THE VIKING INVASION.(Brief Article)

A hundred years ago, Greenwood, Mississippi, in the heart of the Delta, was the cotton capital of the world. Now many of the squat brick buildings downtown are vacant, and Greenwood seems stuck in an era when shoe repair, sewing notions, and feed stores were big business. Fewer than twenty thousand people live within the city limits, although when the households of the surrounding county are added, the area has a population of about thirty-seven thousand. It is, as residents say, one of the poorest places in the poorest part of the country.

Nevertheless, in some respects, Greenwood recalls a way of life that many Americans feel they have lost. The outskirts of town are fringed by cotton, corn, and soybean fields, and acre after acre of the square, watery pens where catfish are farmed. Blues performances are advertised on hand-painted signs stuck to telephone poles, and people sell their folk art--paintings, bottle-cap constructions, primitive whirligigs--from their homes. In the early morning, the sounds of duck calls and shotguns ring against the hydrangea-blue sky. Hickory smoke hangs in the evening air as hints of pork, cumin, and ketchup mix with the smells of fried chicken, catfish, baked ham, and redeye gravy. Instead of restaurants and takeout places, there are oil drums rigged for barbecue in people's back yards.

Most people drive around Greenwood in pickup trucks with gun racks or small, late-model American cars, but shiny new S.U.V.s, Subarus, and Volvos are usually parked in front of the old opera house on the banks of the Yazoo River, where the Viking Range Corporation installed its headquarters fifteen years ago. Formerly divided into storefronts, the renovated Victorian building is a curious amalgam of past and present: the exterior has retained its New Orleans-style porch and curlicue ironwork, but through the front door one can glimpse a spare white industrial interior that looks like a loft in SoHo. Just to the left of the entrance, one last storefront remains: a tiny establishment with the words "Buford Cotton" on its awning. This enterprise appears to be moribund, but the proprietor, Bubbe Buford--who spends much of his day shooing the cars of Viking visitors out of the single parking space in front of his store--won't sell.

Just inside the Viking headquarters is a 90-C Special Deluxe Model Chambers Range--an Ozzie-and-Harriet-vintage white enamel gas stove with six burners, two ovens, and big chrome knobs. Manufactured in 1948, and weighing in at five hundred and forty-five pounds, the Chambers, which is displayed in an elevated niche, is the honored ancestor of all Viking ranges. Fred Carl, the company's fifty-four-year-old founder, told me that the stove originally belonged to his grandmother-in-law.

"When I could finally afford to build my wife a decent kitchen, she wanted a range just like her grandmama's, but they didn't make them like that anymore," Carl said as we sat in his office on the second floor of the opera house. And so he set out to design one, and ended up creating a new category of--and price range for--kitchen stoves. I was already familiar with this story; it is the standard introduction to the Viking legend, quoted by every person who works for the company and included in most of its publicity materials. But Carl's soft Delta drawl was tinged with wonder, and I scribbled down his words as if I'd never heard them before.

Carl is a short, thick, partly bald man with a neatly trimmed white beard. He wears short-sleeved cotton shirts--plaids or prints, mostly--and khaki trousers. He is perpetually flushed and morbidly shy. When he was young, he was kind of a geek; now his physical restlessness and the darting motion of his blue eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses suggest a man with unlimited physical and creative energy. This quality, coupled with an obsessive persistence, has earned him acceptance in the kitchen-appliance industry--a closed and deeply conservative society that tends to shun newcomers.

Carl's father was a building contractor in Greenwood, as was his grandfather; Carl never questioned that he, too, would be in the building business, but he wanted to be a designer or an architect. When he was a young boy, he tried to design a better dump truck and moved on to make sketches for a gravel-washing plant, a boarding school, and a military academy. Carl even wanted to build a better Disneyland. But ...