks (a combination of a hoe and a pickaxe) .
Thus the man who had come out to teach the people of
Burma better methods in agriculture 'plowed' his garden!
Three coolies spent about three weeks more digging at the
half acre.
"At last I got in corn and beans, and they came up in
fine style, so that I had them for sale long before anyone else
in the district. Even though having to plant at the end of the
rains, in four months I had two crops of string beans and
one nop off this piece of land without irrigation. The
Burman is quite satisfied if he gets only one crop. Despite
goats, cows and human visitors who helped themselves to
generous samples, I have 50 rupees' worth ($17) of vegetables from my half acre, besides what I have eaten myself.
"Early in the season I sent to India for a water-lift for

39

irrigating my garden. After some time it arrived. I had three

sets of carpenters try to get it set up. Now my gardener has
spent a week trying to teach the bullocks to pull it. When I
am with him the animals will go. When I have to leave for
other work, they won't. At last he broke out in tears, and
getting no satisfaction in beating the oxen, he began beating
his wife-which
started another interesting series of events!
"As the above experiences show, if I am to make progress
in agricultural work then I cannot be out touring in the
jungle half the time, as is necessary in the Henzada field."

Three and a half months earlier, Brayton Case had

carried his plea for freedom to teach agriculture directly
to his friends in American churches. His letter remains
as the classic argument for the "fourth dimension" in
missionary service (the other three being preaching,
teaching, and healing) :
"Dear Friends:
"Our missions and other missions in India have designated certain suitable men among their number to be their
industrial missionaries, and I should like to be so designated
to agricultural work.
"Three-fourths of the people of Burma gain their living
by means of agriculture. These people are poor, the margin
above the maintenance of life being small. Besides the staple
grain crop, many get very little to eat.
"A large part of the people do not own the cattle with

40

which they cultivate the land. Most of our Burman Christians

from the jungle have little to spare after providing for the
bare necessities of life. Under these economic conditions, how
can we expect to get a strong, self-supporting, self-propagating church?
"Now if missionaries to Burma are justified in putting in
their time to teach English, geography, mathematics, logic
and psychology to make their pupils better office clerks, I
believe some who have received suitable training are justified
in putting an equal amount of time into teaching pupils
to make a good living as fanners in their own villages.
"I would like to give a chance for a different kind of
education to those who have an aptitude for farming. I want
to make it possible for them to earn as good a living as the
others, and thus give dignity to labor by giving it a higher
market value.
"I do not expect to stop preaching or doing distinctively
religious work; but I want to be allowed to work at the
other as being important also.
"After having spent five years in the study of scientific
agriculture and related subjects, and waiting two years in
Burma, I should like to have some definite promise that I
will be given an opportunity
to attempt some agricultural
work."

On the field, Brayton found the missionaries to be

more encouraging than the mission board at home.
Perhaps his driving ambition and seriousness of pur41

pose could best be seen at that close range. The missionaries, who met once a year to evaluate the work and
make recommendations
regarding new work assignments, decided in their 1915 conference that Brayton
should look more deeply into the possibility of setting
up an agricultural demonstration and training center.
In his vacation time that year, Brayton went to India
to study agricultural training centers being set up by
Christian missions and the colonial government. Of
special interest to him was the work established by
Sam Higginbottom,
a Presbyterian
missionary, at
Allahabad. Higginbottom had established his pioneer
work in 1912, the year Case was commissioned. Already
it was attracting much attention, and Brayton learned
a great deal from his trip.
Then he began a survey of all the Burma mission
stations to see which one might be best suited for the
location of his own new work. The ideal spot was
Pyinmana. It was located on a tributary
of the
Irrawaddy where transportation was good, and had an
unusual climate. At Pyinmana the growing conditions
resembled those of several different sections of Burma.
Brayton could train young people from all over the
land at this place, and they would be able to return
to their own area prepared to put their new knowledge
into immediate and profitable use. It was near the
42

center of the country, and land was available for the

mission's use.
In Brayton's mind, the matter was decided. It only
remained for the mission board to approve the plans.
But Brayton had an unsolved personal problem. In
his first year in Burma, he had written home:
"1 do not know how much longer 1 can stand this 'solitary
confinement: The starvation for companionship is sometimes
almost unbearable. There is not one young person with
whom to meet in the whole town or district. The week at the
Burma Baptist Convention and the missionary conference
was thus an unspeakable joy."

He was not speaking merely of the isolation of one

mission station from another. He had come to the field
a single man with a single purpose. But he was learning
that he would need a great deal of help, and one very
important step in this direction would be to find a wife.
Moulmein was where he found her.
Miss Lena Tillman, born in Alsace-Lorraine and a
ten-year veteran teacher in American schools, was
teaching in the Moulmein English Girls' School.
Lena had heard a Burma missionary speak at her
church when she was a youngster, and always after that
she had wanted to be a missionary herself. It took her
several years to receive her commission, but when she
did she studied a year at Newton Theological Institu43

tion (in Newton Centre, where Brayton had lived!)

and went right out to Burma.
She was the very spirit of graciousness, through and
through. When she appeared before the board for
commissioning, her vigorous personality, keen sense of
humor, and joyousness appealed to everybody. She had
so much of the glow of young womanhood that some
of the parents there thought she was too young for the
responsibility that would be hers.
When Brayton and Lena announced their engagement, their fellow missionaries were amazed. And they
were pleased. They predicted that though Lena might
have her troubles, Brayton's life would go much more
smoothly. They were thinking of his rough-hewn impetuosity and the fact that he had so little time for the
niceties in life. They were thinking about the way his
gruff manner disturbed visiting officials with whom he
really should have spent more time. They saw Lena,
in their imagination, helping to balance out the hectic
life of any station where Brayton Case might be
assigned.
All this wasn't lost on Brayton. In late 1916 he made
final arrangements to turn the Henzada work ba.ck to
the Cummingses. Then he hurried to Moulmein to
marry Lena Tillman on January 17, 1917.
He didn't waste any time describing the ceremony

44

when he wrote to friends at home. He just said, "This

was the best piece of work I ever did!" The future was
to confirm his judgment.

45

CHAPTER FIVE

Brayton moved his bride immediately to Pyinmana

and plunged into his farming with six feet and an inch
of pure exuberance.
On his earliest scouting trip to the area, Brayton had
spotted a field just beyond the school building that he
could use for his first experiments.
A veteran turner of the Burman soil by now-he still
blushed to think of his first unhappy attempts at
Henzada-he
had the whole four and a half acres
plowed up without delay.
The neighbors, startled by the size and force of this
giant foreigner, gathered at a respectful distance to
watch. Observing him seemed well worth their time,
since he obviously wielded great powers. Wasn't his use
of their language, for instance, the best of anybody's?
He must be a man of great learning.
46

On second thought, they decided he must be just a

little stupid. Look at him forcing his animals to pull
a plow set too deep. Why would he want to turn so
much earth?
Brayton enjoyed his neighbors' gawking speculations.
He was plowing deeper than they for a purpose. And
he would plant deeper. He would leave more space
between his plants, and he would use so much fertilizer
that his harvest couldn't fail to impress the Burmans.
Not too much fertilizer, mind you, but enough.
He planted his field to sugar cane, an important
product of central Burma. And sure enough, it wasn't
long before the results showed. He compared his neighbors' fields with his own.
"My cane is about twice as high and twice as thick as
theirs, and the sets have stooled out to as many as ten
canes, while theirs have only two or three!"
The harvest, when it came, was bountiful. All the
people asked questions about it, but he could see that
they felt he'd done something they could never do. It
was obvious that the Burman farmer was not going to
be easy to win over to scientific agriculture. Patience,
love, determination
would be needed. And maybewhy, yes, no doubt!-a
bit of dedicated showmanship.
Brayton was sure he could dramatize his subject if anyone could. The first field would be only a quiet start.

