Death of the Dream - Farmhouses in the Heartland (William G. Gabler, 1999)

(128 pages)

Gift from my parents a couple decades back - I had seen it at their home and requested a copy. The book is based on a PBS series documenting (mostly through photos, though I've not seen the documentary) the types of homes built on prairie farms in late 19th century and on into the 20th century. This book is focused on south-southwest Minnesota and the homes look just like those common on the farms I grew up around in the 1960s.

Beautiful photography; evocative; sad - as happened with the home I grew up in and my grandparents' "house on the hill" - after no one lived there any more, the homes fell apart in a pretty consistent pattern. The photos in this book were taken when the homes were in this falling-apart condition.  We have similar photos of the two homes I mention ("house on the hill" being more similar in design to the SW Minnesota homes in this book). There are a few photos included of select homes in their "prime", with family members included.

Much enjoyed, including the 38-page text beginning chapter that provides good background on the arrival of the settlers and the construction of these homes.

I'm glad to own this.

An Iowa Album - A Photographic History, 1860-1920 (Mary Bennett, 1990)

(319 pages)

I have several books about Iowa that were given to me by my parents - back in the days when I told my mom that was the preferred gift when she inquired about Christmas presents.  This is one of them,

And it was a joy to parse through.  The years 1860-1920, at least the latter half, were years through which my great-grandparents and grandparents passed - and many of the photographs and descriptive text resonate closely to what little I picked up from them about those early years.  Also resonates with the photos and text in the marvelous 1976 St. Joseph Parish history book that my parents did so much to put together.

I was born in 1956, and was struck by how close in time that birth-year was to the events and lifestyle in the latter part of this book. Nearly 70 years later, those events and lifestyle seem very far away indeed.

Early settlers; rapid growth; evolution of agricultural techniques; nicer homes; arrival of railroads; nascent automobile presence; the towns grow up.

The book is focused on photography, and has interesting information about available methods and equipment throughout the period.

Much enjoyed reading, and I will continue to page through this one.   

Times Remembered - Algona: 1854-2004 (2003)

(163 pages)

This was a gift from my parents received shortly after the book was released.

It isn't a history book per se; it includes numerous vignettes extending across the named years. 

Useful reminder of conditions being pretty primitive in northern Iowa in the pre-Civil War period. I see that the railroad ("The Milwaukee Railroad" - same line on which I commuted from Glenview to downtown Chicago in the early 1980s) first reached Algona in 1870.

Carnegie library.

For my taste, a bit too much of the content is one-pagers about various retail establishments - maybe this is what the Algona Upper Des Moines was familiar with?  Hutzell's, Hub, Chrischilles, etc.

Easy read, worth the brief time required.

Curlew: Home - Essays & a Journey Back (Tom Montag, 2001)

Some years ago - when Mom asked what I'd like for a Christmas gift - I'd ask each year for a book about Iowa stuff.  I received these for several years, recently located them in a storage box, and now am going these gift books.

I do recall paging through Montag's book, and mostly remembering that it was the only written description of corn shelling that I could ever recall encountering - and that it wasn't a bad description, though his writing was overwrought when it came to describing how the physical labor part feels (admittedly that kind of labor does feel good or rewarding or something).  Plus he was just a once or twice per year corn sheller guy - not at the level of we all-day every-day every-summer (and sometimes in other seasons) experts.

What I didn't recall was the incredible extent to which Montag's experiences overlapped with ours. He's about 10 years older, and they were renters at the time this was written - so as I recall it our setting was a bit more "modern" in some significant ways. But nonetheless so much of this is right on target. (He does spend some time trying to sort out why he wanted to become a poet - less interested in that but ok that's his prerogative.)

Curlew is a tiny town about 30 miles or so pretty much straight west of St. Joe. Whereas we saw the West Bend elevator from the east, he was looking at it from the west.  And wandering into Algona, Humboldt, West Bend, Emmetsburg etc - all the familiar towns.

But mostly he was on the farm.

Stuff that sounded pretty familiar:

He's the oldest of nine children.

p. 18 - reading Snowbound

p. 73 - parents using a wagon hoist to lift up the front end of a wagon (no hydraulic hoist) - oats into elevator to be lifted into the bin - there were parts of this that a young kid could help with. (Dropping the pin into a wagon tongue is my very earliest memory of "helping" with farm work.  Ernest J. couldn't turn around far enough to see exactly where he was backing up.)

p. 82 - Sunday bicycle ride "around the block" (meaning the four miles around the section)

p. 87 - Sunday making a fire and roasting hot dogs; marshmallows

p. 89 - narrow highway 18, with curbs (just like 169)

p. 94 - their telephone ring was two shorts and a long (I think ours was the reverse)

p. 102 - talking about the Curlew centennial history book of 1984 (did they use St. Joe (1976) as a model?

