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Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
Bantam
June 2007
On Sale: May 29, 2007
304 pages
ISBN: 0553804952
EAN: 9780553804959
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.”
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