47

The neighbors really looked surprised when Brayton

put up two buildings in a corner of that first field.
"They're houses," he told those who couldn't resist
asking.
One was for a Burman farmer. That was understandable to everyone, for in Burma in those days a man
had to look after his crops with great care if he was to
avoid being unintentionally generous with his produce.
People came and helped themselves if farms were not
guarded.
The other building caused a flurry. It was just a
shack. Its residents turned out to be hogs-big, healthy
Berkshires, five of them, that Brayton had managed to
import.
"They're the most respectable-looking hogs to be seen
around this part of the country!" he boasted. And they
were. They had to be seen to be believed. People came
from miles around to stare; but again they felt there
must be some special magic in being a foreigner.
Oriental pigs were puny. Always had been. Always
would be.
No, thought Brayton Case. We'll introduce a little
love affair between some of my hogs and some of yours,
and we'll see!
The demonstration farm soon had a poultry department. Lena Case was appointed manager. For years to
48

come, she would be so deeply involved in this project

that Brayton would tease her about it. "Can't keep my
correspondence caught up, but my wife-well,
she's a
real secretary. Secretary to the hens!"
They started with white leghorn stock, and before
long white leghorns were to be found all over Burma.
Perfectly adapted to the country and its climate, the
white leghorn was in demand as a source of nutritious
meat and as a near-perfect producer of eggs, which
always had been scarce.
Mrs. Case had another important duty, beginning
February 4, 1918. That day their only child, to be
christened Clarke Tillman, was born in the Pyinmana
mission compound.
Like his father and his Uncle Russell, Clarke spent
his first twelve years going to the little mission school
and playing with the Burman children.
His parents loved him dearly, but, even as an only
child, he was hardly spoiled. Brayton spent most of his
spare hours tending to secondary matters that had been
pushed aside during the inevitable daily crises. Clarke's
mother tutored him, as missionary parents must if their
children are to be successful later on in American
schools. She spent much time instilling in him the
fundamentals of the Christian faith. As a result, he was
able, in addition to becoming one of central New York

49

state's outstanding
surgeons, to become an effective
Christian layman and a forceful member of the mission
board that had supported
his parents
and his
grand parents.
The demonstration farm was a going concern, but
Brayton wanted to do more than to entertain an
audience. Farming couldn't be a spectator sport. That
was what ailed farming in Burma. People didn't like
to get dirty. Farming was, to them, ungentlemanly. If
you could learn to do anything else at all, then you
might have a chance to move off the bottom rung of
the social ladder.
That idea would have to be changed, Brayton realized. He would have to start a school, attract
promlSlng young men to it, and show them by disciplined study that farming could be profitable and
respectable business.
Brayton was aware that a school of any kind could
easily attract intelligent Burman students. Sam Higginbottom was learning at Allahabad, in India, that students would come and be graduated with honors, expecting to get jobs in government as a result. They were
willing to learn about agriculture as long as they didn't
have to practice it themselves.
He would strive to avoid this from the very first, he
decided. Those boys he'd labored with down in
50

Henzada had been willing enough to work as long as

he was out there with them. They had been able to see
that it didn't hurt the big, sure-of-himsel foreigner to
get his hands dirty as part of his work. He'd show the
same thing to boys from all over Burma.
Now, where could he get some buildings? A curriculum? Students?
The land and the first building practically fell into
his hands, or so he said. Actually, it took the kind of
nerve that few men possessed to seize an opportunity
that most people would not have seen.
. Next door to the farm there was a village school run
by a Buddhist. The building was in bad shape. And
Brayton could see that nothing much was happening
there-because,
he said, the man lacked both education
and energy. But intelligence the teacher evidently had,
for when Brayton approached him, offering to take the
property off his hands, the man agreed to sign over the
school.
Brayton bought the school's equipment and an adjacent plot of ground. On the ground he built a small
bamboo hut, which he filled with benches from the
old school building.
Then he sent out a call for students. While he waited
for a response, he transferred Saya Mya Bu, a teacher
from the mission high school, to the new agricultural

51

school, and they worked out a beginning curriculum.

By July 27, 1918, four boys had shown up, and
Brayton Case opened his first experimental school. He
did it without fanfare and without much notice to the
board in America, because he wasn't sure, himself, how
well it would proceed. If things worked out well at all,
he'd request permission to set up formally a full-fledged
mission agricultural school.
He was wise to demonstrate results to the board
before requesting a policy decision. The board was
reluctant to begin such a school. They knew Brayton
Case was enthusiastic, able, and totally dedicated to the
mission's aim of building up the life of the people of
Burma. But they had no basis for judging the worth of
his novel proposals. He would constantly have to prove
their worth himself.
The British Government was becoming interested in
Brayton Case, though, and they encouraged him to
experiment. For a long time, the colonial authorities
had felt that Burma's future depended on her ability
to increase agricultural production. A nation can't move
ahead until large numbers of her people are freed from
ineffective ways of raising food. In Burma each man was
spending most of his time growing just enough for his
own family.
The government had trained some men in scientific
52

agriculture, but experience showed that their learning

wasn't getting down to the village people. The government picked up students after they had finished their
high school education. As graduates of a college-level
agricultural
program,
they were highly sought as
teachers and administrators, and not as farmers.
Brayton Case, knowing the people well, thought the
solution lay in taking the sons of farmers who had
only attended grade school and teaching them the principles of farming. Not only were they more likely to
return to the farms from which they had come, but
their accomplishments would carry more weight with
fellow-villagers than those of highly educated outsiders.
Before long, Brayton had sixty pupils enrolled in
his still-unofficial school.
"Most are very young," he wrote to the board, "but we
have started making a garden in the little plot of land. 'tVe
have planted vegetables and set out banana and guava trees.
The children will grow, as well as the trees, and we expect
the agricultural school to grow with them."
If the board was impressed, it didn't show it. But
Brayton was beginning to demonstrate that a school at
the secondary level would be appreciated by the Burman people, and that was what the British colonial
authorities wanted to see.
He consulted the government's agriculture depart53

ment later that year, when he could report an evergrowing program at Pyinmana, and ecstatically shared
their response with the mission board.
"They have laid plans for an agricultural
college at
Mandalay, with a number of experiment stations located over
the province,"
he related.
"One of these will be at
PyinmanaI
"The government will search for improvements in the
adaptation of crops and machinery to the needs of Burma.
The results will then be demonstrated
in practice on our
mission demonstration farm ....
The government recognizes
that we are experts at reaching the common people, and is
willing to cooperate with us."