p. 112 - oldtimers reminisce about the winter of 1936

p. 116 - hauling coal, delivering it through a little basement window

p. 136 - wringer washer in the cellar (it's not a "basement")

p. 140 - throwing baseball against the front of the barn, "playing catch with myself"

p. 146 - garbage pail in the "entryway" - this is where they always enter the house, it faces east

p. 149 - playing pinochle and 500; a sister bids nine diamonds

p. 150 - they buy The Book of Knowledge; also Encyclopedia Brittanica

p. 167 - visiting the farmstead, pretty much everything gone.  Some trees soughing.  Decaying corn crib.

p. 183 - he reads The Kid Who Batted 1.000

p. 217 - walking beans for the neighbors; cockleburrs; washing up in a pan placed on the porch outside their house

p. 218 - walking around the former farmstead again - "it's all gone, and nothing is gone"

p. 222 - BB guns; shooting a car window

p. 227 - the corn shelling description.  The sheller man arrives early. "He gets so much per bushel shelled and so much per bushel hauled." He remembers the sheller man being very particular ("always insists upon doing this part of the job himself") about linking the chains of the drag sections - EMG the same, this was an important ritual at the start of every set. "Dinner is a big meal" - sitting a spell in the shade after.  Etc.

p. 241 - rotary hoeing the corn; the blade picks up rocks

[He several times mentions the rock pile - a place to play, a place where rocks were brought in from the field, of course.]

p. 259 - butchering chickens; hot water for scalding feathers, barrel with newspapers for fire to singe off hairs

p. 287 - killing rats (after moving the feeder)

p. 307 - visiting the cemetery; a deceased sibling

p. 311 - "I don't want the sadness of the loss to be what is remembered.  I want to remember the joy of those years . . ."

Thanks, Mom & Dad!

Retracing My Footsteps in World War II (Vernon Hohenberger)

The author had given a copy of this book to my parents some years ago; I had paged through it on St. Joe visits, and was pleased to be able to take this from the St. Joe house when we siblings "divided out" things in April 2023.

It's autographed by the author!  Vernon Hohenberger farmed near us in the Luverne/Livermore area though - since he wasn't Catholic - we didn't see him regularly - in fact, very seldom.  I have a dim recall of a very pleasant human being.

The book is fascinating. Partly because I read so few, if any, first-person accounts of the war.

Hohenberger's path overlapped geographically with that of our uncle, Irvin Bormann - North Africa and Italy. But a bit earlier in time (and later). Unlike Irvin, Hohenberger survived Italy and ended up with duty elsewhere after the fall of Rome.

He belonged to the famous 34th Infantry Division - "Red Bull" - an incredibly long combat history - at page 100 he mentions 33 months overseas. Red Bull division is prominent in all the histories of the European theater in WWII.

p. 28 - vivid memories of getting into a theater to see "White Christmas" prior to getting shipped toward N. Africa.

p. 35 - artillery experiences, here in N. Africa - reminds of Irvin's artillery descriptions.

p. 45 - his description of N. Africa "Arab" scenes - again, reminds of Irvin's.

p. 47 - he mentions the soon-to-be-famous 100th Infantry - this is the successful battalion of mostly Japanese-American soldiers mostly from Hawaii - they come up later in his story - Michener covered this in his "Hawaii" novel.

p. 50 - landing at Salerno (Irvin at Naples). I believe this was autumn 1943, prior to Irvin's arrival.

p. 53 - Volturno River - just a terrible area. Lots of detail in ensuing pages about fighting around Rapido River, Cassino. Mentions Christmas 1953.  Irvin killed in action February 1, 1944.  Monte Cassino eventually bombed February 15, 1944.

Additional discussion of finally getting furloughed and a visit home; war wrapping up by the time his overdue leave was expiring - ended up with some duty with occupation troops.

Stories of getting back into civilian life - including a short time working at a store owned by Cliff and Mary Baker (yes, Uncle Daryl's parents).

This is a quick and excellent read.

Farmall Century 1923-2023 - The Evolution of Red Tractors in the Golden Age of International Harvester (Lee Klancher), 2023)

I very much enjoyed routine tractor work - whether in the field or driving the corn sheller from job to job - during my on-the-farm days - from the late 1960s through 1979.  But I definitely was not the gearhead type and remain not-knowledgeable about pretty much anything mechanical, including tractors.

Yet - my dad's 2022 death at age 93 and the subsequent auctioning of all of the farm goods triggered a higher degree of interest for this kind of thing, or nostalgia, or whatever it is.  I'm enjoying seeing various social media feeds and photos of old days tractors. (Dad owned Farmalls until a John Deere 4020 showed up later - so we supported Farmall.)

So I bought this book - thinking it was more of a coffee table item but it turns out that there also is a great deal of interesting history. Much enjoyed.

The foreword portion was captivating - it included a passage about farmers' proclivity for tinkering with their machines - dad certainly did this with the corn sheller, to the point where Charlie put together a mock patent office filing going through his innovations.

The early portion of the book is dedicated to the development of reapers and the like - tractors aren't even on the scene. This part is more interesting to me than lots of the later tractor detail - I never understood very well what was involved in the "threshing" crews that my parents and grandparents talked about; let alone the incredible amount of labor to get anything done during the phases prior to that.  It's easy to see how mechanization depopulated the rural areas.

