Book #55: Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish

While I was in Ithaca, I was telling my grandma about the books I was reading and she recommended a few to me as well. This was one of them. My mom also told me about it, and it sounded cute and intriguing enough that I checked it out from the library at the same time as all of those Georgette Heyer books. It's a memoir of Mildred Kalish's time growing up in rural Iowa during the Great Depression, when she was a young girl. She details all of the things they had to do in their everyday life, all of which is fascinating because of how time intensive and pioneer-ish it all sounds to us living our cushy modern life today. It's been probably a decade since I last read Little House on the Prairie (and reading this makes me want to revisit them . . . maybe I will!), but it's amazing how much this book reminded me of the lifestyle that the pioneers had to live, bringing most of their food in from off their farm and living very much by all of their own self-sufficiency. And yet this was nearly a century later! Mildred Kalish is (probably) still alive today! My grandpa grew up on a farm in Montana and had a life very similar to this--and it's no wonder that there is a huge generational difference in how they see things and how people who have grown up worlds away from them in terms of work expectations see things.

Kalish makes it very clear (by repeating over and over again, "Can you imagine young children doing this today?") that modern kids and people are totally spoiled and not at all held up to the same standards of work ethic and expectations that they were back then. (And it's true--I CAN'T imagine a five-year-old today being handed a pig's head and told to clean it and help make the headcheese out of it.) I like how she tries hard to represent the good and the bad about their lives then, and she very honestly writes about her feelings about her childhood as she's considered it and grown older (both positive and negative). She writes at the end that she was probably sugarcoating a lot of stuff about her childhood, but that she really does remember a lot of it as a very free, independent, and wonderful time, despite the hardships that she wasn't even aware of until she was older and looked back on her experiences.

I was a little bit bored by some of the chapters, particularly when she started including all of her family's old recipes for things (although I can understand her desires to include them). I wished she'd given more details and stories about her family--she hardly ever even named her brothers and sister and when she wrote about them it was always just in passing. I didn't really have the sense of what her siblings were like and they obviously featured a lot in her adventures growing up and I wanted to know more about them. I feel like it would have been a more compelling story if there had been a better balance of personal stories and explanation of what Life Was Like Back Then, which is what the book seemed to lean heavily towards.