This finally brought results from the mission board.

By "willing to cooperate," Brayton meant that government would share funds to help make his work a
success. If they were that much interested, the board
reasoned, then there must be validity to Brayton Case's
plans. So in 1919 the word came to him that he could
start a real school at Pyinmana.
Impatience to begin was tempered by Brayton's levelheaded knowledge that the school must be carefully
founded to be a success. He spent the years 1919 to
1923 setting up a formal curriculum, talking with
government agricultural experts, and sounding out the
opinions of Christian leaders all over the land.
54

Government funds would largely support the school.

"They believe my scheme will work," he said.
Christian leaders agreed that the proposed school
was in line with the most pressing needs of the country.
"And non-Christian leaders of Burma, to whom I
have spoken, have with one accord stated this is the
kind of education needed most for the country, and
that it should attract students," Brayton told friends in
America when he went home for a furlough in 1920-21.
Of one more thing he was certain. The people were
pressing for education along other than literary lines,
"and American suggestions on the improvement
of
economic life are especially welcomed by them."
In 1923, the Pyinmana Agricultural School was finally
opened. Dozens of hopeful students immediately made
their applications, so with the very first class many had
to be turned away for lack of room. This would become a pattern, unfortunate
for the disappointed
youngsters who had come down-country with hearts full
of hope but fortunate for the progress of the school and
for the economic life of Burma.
The boys came from everywhere. Word of Brayton
Case's marvelous experiments
with machinery and
methods had traveled far since 1913. Brayton himself
was not the kind who would fail to mention his successes and his dreams when he toured the villages!

55

It was important to Brayton that the students come

from all over Burma. It would make teaching difficult,
for Burma is made up of many racial groups with
separate languages and traditions. But if he succeeded,
no one could say that his methods were effective only
for the foreigner or with only one or another of the
cultural subgroups of the land.
Also, he had located his school in Pyinmana not only
because of its accessibility, but because it lay where
several different kinds of land and climate came together. Without going far in any direction, he could
experiment under varied conditions. He wanted his
graduates to be able to go anywhere in Burma and
make a success of agriculture. He meant to create an
impact on the economic condition of the whole nation.
This never-ending concern to have his school reflect
the actual conditions in Burma's villages was responsible for one of Brayton Case's most substantial contributions to missionary agriculture.
He knew that his boys were not "professional students." Even so, he soon found that he would have to
modify his curriculum.
He had always intended to supplement class work
with a lot of practical work in the fields. At 'first he
began by having the students study in the classrooms
all one day and letting them work outside the next.
56

But he found them restless during the long class periods

and changed to a plan of having them work outside
each morning and attend classes in the afternoons.
Brayton Case made trips to other educational centers
in India, Burma and the United States to see how they
did things, but always looking at them from his own
peculiar viewpoint-not
to see how other agricultural
centers made scientists of their students, but to see how
they adapted their science to the boys.
The government
recognized the validity of his
approach. They had been doing research on such things
as seeds, diseases and fertilizers before Brayton Case
ever went to Burma. But they had not been able to get
farmers to use the results of their research. Case, with
his unique approach to the people, got the message
straight to "the farmer in the dirt," where it counted.
It happened that with his understanding of the Burman people, Case could put his finger on one of the
major problems in teaching agriculture.
"Some missionaries told me they never saw Burman
boys work so hard before as some of our boys did
during the vacation. In a land where the object of
getting an education is to get out of work, it needs a
good deal of promoting to make popular an education
that aims to teach people to work harder and better,"
he said.

57

And he knew how to promote it. Show a man what he

can get from hard work that he can't possibly get otherwise, and demonstrate that anybody can do it, and
you've made your point. Show him that even the
"wealthy," highly educated American missionary is not
ashamed to work hard in the soil and the point is
clinched.
As a farmer-preacher, Case was identifying himself
with a great number of men in Burma for whom he
had both admiration and pity. These were the young
Burman men whose experience with Christianity had
led them to theological school. After graduation, when
they looked around for a place to settle with a church
to lead, the young men would find themselves caught
in the same trap with Burma's millions of farmers.
While many village churches longed for a full-time
leader, they could not afford one.
These were the people of whom Brayton Case once
wrote:
"I felt called to serve the farmer who works a five
acre farm, lives in a five dollar house on five cents a day,
and is trying to fatten his children on one cent a meal.
If you lived like that and a missionary came to preach
to you that a good God created the earth and loved
and cared for you, what would you answer?"
Actually, the people did believe that God is good.
58

They became Christians and formed churches and said

to the young preachers just out of school:
"Here is all the rice we can get for you. We know it
isn't enough, but won't you take this and come? We
want you so."
And the preacher would reply, "I will come. I will
take what you can give, and so that I can support my
family I will make it up by being a farmer as well as a
preacher."
The young preacher thus became a slave to the soil,
just like the rest. The difference was that when night
came and the others could rest, he had to study for his
Sunday sermon or go out among his people.
"What kind of leadership can you expect under these
conditions?" asked Brayton Case. "You see, five cents a
day not only starves the body but it also starves the
soul. It starves the preacher and the teacher and the
school and the church.
"That is why I am a farmer-missionary-not
for the
sake of cows, or the pigs, or the hens, but for the sake
of the souls of men.
"In spite of these handicaps some of the noblest and
most devoted preachers I know on earth are these
farmer-preachers, and I admire them. I am not too good
to farm and preach, when these friends of mine are
farmer-preachers, too."
59

The curriculum of the school Case explained

board in America this way:

to the

"In the first year, the students' main subject is gardening,

and they learn the use of hand implements. In manual
training they learn bamboo and cane work.
"The second year the main subject is farm crops, and the
students learn the use of ox-drawn implements. Each grows
one acre of crops as his project, and carpentry is taught in
manual training.
"Animal husbandry is the main subject of the third year,
and for his project each student rears a group of animals;
carpentry
and iron repair work are taught in manual
training.
"The fourth year the student does special work in one
of the three departments of agriculture he has previously
studied, and in addition takes up farm management and
simple farm engineering."

When the first class was graduated in 1927, eighteen

had finished the full four-year course. One more had
finished a special two-year course in agriculture.
Case was pleased with them. They had been the ones
to survive the first shock of discovering that the school
was a place to work harder than they had ever worked
before. They had been the ones who had gone out on
field trips and who, during vacations, had been the
school's best recruiters of new students.

60

"They are going out with enthusiasm," Case happily

reported, "confident that they can win success out of
the soil, and anxious to help their own people back
in the jungle."
At last, more than thirteen years after arriving in
Burma, he was seeing what he had dedicated his life to
make possible.