McCormick family, competitors, reaper wars, early 20th century antitrust, lots of patent litigation, Rockefeller involvement, branding, educating consumers.

Interesting characters - including a John Steward wounded at Vicksburg, started out with John Wesley Powell's second Grand Canyon expedition (1871). Abraham Lincoln hired one of the attorneys involved in the reaper patent litigation for some of his own matters.  

Later hiring a consumer goods artist to design the attractive "letter series" Farmalls - these were the Ms and Super Ms that we were familiar with (followed by the "number series" tractors, such as our 400 diesel). Now that I think about it and see the photos - the design was pretty cool! Designer even put together art-deco type (or was it midcentury modern?) dealership buildings, a few of which have survived.

Replacing horses - early tractors with not much more power than a couple horses. A huge market.

Steam, kerosene, gasoline, diesel, etc.

Lots of pulley work in the early going.  Development of the PTO (something I took for granted).

Did not realize how many Fordson tractors were sold through Ford - it was a great little machine, sold at a low price and a genuine threat to IH (though priced so low that this probably contributed to Ford shifting away from it).

Eventually we get to the F-20, M and then the larger tractors.

I had no idea how much IH was involved in WWII.

Great photography throughout - this will sit on the coffee table for easy access.

Storm Lake - A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper (Art Cullen, 2018)

(317 pages)

Author is my brother-in-law - who won Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in April 2017 - obviously quite an achievement.  This leads to book opportunities with top publishing houses - they eventually settle on Viking (which the frontispiece tells me is an "imprint of Penguin Random House") i.e. a real deal.

The guy can write.

I cannot evaluate the book in any objective manner (of course I'm not a professional (or even amateur) reviewer anyway so who cares - I keep this website as a memory aid anyway).  Some reasons why an objective evaluation is impossible:

• There are quite a few family references interspersed throughout - I very much enjoy the way they are handled.  Especially the interactions with my dad - which are fairly significant to the exposition - Art captures him quite well!  These passages are highly interesting to me.

• Then there are all of the Iowa references, including many from the 1960s or 1970s - author's path has more overlap with mine than I had realized - again, highly interesting to me.

• I came to the book with a decent level of familiarity with Storm Lake's unique demographics and challenges (and opportunities) - so pretty well versed on that part (meaning I read through these pages pretty quickly).

For readers who pick this up "cold" - I expect there's quite a bit to learn via the Storm Lake story - this at a time when immigration issues are front and center - quite a few positive aspects here.  Also for this group of "cold" readers - I hope they can relate somewhat to the story elements revolving around the family.  Hard to know.

Useful discussions of the evolution of agriculture and resulting social changes.

Perhaps my main reaction:  deeply grateful that someone with actual writing skills has chronicled a few of the pieces of our family's story line.  That is highly valuable to me.

Art & Dolores have a lot to be proud of.

A Good Day's Work - an Iowa Farm in the Great Depression (Dwight W. Hoover, 2007)

Another very interesting read centered in rural Iowa in the Depression. Unusual that two books like this (the second being "Little Heathens - summarized here) were published about the same time. Like "Little Heathens," this one had great reviews in the Wall Street Journal and nytimes.com.

I was looking forward to reading this quite a bit, but in the end I must say I liked "Little Heathens" better. This guy was just a bit too clinical. Plus he spent lots of time discussing livestock, 4H and other topics to which I had very limited exposure.

That being said, I much enjoyed the book. The author is writing about a very different time, but much of the talk is familiar and certainly triggers recollections of conversations I heard growing up. As with "Little Heathens," it is striking how rapidly the world of agriculture changed in a very short window of time. This is not a new insight, but the pace of agricultural change for centuries was minimal, then things picked up moving into the 20th century, now an entirely different world . . .

Little Heathens - Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm during the Great Depression (Mildred Armstrong Kalish, 2007)

This book had very strong reviews in the Wall Street Journal and nytimes.com. So I gave it a try. And liked it quite a bit.

As the title spells out in detail, the author grew up on an Iowa farm in the 1930s. She became an English professor and certainly has both an excellent memory and a good writing style.

Here in 2007, stories of a kid growing up in the Depression seem to describe a long-lost era. My major take-away from the book was the similarities - not the differences - between the author's world and the world in which I grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It actually only was 30 years prior to my own childhood.

I'm guessing the similarities arise because my world was populated by characters who were adults in the 1930s - my grandparents and their peer group - and another set of characters - my parents etc. - who were shaped by preceding generation. So when this author talks about saving everything - down to pieces of string and bits of foil - I can relate. And when she describes the advice from her elders about never wasting time and the folly of idleness - I can relate. And the gardening stories. And the respect for elders. Also little things like the description of the smell of the green walnuts they harvested.

Of course there have been big changes in mechanization - both in the ag operations and in the farm house. And these have drastically altered the daily routine as described by the author. But much of the underlying attitude persisted.

The Golden Rule Challenge (George Lobdell, 2004)

History of POW camp in upper Midwest, mostly Algona.  Ends with discussion of Edward Kaib and crèche.  Christmas gift from EMG and HSG. Read at La Camarilla.