By Mark Bivens

Everybody was going to get rich. It was going to be so easy it would be hard to find someone foolish enough to turn down the opportunity.

The time frame was from about 1980 to 1983. Nobody seems to really recall exactly when it happened. 

Some operation, if operation is the proper term, made a swing through Hot Spring County and Saline County with a sales pitch — and a good one. They gave presentations at area businesses. One such operation was said to have even rented an old gymnasium in Saline County and packed the place with curious people. Everyone wanted to know the secret. How could a person with only meager funds become rich? 

It was easy, the operation allegedly said. Raise earthworms. Raise what? Earthworms.

One brochure being offered claimed that earthworms, or in this case, red wigglers, could more than quadruple in number each 21 days. Start out with a 1,000 red wigglers and before the month was over, you’d have 4,000. And the next month, 16,000. Anybody with even simple math skills could see nothing but dollar signs.

Skeptics asked one question. “What could a person do with the worms?”

The simple fact was, worms were known basically being good for one thing — fish bait. There was, at the time, maybe three bait shops in Benton. Being faced with that question didn’t deter the worm pitchmen. Like a seasoned attorney, they were ready for that question. They’d heard it before.

The worm itself isn’t the product, they convinced the crowd. The castings are the marketable product. What’s a casting? To be blunt, a casting is worm manure. That’s fertilizer. 

Hot Spring County agent Jessie Clark had heard the stories of the great worm fiasco of the early 1980s. So what happened to all those people buying into the get-rich-quick worm scheme of the’80s? How many are rich? Clark said there are, to his knowledge, only two “worm farms” left in Hot Spring County today, and both are small-scale operations.

That being said, let this be said. Now with all the world seemingly with a desire to “go green” and return to organically-grown food, look for more worm pitchmen to start coming around. The people of Hot Spring County and Saline County have had almost 30 years to forget how the pitchmen marched through the area and sold people their dreams of getting rich.

That gave the editorial staff at the Malvern Daily Record an idea. What did happen to all those worms and worm ranchers? And remember the great emu escapades of the early 1990s? What happened to them? One local prospective emu rancher reportedly gave several thousand dollars for a pair of breeding emus. An emu resembles an ostrich. They were raised for the meat. 

A couple of years after people dished out major bucks for emu, now and then a classified advertisement would spring up. One such advertisement stated, “Free to good home: emus.”

We’ll do a little nosing around. If there’s a story behind the emu or worm stories, we’ll have something to dig up, if you’ll forgive the pun.

(Mark Bivens is the editor of the Malvern Daily Record)