61

CHAPTER

SIX

Some of his fellow missionaries thought Brayton

Case had a one-track mind, but he didn't. In those
days, when a missionary was a jack-of-all-trades, Brayton
was in his element. He could do anything, almost; and
furthermore, he could do a dozen things at once.
While the school was getting started, he kept the
demonstration
farm going full tilt. His experimental
work was every bit as demanding as masterminding a
pioneer curriculum.
He also spent many weeks each year touring the
villages, preaching and holding community development and stewardship
institutes.
He trained and
directed extension workers. By the time the school
was ten years old, he and Mrs. Case were heading up
marketing cooperatives that further accelerated the
development of Burma's economy.

62

In 1921 he brought back from his furlough in the

United States a cane crusher and engine. He had established the fact that much better sugar cane could be
grown in Burma. Now he was concerned to see the most
profitable use made of it. ''''hen he set up his rig, it
extracted so much juice from his cane, and did it so
much faster, that Burman cane growers immediately
ordered several outfits like it for their own use.
He thought other crops could be improved, and he
started with corn. Selection of the seed was important,
and for this he sought the help of the scientists in the
government's agriculture department. He wanted the
Burman farmers to know the specialists were there to
be used and that heeding their advice made sense.
Before planting his corn, Brayton thought about his
labor costs. Might not corn be cultivated in rows, as in
America, so that oxen could draw cultivators through
it? The Burman method was to broadcast corn kernels
by hand. Then, with corn growing in irregular patterns,
men had to hoe out the weeds and keep the soil broken
up entirely by hand. So Brayton drilled in the seed in
rows and was able to move systematically up and down
the rows with his oxen, which the Burmans thought was
great! And when they saw the harvest, which was by
far the best in the whole area, they resolved to follow
the new method themselves.

63

The successful drilling of seed corn opened the way

for Burman farmers to get away from the awful, backbreaking work of rice planting. People had been
spending fantastic amounts of time bending over their
paddy fields, inserting rice transplants individually into
mucky soil.
Brayton bought purebred rice seed and drilled it in
-the
first time such a method had been used in
Burma. Not only was the crop very high in its yield,
but it matured earlier than usual.
The rice harvest on Brayton Case's experimental farm
was a wonder to behold. He had a mower, ordinarily
used for cutting hay for livestock. With a reaper attachment, he not only saved most of the time ordinarily
wasted in harvesting, but he managed to save more of
the precious grain. He estimated that he gained a 25
per cent increase in the value of his crop through this
harvesting system, and another 25 per cent in planting.
Best of all, he had not made any changes in the land.
Some experts had thought American methods couldn't
be used on the ordinary paddy fields, but Case showed
that they could. He finished the experiment by threshing the grains from the stalks with a threshing machine,
cu tting his labor cost and adding to his profit.
The use of the mower meant such a saving of time
that he tried planting other crops in the still-moist
64

earth. His neighbors' rice took two months to harvest

with hand sickles, and by this time the ground had
dried up. But Brayton was able to harrow and re-plant,
this time to field peas and sorghum.
The idea of getting two major crops in a single
season had an obvious appeal to anybody who could
actually see it happen. To anyone else, it was simply
unbelievable.
So Brayton Case went into the audio-visual business.
He developed lantern slides showing his methods and
their results. But it soon dawned on him that the best
audio-visual aids would be his chickens, pigs, and rice.
The lantern slides subsequently went out to villages
with his students, while he took to visiting church
association meetings to "preach" in a most unique way.
Such meetings always were large. They were held in a
harvested field over which rice straw had been scattered.
Bamboo poles were stuck in the ground and strawcovered roofs raised to provide shelter.
Brayton Case would march into this meeting place
with a pig under one arm and a barred rock hen under
the other. The pig would already have advertised the
meeting by squealing all along the village street.
The people would gather-one
thousand, two thousand, sometimes three thousand or more-for
the biggest event of the year.
65

They would sing, officials would read letters and

documents,
and
then
Brayton
Case would be
introduced.
"Friends, the pig is my text," he'd say. Then he
would expound the virtues of good parental influence,
as in the case of the pig. "What a great father he had!"
Brayton would say, relishing the almost-unbelieving
stares of the people as he told about the father's impressive weight. "And what a splendid mother"and, of course, he would give her weight. He would tell
how the pig needed to be fed and cared for in order to
grow up to be "a real respectable Christian pig."
He had developed charts for the next part of the
story. The sermon on the pig had ten points, all nicely
illustrated in ways the people could understand and
remember. And the title was a sure-fire best-selling
slogan, A Good Pig Is a Friend of Burma.
The pig, however, was only the first major point.
Once he was certain the people were properly
impressed, Brayton would start all over again, this time
with the hen. With a new chart boldly lettered, How
to Make Hens Lay Golden Eggs, Brayton would hold
up his chicken.
"What a fine figure she has! And she lays an egg
almost every day!" (This was a feat unheard of in
Burma.)
66

Then he would show some heads of rice and another

chart: Ten Commandments
for Rice Growers. And at
the end, the announcement was made that each of these
sermons within a sermon was for sale, at a penny each.
Still the sermon would go on. The people, excited
and almost aching for more, would be disappointed
with just an hour's sermonizing.
So Brayton would announce a plowing contest-right
here, right now, part of the sermon, an experience to
remember and treasure. He would pick up the plow
he had developed for the Burman soil, one with a
moldboard, and point out the differences between his
new plow and the villagers' wooden ones.
The people would hurry to hitch up some oxen.
Two members of the crowd would start plowing furrows right around the meeting shelter, while the entire
congregation formed a procession behind them. Before
long, there would be a nice set of furrows from each
plow for the people to compare.
"See how it turns the ground all the way over-twice
as well, and twice as fast, as ours! How much does the
new plow cost?"
Brayton had an answer ready. "Only a dollar."
"A dollar! That's no more than we pay for our
old plows. Where can we buy new ones like yours?"
Prepared for this, too, Brayton would pick up a box

67

full of plow points, and sell them right in the meeting.

Excitement would become a fire, lighting up the
whole village. Even the non-Christians-everyone
for
miles around-by
now would be pressing in, hoping
to share in the wondrous blessings brought by this
friendly giant.
"The pig-how
much for the pig?" To the people's
delight, Brayton would sell not only his sermon's first
point, but other pigs that he had brought and left at
the edge of the village to be a pleasant surprise. Hens,
too, would go on sale, with boxes of eggs.
No doubt some offering money went into these transactions. Brayton believed that it would take an investment to raise the standard of living, and that money
invested wisely in this way would be a special kind of
offering to God. Not everyone agreed when Brayton
went this far; but he was a compelling leader, and no
one could doubt that he was leading the people in the
right direction and that they wanted to go.
Women would tie a few eggs in handkerchiefs and
carry them, almost on tiptoe, as long as four days' walk
back to their own villages. There they would lovingly
tend them until the eggs produced some of Case's
famous "Christian chickens" for them to raise.
Such meetings wouldn't end without an evangelistic
clincher.

