Frontier, 1955

On the fringe of nowhere in the heart of South America, the Paraguayan town of Pedro Juan Caballero and the Brazilian town of Ponta Pora doze in the green, rolling forests of the Amambay plateau. A broad, straight strip of grass between the red-roofed towns marks the international border. But they really form a single frontier community of bearded, mud-stained Gauchos, Syrian merchants, Redemptorist priests, barefoot women, and soldiers in faded green uniforms.

One morning last fortnight, all these people marched out past their tumbledown cemetery to the green grass Pedro Juan Caballero airstrip. Soon, two silvery Douglas transports circled and landed, bringing Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroessner, U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay Arthur Ageton and other local and foreign dignitaries. Forward to greet them stepped Clarence Earl Johnson, a 6-ft, 200-lb. Texan in a white Stetson, faded blue jeans with pearl buttons, and cowhide boots.

How to Get Rich. Clarence Johnson, a man born for taming frontiers, is clearing a virgin jungle at the edge of the Chaco and financing the job by means of an unusual idea. As president of the American Economic Development Corp. (the Spanish or Portuguese initials for which work out tidily as CAFE), he is selling packaged coffee plantations.

It works thus: CAFE, a stock company incorporated in Brazil, owns good red-earth Paraguayan land half the size of Delaware, near Pedro Juan Caballero. For $15,000 the company will sell from its holdings a complete 123 1/2-acre farm, including a nanny goat, a sow, a bee colony, gardens and 22,500 young coffee trees.

CAFE will manage the farm, for 30% of the profits, or the owner may move in and run it himself. After the trees mature (in four years), Johnson says, each farm should gross at least $40,000 a year, with a fat one-half of the take as profit. The notion of owning a profitable Paraguayan plantation has proved irresistibly appealing to Wall Street bankers, Brazilian businessmen, even staid European capitalists. A typical sale, as related by Johnson: "

One time in Chicago I wentinto a store run by Harold Rubin at 520 South State Street to buy a $1 necktie, an' he says where you from? An' I says I'm from Texas. An' he says what you doin' here? I says selling coffee farms. An' he says my instinct tells me this is a good deal, I'll buy one." To date, Johnson has sold 63 farms, worth nearly $1,000,000.

"Just as Crazy as Hell." Johnson's Texas bragging hides a long, sound business background. After a hard-knocks youth, he went to work in 1923 for Anderson, Clayton & Co., big U.S. cotton merchants, as a cotton weigher at $110 a month. He moved up fast. "In 1938," he recalled, "I was sent to Brazil to manage the company's cotton compress at Sao Paulo. On the way down by boat, I happened some way to sit at the captain's table. He was an Englishman, an' he took to ridin' me pretty hard until one night I says to him, Captain, if you mean that I don't drink tea and don't dress up fancy for supper, you're right. But if you mean that I'm ignorant, you're just as crazy as hell." Four years after he reached Sao Paulo, Anderson, Clayton's plant became the biggest cotton compress in the world. By way of a hobby, he bought a little farm near Sao Paulo and started planting it, growing olives, plums, lemons, bananas, kumquats, corn and orchids. Impressed by the possibilities of tropical agriculture, he was unable to resist taking on CAFE'S lands when the chance came along in 1953. He resigned from Anderson, Clayton to work full-time on the new project.

At CAFE, since then, Johnson has built up a force of 1,100, constructed housing, set up a sawmill, bakery, tile and brick factory, gristmill and nursery, planted 1,260,000 coffee trees. Paraguay, which cooperated with CAFE by easing laws on currency exchange, now promises to become for the first time a coffee producer, and a competitive one. Said President Stroessner, after his tour of the new plantations: "What Paraguay needs is 100 men like Senor Johnson."

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