Patty Gardenseed Walks the World

 

 

    His real name is Aloysius Eugene Francis Patrick Mozier.

 

    But the one he likes is Patty Gardenseed.

 

    It sounds kind of ridiculous — like something invented by a Hollywood hack for a comedy take-off of Johnny Appleseed.  At first, it does.

 

    But when you meet the man, you're aware immediately that neither the name, nor he, is a joke.

 

    In another 100 years, the legend of Patty Gardenseed could conceivably push the front page deeds and decisions of many of today's politicians and diplomats into the footnotes of our history books.

     He's that kind of an out-of-place romantic, idealistic 20th century character.  He's an eccentric, just like John Chapman was an eccentric 200 years ago.

 

    The primary difference, other than time, between the two is geographical.

 

     Appleseed limited his unique philanthropy to the Midwestern frontier.

 

    Gardenseed walks the world.

 

    For the first time, I met him this week.

 

    He's a short man, 56 years old, with thinning blond hair and a nose bent by an amateur boxing career that spread over a decade.  He's a seafaring man, with 30 years of service in the Navy and Marines behind him.

 

    It was at the end of his Navy career, he told me, that he got his grim inspiration for the mission which has devoured him for the past seven years.

 

    Passing vegetable seeds among the hungry of the world.

 

    The inspiration came when he was driving a jeep near Pusan, Korea, and he saw a child, who had been walking along the roadside, suddenly collapse.  He stopped, lifted the tiny girl in his vehicle and raced her to a hospital.

 

    She was dead on arrival.  "Malnutrition," the doctor who examined her said with a shrug.

 

    Since that day, Johnny Gardenseed has distributed more than a million packets of vegetable seeds to those who were hungry.  He's visited South Korea, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, India, Italy, Israel, Egypt, North Korea, Red China — 74 countries in all.

 

    Carrots, turnips, lettuce, radishes, tomatoes — whatever seeds he can  buy or beg — he takes with him on his pilgrimages.

 

    Wherever he goes, he earns his own way as a nautical engineer.  He ships out whenever he has enough seeds to make a trip worthwhile.  From his earnings, he pays the freight for his strange cargo.

 

    Personally, he distributes the packets.  "There's no black market that way," he explains.  "I've never seen anyone black market garden seeds."

 

    In his travels, he has seen some of the official gifts which the United States has lavished on underdeveloped areas of the world in its effort to buy friends.

 

    "Like a tractor to the natives of a small island," he recalled to me.  "With no gasoline to run it, and no gasoline available for miles."

 

    Patty Gardenseed told me, "There's a reason for seeds.  Everybody — I don't care what color they are or what their politics are — has pride.  They want to work for what they get."

 

 

    I asked him how he managed to get into North Korea and Red China.

 

    "I just walk with my seeds," he answered.  "I speak eight languages.  If you talk somebody's language and you can tell them that you want to help them to help themselves, they're not going to stop you.  Our State Department hasn't stopped me, either.

 

    "Politics," Patty Gardenseed added, "is not my business."

 

    There's nothing Ugly about an American named Aloysius Eugene Francis Patrick Mozier.