68

"The plows and pigs and chickens are all gone now,"
Brayton would tell the people who had returned to the
shelter.
"But I still have something that is best of all-jesus
Christ, who helps us to live, and who died for us, and
who rose and still cares for us. He's not like Buddha,
who only lost himself in karma. I have a living God,
who hears my prayers, and helps, and cares for me."
Knowing Case could deliver what he promised, fantastic though it might be, the people listened.
His testimonies were backed up by others. A
preacher from a distant village might jump up and
say, "I have been preaching in my village for five years.
Last Christmas a team of boys came from the Agricultural School and preached pigs, rice and religion. They
did more good in one week than I have in five years."
A deacon would stand up to say, "Other preachers
have been telling us that we must give more. But this
preacher shows us how to produce more so that we can
give more."
And an old, gray-headed farmer would be sure to
say, "I have been praying for years that the Lord might
send us an agricultural missionary. He does answer
prayer. He sent you."
Whenever his colleagues dared, they questioned his
church-meeting showmanship. Was it necessary?

69

"A thousand million people in the world earn their

living by agriculture," Brayton Case would retort. "But
half the world is hungry. Half the world is sick. Prayers
rise to God to help them. I must work for God in my
own way, and I am helping them."
Brayton Case could arouse enthusiasm in village
meetings, and he could also sustain it in his students.
Visitors, who began to come to Pyinmana in respectable
numbers to observe his work, sometimes wondered if
his success were dependent on his own unique personality. They wondered if his kind of leadership could
be transferred to the Burmans themselves.
It could. His outrageously cornball exhibitions at
village meetings were effective because he knew precisely what would impress the people. His students, who
came from among the same people, only needed to be
sold on the product in order to go out and sell it the
same way themselves.
The curriculum of the school allowed them to practice their leadership skills from the very beginning.
Brayton organized forays out into remote villages on
weekends.
Teams were composed of students and teachers. Two
would play games with village children and tell stories.
Two would plant seeds and fruit trees. Two would
perform public health services, either digging latrines

70

or improving conditions around the village well. Two

would dispense medicines and visit the sick. Two would
visit in the homes, distributing literature and explaining it while telling how the Christian life had made
them stronger and more confident. No observer could
honestly say that Case's leadership training was shallow;
ordinary youngsters were being mobilized to take the
whole Christian gospel to the whole man.
When
the mission board in America started
appointing more agricultural missionaries to enlarge
Brayton Case's work, he began to broaden the base of
the school.
Many who were sold on his ideas couldn't afford to
come to his school for a four-year course. So he organized an annual eleven-day workers' institute at
Pyinmana. The training there was so thorough that a
preacher who attended once went home saying, "We
learned all about Corinthians
and cabbages, and
preaching and pigs!"
All went home telling about the wonders they had
seen: huge cabbages, peppers and tomatoes; corn as
sweet as sugar; wonderful rice, with grains so big and
even, just like rows of peacocks' heads. With bare feet
they had waded into the soft earth of Brayton's fields.
"This ground has been plowed differently from ours.
See how soft it is!"

71

And, ''I'm going to get some of that seed, and I'm

going to take home one of those plows!"
And again, "How funny-houses
for hens! Yes, and
feed mixed specially, just for hens. Those are pigs?
Must have been crossed with elephants! We're going to
take home some of these, and show them there how it
can really be done."
What of it? Did their enthusiasm last?
Whenever Brayton was asked this question, he answered, with ill-concealed pride, "When we travel
about and meet them back in their villages, they show
us what they have accomplished. They're proud to be
doing things the way they found them done at
Pyinmana."
A former army officer provided one of Brayton's best
opportunities to extend the benefits of scientific agriculture to large numbers of people.
When Captain Rivers became the director of a
35,000-acre estate with 15,000 tenants farming it, he
was dismayed at the way the people lived. Their rice
yield was poor. The people became slaves to moneylenders, and life seemed hopeless.
The captain did all he could to lift them to a better
level. He established a bank that lent tenant farmers
money at 12 percent instead of the usual 100 percent.
He always paid a higher price for the harvest than did

72

the neighboring merchants. He opened roads to the

villages. He provided a private police force to protect
the people from marauding robber bands, and his door
was always open to the farmers who had difficulties and
disputes to settle among themselves. He was like a
father to his tenants.
And yet he could not give them the basic help they
needed. So he said to Brayton Case, "You are teaching
improved practices at Pyinmana. Could you locate some
of your graduates on my estate as demonstrators?"
Three young men immediately volunteered. Each
took ten acres, the average size of a tenant farm, and
they began growing government-pedigreed
improved
rice. Not only did it yield 25 per cent more, but it
ripened a month earlier than that on surrounding
farms.
Then, because the ground was still moist, they could
plant cowpeas in the stubble, plowing under both seeds
and stubble. They picked the peas, eating some and
selling some, and feeding the vines to the cattle that
worked in the field. And the next year the peavines,
plowed under the surface to share their nitrogen with
the soil as they decomposed, made the soil richer for a
still better crop of rice.
The Pyinmana graduates also diversified their crops,
planting
sugarcane, soybeans and pigeon peas on

73

higher ground. Being scarcer than rice, these products

brought a better price.
On land near their houses, they planted vegetables-cabbages,
carrots, onions, radishes, tomatoes,
eggplants and lima beans. They thus had a variety of
foods to eat while the rice was growing and being
harvested. They could stay away from the moneylenders altogether between harvests. Other tenants
were mightily impressed.
The young men's influence began to spread even
beyond the huge estate. Everyone wanted to use plows
like theirs. People wanted to get Berkshire pigs and
barred plymouth rock hens-the
"Christian" pigs and
hens that ~ere so revolutionary.
Thus there developed a need for marketing knowhow. Marketing on a nationwide basis isn't simple.
Consumer demand for brand-new products must be
guessed at long before the people realize they have a
need for them! Production, transportation, and moneyhandling all have to be arranged on a trustworthy
basis.
Others in Burma had seen the need for marketing
cooperatives that would involve large numbers of
people, giving them incomes while teaching them the
fundamentals of the agriculture business. But until
Lena and Brayton Case worked out the solutions,

74

Burma didn't have such cooperatives-at

least, not
ones that worked.
The key, the Cases thought, was to have cooperatives
founded on Christian principles and with Christians
running them. Mutual trust is absolutely necessary in a
marketing cooperative. The honest operations of enterprises has always been one of the distinctively Christian
mission contributions to developing nations, and this
was so with the Case-designed systems.
Poultry marketing came first. The poultry cooperative started on Lena's back kitchen veranda, then grew
so much it had to be moved to the garage. The poultry
yards were right next to the big brick house, so the
hens could have Lena's regular attention. She always
had to struggle not to have the whole house running
over with farm business.
They called that first cooperative the Fresh Egg Association. The first high-grade roosters were supplied by
the government. These Brayton distributed to a circuit
of many villages. Pyinmana graduates then divided the
circuit up into sections they could easily handle. Their
job was to give instructions on the care of poultry,
and to collect good eggs for marketing as they made
their rounds. The association's eggs really were fresh
and plentiful; they found their way all over Burma.
Brayton couldn't go down to Rangoon without taking

