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Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression Paperback – April 29, 2008
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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.”
- Print length292 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBantam
- Publication dateApril 29, 2008
- Dimensions5.47 x 0.68 x 8.21 inches
- ISBN-100553384244
- ISBN-13978-0553384246
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Little Heathens is an enchanting but thoroughly unsentimental look at rural life in the Great Depression. In clear clean prose we are offered the grit, struggle, and also the joy of hard work on a farm. I cherish this book for its quite naked honesty and quiet lyricism about a time which makes our current problems nearly childish. This is a fine book.”—Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall
“Now that cell phones are a way of life, you won’t find a better way to participate in the Good Old Days. Whether you are of farm origins or not, Little Heathens is a bit of history begging to be borrowed. Like a neighborly cup of sugar, it will sweeten your modern-day life.”—MaryJane Butters, author of MaryJane’s Ideabook, Cookbook, Lifebook for the Farmgirl In All Of Us
“Using this book alone, one could reconstruct, with glorious exactness, a lost time and place. Mildred Kalish has a novelist's eye for detail and a beautiful understanding of what the gestures of daily life mean. A lovely, wise, transporting memoir.”—Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories
"Not only trustworthy and useful, but also polished by real, rare happiness. It is a very good book, indeed. In fact, it's averyveryverygoodbook."—New York Times Book Review
"Unpretentious yet deeply intelligent ... [Little Heathens] radiates the joy of a vanished way of life.... In prose that never yields to mawkish sentimentality, Kalish details the roles of family, religion, thrift, and education in her upbringing."–Booklist
"Not only trustworthy and useful, but also polished by real, rare happiness. It is a very good book, indeed. In fact, it's averyveryverygoodbook."—Elizabeth Gilbert, The New York Times Book Review
"Little Heathens made me ache for my own Depression-era Grandma, with her hand-cranked clothes wringer and her North Dakotan speech tut-tutting.... This is a book to awaken your family's own half-remembered stories - or better, to send you back to your elders to scour up your own.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Foreground
My childhood came to a virtual halt when I was around five years old. That was when my grandfather banished my father from our lives forever for some transgression that was not to be disclosed to us children, though we overheard whispered references to bankruptcy, bootlegging, and jail time. His name was never again spoken in our presence; he just abruptly disappeared from our lives. The shame and disgrace that enveloped our family as a result of these events, along with the ensuing divorce, just about destroyed my mother. Is it possible today to make anyone understand the harsh judgment of such failures in the late 1920's? Throughout my entire life, whenever I was asked about my father, I always said that he was dead. When he actually died I never knew.
So it was that Grandma and Grandpa chose to make our family of five--Mama, my ten-year-old brother Jack, my eight-year-old brother John, my one-year-old sister Avis, and me--their responsibility. They decided to settle us on the smallest of Grandpa's four farms, which was located about three miles from the village of Garrison, where they had retired after a lifetime of farming. However, because the fierce blizzards and subzero temperatures of Iowa winters made it hazardous to walk to the one-room rural school we would be attending, it had been arranged that we would live with Grandma and Grandpa in Garrison and attend school there from January until the school year ended in mid-May. At that time our family would move out to the farm. Each year from then on, we went to school in the country from September until Christmas, then moved back to Garrison and finished the school year in town.
Our new life began when we arrived at Grandma and Grandpa's on a cold winter day in February. The house we moved into that day was a large, substantial structure. It was located about seven miles from Vinton, the seat of Benton County. Grandpa was born, raised, married, and buried all within an eight-mile radius of Garrison and Yankee Grove, the wooded area where his parents had settled as pioneers.
Though the house we shared boasted eight large rooms, suggesting that we had lots of space and privacy, in fact, all seven of us spent most of our waking hours confined to the living room and the kitchen because they were the only rooms that were heated. The frigid upstairs bedrooms were rarely used except for sleeping. The conditions under which we lived were a perfect demonstration of the wisdom of Kahlil Gibran's observation: "Let there be spaces in your togetherness."
Grandpa and Grandma must have had some unspoken, perhaps even unrecognized, resentment at having toiled all their lives raising their own family, only to be confronted with the inescapable fact that now, retired at last, they had to do the whole thing all over again and raise their daughter's "spawn," as Grandma often referred to us. And all of this was happening at the worst possible time, during the Depression.
