Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
by Mildred Armstrong Kalish
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Book Summary Information
Author: Mildred Armstrong KalishEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-04-29
ISBN: 0553384244
Number of pages: 292
Publisher: Bantam
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780553384246
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
Book Review: 'Free range farm children' on the loose
Summary: 5 Stars
One anecdote in a flood of memorable stories stands out in "Little Heathens." The Urmeys (her grandparents) were not poor, not Okies or Arkies, not tenants or sharecroppers. They owned four debt-free farms in eastern Iowa (painfully acquired, one for each daughter), over a thousand acres. Sometime in the `30s, when Millie was in third grade, the Ipana toothpaste company provided samples of toothpaste to the Garrison school, along with printed pictures of a modern bathroom, which Kalish recalls, they all happily colored, though none had even seen, let alone used indoor plumbing.
Few people today understand how laborious and restricted life was in the countryside before World War II. Relatively prosperous Iowans with some education (the Urmey girls usually taught in one-room schoolhouses until they married) seldom traveled more than 10 miles, did not enjoy indoor plumbing, and -- during the Depression, which began in 1922 in rural America -- virtually dropped out of the money economy.
In the South, things were much worse.
It turned out not to matter that the Urmeys were examples of the hard-working pioneer settler way of life. "Grandpa and Grandma never quite made it into the 20th century." The irresponsibility and incompetence of the financial classes nearly wrecked them. Kalish comments that her grandparents were land-rich and cash-poor, and terrified of losing their land in a tax sale.
Commodity prices collapsed in `22. The overall economy seemed to be expanding, but the rural economy crashed and stayed crashed. There was nothing farmers could do, alone or even in alliances to restrict production so as to praise prices. Farmers with debt were wiped out. It is no wonder that Grandpa Urmey believed in three things: hard work, the Methodist church and Franklin Roosevelt.
There is a well-financed campaign under way in 2010 to rewrite the history of the Depression in favor of free market ideology. Here, through the eyes of a child,. is the refutation of those lies.
However, "Little Heathens" is not an economic screed. (Such a screed has been written, by Linda Flowers in "Throwed Away.") It is more like "Life with Father" or "I Remember Mama" or any of the numerous other American reminiscences of family life, only much franker.
As a Little Kid, Millie observed but did not entirely understand the sex, scatology and scandals around her. Late in life, she lays it out, without squeamishness or reticence.
The book is organized by themes: religion, cooking, medical matters, laundry. The chapter on laundry will be an eyeopener for most readers.
Millie describes her mother as overwhelmed. Her dad was missing, run off or driven off, amid rumors of prison and bootlegging. Thus, Millie and her brothers and sister were less constricted than the other kids. "Free range farm children," she calls herself and her sister and brothers.
Yet thanks to uncles and aunts, neighbors, older kids and even teachers, they learned a great deal, from how to rob a bumblebee nest to treating toothache. "I know of no comparable body of knowledge that young people today possess."
Yet one thing they did not learn. "We had no acceptable way to show affection toward people."
I am reminded of a remark I read from a younger woman recently: "My father never told me he loved me. Only now do I realize that `Do you want to learn how to change the oil is the car?' was how he said it." "Little Heathens" is an extended riff on that thought.
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Summary of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
I tell of a time, a place, and a way of life long gone. For many years I have had the urge to describe that treasure trove, lest it vanish forever. So, partly in response to the basic human instinct to share feelings and experiences, and partly for the sheer joy and excitement of it all, I report on my early life. It was quite a romp.So begins Mildred Kalish?s story of growing up on her grandparents? Iowa farm during the depths of the Great Depression. With her father banished from the household for mysterious transgressions, five-year-old Mildred and her family could easily have been overwhelmed by the challenge of simply trying to survive. This, however, is not a tale of suffering.
Kalish counts herself among the lucky of that era. She had caring grandparents who possessed?and valiantly tried to impose?all the pioneer virtues of their forebears, teachers who inspired and befriended her, and a barnyard full of animals ready to be tamed and loved. She and her siblings and their cousins from the farm across the way played as hard as they worked, running barefoot through the fields, as free and wild as they dared.
Filled with recipes and how-tos for everything from catching and skinning a rabbit to preparing homemade skin and hair beautifiers, apple cream pie, and the world?s best head cheese (start by scrubbing the head of the pig until it is pink and clean), Little Heathens portrays a world of hardship and hard work tempered by simple rewards. There was the unsurpassed flavor of tender new dandelion greens harvested as soon as the snow melted; the taste of crystal clear marble-sized balls of honey robbed from a bumblebee nest; the sweet smell from the body of a lamb sleeping on sun-warmed grass; and the magical quality of oat shocking under the light of a full harvest moon.
Little Heathens offers a loving but realistic portrait of a ?hearty-handshake Methodist? family that gave its members a remarkable legacy of kinship, kindness, and remembered pleasures. Recounted in a luminous narrative filled with tenderness and humor, Kalish?s memoir of her childhood shows how the right stuff can make even the bleakest of times seem like ?quite a romp.?
From the Hardcover edition.
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