75

as many cases of eggs as he could handle, and he never

had to bring any home.
Case also developed plans for the cooperative
marketing of pigs and fruit. He was so successful that
the government in 1934 authorized him, for the first
time in all Burma, to organize two incorporated cooperatives for the uplift of Burman village life-the
Cooperative
Poultry
Societies, Limited,
and the
Pyinmana Cooperative Bank, Limited.
Those days in the 1930's were Brayton Case's most
joyous. He was doing what he most wanted to do, and
was seeing results. The government, too, saw results,
and in 1934 they gave him the rare Kaisar-i-Hind silver
medal for conspicuous service, awarded by the EmperorKing himself.
In all his efforts, Brayton was helped by his devoted
wife, Lena. Their son, Clarke, had been left in America
at the age of twelve, in 1930. Returning from furlough
without him, Lena at first was brokenhearted. Seeing
other missionary children running around the compound, she couldn't help crying. But Brayton convinced her that in a way, these were her children, too,
and that her job was to share her mother-love with the
people in her adopted country.
She threw herself into her work without reservation,
but by 1938, she was experiencing difficulty in making

76

long trips, and finally she admitted she was in great

pain.
The trips were not easy, anyway. Some were as long
as two thousand miles. Even going to an association
meeting in the Chin Hills meant that she and Brayton
had to catch a 4:30 A.M. train. After a long time on the
rails they got off, walked at least part of the four miles
between the railroad and a river, and crossed the river
in tiny dugout canoes, holding their breath and
squeezing the inside edges of the canoe for balance.
Then there was a bumpy cart ride of five miles, during
which Lena was so shaken up she literally hurt all over.
Arriving at the meeting by day's end, she found she
had to prepare food for a crowd, because there had
been trouble with the cook. She could only get a few
minutes' rest to ease her aching head.
They both knew what it meant to be quietly heroic.
In 1939, Lena Tillman Case fell victim to cancer.
The disease was discovered in midyear. Arrangements
were made for her to be flown to America.
Should Brayton go with her? Obviously, he should.
But just as obviously (to them), he was needed at
Pyinmana. They decided he would stay at his post.
They read Psalm 91 together. "You will not fear the

terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day."

They decided to abide by its promises, knowing they
77

would not be separated in spirit no matter what might

come between them physically.
At the airport, Brayton almost changed his mind.
But he thought of the Psalm and he stood his ground.
Letters and cablegrams spanning the continents the
next few months were poignant. Lena weakened, and
surgeons couldn't even operate. Clarke, who had just
finished his M.D. course at Harvard, spent all the time
he could with her.
On December 28, her heart simply stopped beating.
"At last," Clarke wrote to his father, "she knew peace.
She had suffered a great deal."
Brayton received the news by cable; then Clarke's
letter came after she was buried. His heart was heavy,
but his smile was not dimmed. He went on teaching
and traveling among the people, playing Beethoven on
the piano when he entertained in his empty house, and
telling jokes in Burmese and singing with the villagers
the songs passed down from father to son for countless
years.

78

CHAPTER

SEVEN

National independence, and then the Second World

War, both came to Burma in the early 1940's. Brayton
Case found his career greatly changed.
Still he was the same man. He was seen as late as
1942 on the road to Mandalay with a pig under one
arm and a hen under the other. He loved the Burman
people so much that he couldn't bear the thought of
leaving them while he could be of any help.
A reporter for the Associated Press thought this quite
a remarkable attitude, so the following story was wired
around the world.

u. S. MISSIONARY STAYS AT POST TO AID CHINESE

Risks Life to Round Up Food For Burma Armies
Burma, March 28, 1942 (AP) -Disregarding danger from
Japanese bombers and wild dacoit tribesmen, an American
missionary was marshalling food supplies for the Chinese

79

Army in Burma at an oft-bombed Baptist agricultural

school
behind the front.
Civil authorities
long since have departed
from the surrounding
area, but the Rev. Brayton Case, a lean, middleaged Burma-born New Englander, whose only son is studying
medicine at Harvard, is sticking to his job.
"'Vegetables
for Victory'," he said with a smile. "I just
sent off six truckloads of cabbages to the Chinese army and
I've got 20 or 30 hogs ready to go. As long as I'm here, I'm
sure I can get the farmers of this district to sell me all they
can produce.
"The agricultural
school is unharmed,
although
firebugs
burned a section of the town this week. I'm getting a couple
of Chinese soldiers to stand guard whenever I go into the
countryside.
"If I ran off for good there would be no one around here
to round up food for the Chinese, and these young men
have to eat in order to fight. So-I'm
sticking."

In March, 1942, Case was still at Pyinmana. But

within weeks the school was completely bombed out.
He tramped upcountry with those who left their homes
and farms just ahead of the Japanese.
Two months later, Case was with Gen. Joseph W.
Stilwell, Burma Surgeon Gordon S. Seagrave and the
nurses he had trained, refugees from all over, and remnants of several fighting groups. General Stilwell
marched them steadily in parching heat or driving rain.
80

They forced their way through jungles, forded or swam

creeks, floated on bamboo rafts down rivers and then
climbed razorback mountains into India. Case foraged
for them, scouted for the right road, arranged for billets
in abandoned monasteries, and rounded up porters and
mules to carry supplies and the sick and exhausted.
In India, Brayton thought he'd get a chance to write
some books he'd had in the back of his mind over the
years, or live among and help Christian tribesmen.
Such a peaceful life was never to be his. He probably
wouldn't have been able to live that way for long,
anyway. No sooner had he arrived in India than
General Stilwell asked him to return to Burma as a
civilian employee of the U.S. forces. He would act as
liaison between the American military forces and the
people of Burma.
His life would be constantly in danger, but he could
be with his people. As he understood the job, it even
had some religious overtones. He would be a sort of
chaplain-to
the Burmans, to officers, and to the
ordinary American soldiers. Chaplain to everybody. It
fitted in well with his idea of a missionary opportunity. He could create understanding and good will.
Naturally, he took the job. Other missionaries in
Burma and India were doing similar tasks, helping
with refugees and medical work, and leading corps of
81

indigenous workers. Brayton needed a thorough rest,

and doctors had told his colleagues to use all their
influence to help him avoid a nervous breakdown; but
no one could get him to slow down.
He found he was to travel as much as 1,500 miles a
month, much of the time in jeeps behind enemy lines.
That was all right with him. Danger was something a
missionary should face just as well as a soldier, he
thought.
"I feel it is my duty to help drive the Japanese
invaders out of Burma, and share in the dangers with
our American soldiers who have come here," he wrote
to his son, Clarke. "I can't sit in some safe place letting
them do the struggling and suffering, and then come
in and comfortably carryon the mission work in Burma
after the war is all over."
Most of Brayton's
American
companions
were
soldiers much younger than he. They called him "that
old man" at first; but as they got to know him, they
were amazed at his tremendous vitality.
He was called to the forward headquarters of the
army one day, and he was able to ride part of the way.
But the last twenty-five miles he had to tramp, carrying
his pack. The men with him, twenty years and more his
junior, found it a strenuous trip, yet he stood it much
better than they.

82

Malaria was a major problem for the soldiers. Some

of them asked him, "How many times have you had
malaria during your long stay in these jungles?"
"Oh," he replied, "I had a little fever about twenty
years ago, but nothing since!"
He taught Burmese to the officers and men so they
could make their wishes known to the people. He was
in demand as a speaker on life in the jungle, and on the
people and country of Burma. Still very much the
audio-visual devotee, he gathered a number of plantsedible jungle roots, stems and leaves-and
passed them
around as examples of how a man might live off the
land if necessary.
Homesick soldiers, thoroughly disgusted with the war
in the jungle, expressed amazement that Brayton Case
would have chosen to live in Burma for so long.
"The most important thing about your work," he
would answer, "is not where you do it, but the people
with whom you are working. If you have your friends
about you, you can put up with almost anything. A
great host of my friends are in Burma, and when I
can be with them and help them, I am happy."
A military chaplain heard Brayton Case speak to the
soldiers one time. As he listened, he thought, "Here is a
man whose life's work is destroyed, and yet at his age he
is talking to us with youthful enthusiasm, talking about

83

the planting of the Lord among the ashes-and

that's
all that was left of his mission in Pyinmana. There's no
defeat in his makeup."
Wherever he went, Burmans crowded around with
eager welcome. They had known this man before the
war. He could always help.
"Where can we find rice 'til the next harvest, when
what the army left behind is gone?" they asked. After
the war had swept through their villages, they would
return to what was left of home. Enemy dead would
still be lying around, and shell craters, still smoking,
would be gaping wide. Their bodies thin and worn,
but their faces for some reason still expectant, the
Burmans would look for a place to settle down again
after months of moving and hiding.
Brat yon Case's heart went out to these people. Thin
as they were, they looked much better with packs full
of rice from an emergency supply depot piled high on
their backs. They could face the future when they had
a tattered blanket and some clothes, a few cooking
pots and a rusty lantern, and a precious chicken or two
to restock the village.
Brayton never gave up his gardening. He did it
wherever he found need, whether in areas already
cleared of Japanese and relatively safe, or behind the
lines of combat. He was absolutely fearless.
84

He startled an American soldier one day, six miles

behind the enemy lines in northern
Burma. The
soldier heard Brayton coming down the jungle path
and was sure it was the Japanese. He hid. Then he
looked out from his hiding place and saw the cheerful
features of the missionary.
The soldier said, "My Godl Do you know where you
are?"
"Yes," Case said, "I'rn back of the Japanese lines."
"What are you doing here, anyway?" the soldier
asked, incredulous.
Case simply said, "Making vegetable gardens." He
was planting gardens so that when the Japanese were
driven back, the people would have something to start
on.
The soldier said later, "We go behind the lines only
when we're told we have to. He goes because he wants
to-the people are that important to him."
And more than one said, "The reason we all like
Case is-he just has guts!"
Guts and compassion carried Brayton Case through
two years of hellish warfare.
In July, 1944, knowing that thousands of Burmans
were nearing starvation
in the devastated
north,
Brayton set out to arrange for the planting of rice.
He must find seed, talk its owners into sharing it, and

85

get it shipped where it was most desperately needed.

He found a former tea-shop owner named Maung
Ba Kyan, who knew the area and its people. Together
they arranged a scouting trip that would take them
across Indawgyi Lake.
The British Army was evacuating refugees from the
lake region by boat, and Brayton and Ba Kyan found
a place in a British-manned boat.
The boat was made from two smaller Burman boats,
with a platform lashed between them. People sat on
this elevated raft, and an outboard motor was mounted
on the stern.
Half an hour out into Indawgyi Lake on the morning
of July 14, the boat turned a very sharp curve and
water filled part of one of the little boats. Everyone
moved over to the opposite side to balance it.
Nearly everyone on the boat had been told that
though the makeshift raft might ship some water, it
would not sink. In case of emergency, they were told,
they should hold onto the boats tightly. But Brayton
Case and Ba Kyan had come too late for the instructions. The moving men caused the second boat to take
on some water, and the whole raft tilted crazily toward
one side. It didn't overturn, but everyone was thrown
into the water.
As Brayton fell in, he yelled in Burmese to Ba Kyan,

86

"Grab something!" The Burman couldn't swim, but

he held his light bedroll and an empty gasoline tin
tight under his stomach until he was pulled into the
boat by a soldier.
Case, on the other hand, could swim. But he
weighed close to 195, and he had rubber boots and a
steel helmet to hold him down. A soldier reached for
him, held him momentarily, then had to let him go.
Brayton struggled a bit in the water, then sank. Three
men hanging onto boats floated downstream, but were
rescued. Everyone stayed for a while searching in vain
-first, for a spent, struggling man; then, hopelessly, for
his body.
They never found him.
The governor of Burma immediately cabled the
American Baptist Foreign Mission Society:
Burma thanks you for Brayton Case. His agricultural
school at Pyinmana was a national asset. His greathearted
enthusiasm was an inspiration. His work during evacuation
and in liberated areas was invaluable. His presence will be
much missed in the vital reconstruction period.
The Burma Christian Council sent similar sentiments through the Archbishop of Rangoon.
The British considered his effervescent leadership a
great contribution to the development of Burma, and

87

for this, they made him (posthumously, in 1945) a

member of the Order of the British Empire.
Brayton Case could not have imagined the tributes
that would pour in from all over the world. In any
event, the one tribute that mattered to him he had
received in abundance during the thirty-one years in
Burma. That was the love, freely bestowed in return
for his own, of the people of the nation to which he
had been called.

88

ePILOGUE

The author asked Dr. Clarke Tillman Case what he

thought about the timeliness of a book about his father.
After all, it must be remembered that Brayton Case
is a figure from another time.
"This may be a time when urban patterns dominate
our thinking," Clarke Case said, "but adequate food
production is the timeliest of topics still, and probably
always will be. Even though fewer people now may
produce more food, my father was addressing his whole
life to a subject that has not been solved adequately
even today."
In the latter half of the twentieth century it is proper
to judge a missionary organization by the amount of
attention it gives to helping people solve the root problems of human sickness, injustice and alienation.
It was not so fashionable when Brayton Case went

89

out to Burma. As the first Baptist agricultural missionary, he had to fight hard to make the church understand its responsibility in dealing with the major facts
of life.
Joe Leary, a young Roman Catholic supply officer for
a maintenance medical battalion in Burma, summed
up Brayton Case's philosophy in words that could almost have been Case's own.
"At the time of his death," Leary wrote his mother,
"Case was working very hard getting the people resettled and producing agriculturally as close to their
pre-invasion years as possible. People can't be independent if they aren't self-sufficient."
Scuttlebutt around military camps boils down to
some pretty accurate appraisals. Lt. R. L. Cornwell
reported, "Case is credited with doing more for the
Burmese farmer than any other man."
Dr. Clarence E. Chaney said, "Brayton Case spent
his life, in his words, 'helping hungry poor people
produce food and glorify God in doing it'."
Gustav A. Sword, veteran fellow missionary, summed
up the effect of Case's life, "His words weighed heavily
in the scales of the mighty."
In the files of the American Baptist Foreign Mission
Society rests a letter from the great General Joseph
W. Stilwell:

90

"I wish to state that in my many years in Asia, the

Reverend Brayton Case was one of the hardest working and
really selfless men I have ever met.
"For two years Mr. Case worked with me and members of
my staff. His thoughts and actions were always for the
native population and means of alleviating their hardship.
The Burmese had no better friend. Officers and men of the
theater admired Mr. Case, and regretted that he was lost
in the line of duty."

Brayton Case's mark has been left on Burma, and on

all agricultural mission work everywhere.
In Burma today the "Bo Case peh" ("Chief Case
bean") and the "Bo Case wet" ("Chief Case pig") are
tremendously popular. "Many people of Burma know
these today," reported Thra Eddie Loo, Burma Baptist
Convention agricultural worker, in 1964. The barred
Plymouth Rock chicken, now in general use in Burma,
is sometimes called the "Case chicken."
The kind of agricultural
work he started at
Pyinmana was successfully extended by missionaries of
the next generation, notably William D. Hackett at the
Baptists' Pang T'Kwa Farm. Now that all foreign personnel have been excluded from the country while the
Burmans get established on their "Burmese Way to
Socialism," word is sent out from time to time that
community uplift of the Case variety continues.

91

Brayton Case was partly responsible for the development of a famous "winter course" at Cornell University's College of Agriculture, which has given countless
missionaries to rural areas an intensive month of
training in the fundamentals of modern agriculture.
He found his way into the history books, too. Official
military histories mention his service and the great loss
sustained by his death in action.
His work is forever timely. "Innovation is always
timely," his son says. "Fifty years later it still is being
shown that it's not the technological development that
counts, but it's getting the conservative farmer to follow
it-in Burma or anywhere."
This, then, was the genius of Brayton Case. He could
sing songs-secular
songs, growing out of the soilwith the Burman people. He could tell jokes with them
in their language, and with a full appreciation of what
every subtle shading of the words meant to them.
In a day when missions raised up great institutions,
much to the chagrin of today's missionaries who fear
institutionalism, "Case was institutionally minded only
to the extent that a school center was essential to the
permanent contribution that he wished to make. It was
made to serve his larger purpose of bringing more
light and a better life to the farmers in the villages of
Burma." So said the leaders of Agricultural Missions,

92

Inc., an agency in the United States that Case helped

to found.
"Brayton Case met life on every corner with a smile,"
said Dr. Clarence E. Chaney, missionary colleague. "He
faced many an obstacle and bitter disappointment, but
I never knew him to lose his patience or his smile. In
recent years the habit of laughter had become almost
perpetual."
Perhaps Brayton Case's finest insight was this:
"I am constantly finding that some of the greatest
obstacles to better agriculture and better living in the
villages are spiritual obstacles-lack of motive for persistent effort, lack of love, lack of honesty, lack of faith
in one another, lack of unselfish service.
"The Christian religion helps me overcome these
obstacles and I see it helping them when they accept it.
"I am an agricultural missionary because I am a
Christian, and I hope I am helping others to become
truly Christian because of my agriculture."

93

'l)EADING LIST
~ ~

Other Biographies

Carlson, Lois. M onganga Paul (The Congo mmistry

and martyrdom of Paul Carlson, M.D.). New York:
Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc., 1966.
Davey, Cyril J. Kagawa of Japan. Nashville:
Press, 1961.

Abingdon

Gallagher, Teresa. Give Joy to My Youth, a Memoir of

Dr. Tom Dooley, 1927-1961. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1965.
Graham, Billy. World Aflame.
& Co., Inc., 1965.

Garden City: Doubleday

Harrison, Ann M. A Tool in His Hand (Dr. Paul W.

Harrison, medical missionary in Arabia) . New York:
Friendship Press, 1958.
Homan,

Helen

Walker.

Francis

94

and Clare, Saints of

Assisi. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956.

Lacy, Creighton. Frank Mason North (Social and Ecumenical Leader) . Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967.
Lash, Joseph P. Dag Hammarskjold.
Doubleday and Co., Inc. 1961.

Garden City:

Lazell, J. Arthur. Alaskan Apostle (The Life Story of

Sheldon Jackson) . New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc., 1960.
Mathews, Basil. Livingstone
Friendship Press, 1954.

the Pathfinder.

New York:

Means, Florence Crannell. Sagebrush Surgeon (Dr.

Clarence Salsbury, surgeon in the Navaho country).
New York: Friendship Press, 1956.
Monk, Robert C. John
Press, 1966.

Wesley.

Nashville: Abingdon

Nolan, Liam. Small Man of Nanataki

(Kiyoshi Watanabe). New York: E. P. Dutton, and Co., 1966.
Oliver, Robert T. Syngman Rhee, The Man Behind
the Myth. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1964.
Perkins, Sara. Red China Prisoner (autobiography).
Westwood, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1963.
95

Petersen, William J. Another Hand on Mine (The

~tory of Dr. Carl K. Becker of Africa Inland Mission) . New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1967.
Prichard, Marianna Nugent and Norman Young
Prichard. Ten Against the Storm (Biographies of
ten courageous Japanese Christian leaders). New
York: Friendship Press, 1957.
Rowland, Stanley]., Jr. Men for Others (Short biographies). New York: Friendship Press, 1965.
Rudolph, L. C. Francis Asbury.
Press, 1966.

Nashville: Abingdon

Seamands, John T. Pioneers of the Younger

Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1967.
Searcher, Victor. Farewell
ingdon Press, 1965.

to Lincoln.

Churches.

Nashville: Ab-

Wilson, Dorothy Clarke. Handicap Race. New York:

McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1967. (A paraplegic
ministers to other handicapped persons.)
Wilson, Dorothy Clarke. Ten Fingers for God (Dr.
Paul W. Brand, Vellore). New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Co., Inc., 1965.

96

,
I

---------- ....

BOLD BELIEVERS

HUNGER

FIGHTER

SERIES - a new set of biographies

'Jhe Story of

IN BURMA:

Brayton Case

$1.50
Robert F. Cramer

Because he believed in and cared about food-enough

food
..,....forboth the body and spirit of man, Brayton Case preached,
taught, farmed-and
lived-in Burma so whole-heartedly
and
so successfully that he left his mark there and" on all agricultural mission work everywhere."
Robert F. Cramer, associate secretary, Division of Public Relations, American Baptist Foreign Mission Societies, was educated at Syracuse University and Colgate Rochester Divinity
School. He is the author of god's 7vlission and 7vline, a
Judson Press junior high textbook.
Otber titles in the Bold Believers SeriesFUTURE-MAKER IN INDIA; 'Ihe Story of Sarah Chakko
Mary Louise Slater
MEDICS in THE MOUNTAINS: 1be Story of
Edgar and Elizabeth )Willer
Eleanor Preston Clarkson
THROBBING DRUMS: 'Ihe Story of James R Robinson
Amy Lee
"Bold Believers" Series FRIENDSHIP

PRESS

$1.50 each book

An Original Paperback

NEW

YORK