All three generations suffered. We kids were under the constant surveillance of Grandma and Grandpa, who were critical of how we spent our days, how we spoke and dressed, and how we behaved. (In a good many ways, they never quite made it into the twentieth century.) Suddenly we were subjected to a completely new set of rules, which governed every aspect of our lives. The whole family had to go to bed at a set time every night and get up at a set time every morning. We all had to be fully dressed for the day before we ate breakfast. We all had to sit down at a properly set table three times a day, and we all had to eat what was served on that table. Generally Grandpa would choose the menu for breakfast because he was the first one up. If he decided he wanted oatmeal, then everyone ate oatmeal; if he decided he wanted pancakes, then everyone ate pancakes; whether he selected sorghum, honey, or molasses as the sweetener, all were required to accept his choice. We were allowed no say in the matter.
In addition, to reinforce the principle of "Waste not, want not," we were required to eat everything on our plates. If we didn't, the food was set aside and served to us at the next meal. Generally, unless it was a Saturday and we had cousins visiting, there was no eating between meals.
Through this regimentation, the austere habits that Grandma and Grandpa had adopted and lived by for decades were imposed on us with a vengeance. And we often resented their severity. To be fair, I must note that it was those habits that made it possible for them to acquire four debt-free farms by the time we came to live with them. Now, there's an achievement not to be overlooked.
Nonetheless, Grandma and Grandpa were what the locals called "land-poor"--people who owned a lot of land but had very little money. And even what little they had they tried to save. The only things they spent money on were tea, coffee, sugar, salt, white flour, cloth, and kerosene.
Years later I came to understand that there was a good reason for them to want to save money. They needed it to pay the taxes on their farms, three of which they had rented out to the families of their daughters. Due to the deepening Depression, they could never be sure if the rent would actually be paid. If the rent did not come in, there would be no money to pay the taxes and the farms would be lost. We children sensed, but could not really understand, the awful threat of that disastrous economy. I had to grow to adulthood before I could even begin to comprehend the impact of what was happening in those days--the disappearance of money and jobs, the loss of machinery and farms, the bank failures that took people's entire savings.
Though we didn't understand them, we children were seldom protected from the harsh realities of the period, and we certainly sensed that something terrible was happening. Indelibly stamped in my memory is the scene in my Aunt Hazel and Uncle Ernest's farm kitchen one wintry March morning when I was perhaps six years old. There I entered to find all the stalwart adults of my world--Grandma, Grandpa, Mama, my aunt and uncle--still and wordless as statues. It was clear that they had been crying. I had never seen adults cry. I didn't know they could cry. I was struck mute with a fear that grabbed me right in the guts. Though I was given no explanation at the time, in the days that followed I overheard enough to realize that Grandpa's brother and sister had each lost their farm, all of their machinery and all of their livestock, for reasons that were unfathomable to me. What can a child know of vast economic forces operating on a global level? I was stunned and afraid.
Grandma and Grandpa's lives were changed forever by the plunging economy. It has taken me a lifetime to realize that the Depression and its consequent tragedies were nearly as incomprehensible to the adults as they were to us children. Since they could not understand what was happening in the world, how could they explain the situation to us? Suddenly, unexpectedly, a family of five was now the responsibility of two old people who had thought they were heading into a comfortable, if frugal, retirement. They must have been scared to death.
In Garrison, then, we children were required to adhere to the rigid routines set down for us by Grandma and Grandpa. But our lives changed radically when the school year ended around mid-May, for that was when we left Garrison for the country. The move to the country provided our little family with a welcome separation from our grandparents, and them with a no doubt equally welcome respite from us.
The farm we lived on was directly across the road from the farm where Mama's sister, Aunt Hazel, her husband, Uncle Ernest, and their three sons lived. Unusual in Iowa, this proximity meant that there was much sharing and interaction between the two families. Feeling equally at home at both places, we cousins shared pets, leisure time, food, and chores. Indeed, the two properties were treated as one cooperative, if complicated, venture, though we maintained strictly separate households for eating, sleeping, and gardening. Each farm had its advantages. Aunt Hazel and Uncle Ernest's farm was equipped with all the necessary implements, the buildings were properly maintained, and the livestock were well housed in winter and in summer; but it had insufficient pastureland. Our place was older, and the house, the sheep shed, and the chicken houses were the only buildings habitable the year round. The ancient, though picturesque, barn had been allowed to fall into a state of disrepair, and provided proper shelter for horses, calves, chickens, ducks, and geese only during the mild months of summer and fall. However, the permanent and best pastures were on our side of the road.
Grandma and Grandpa visited the farms frequently in their very noisy Buick bringing food, household necessities, and goodies. On these visits they would stay the day, lending a hand wherever help was needed, and then return to their home in the evening. They did this for all four of their daughters and their families.
It is no exaggeration to say that Grandpa and Grandma were about as compatible as two people could possibly be. They seldom argued; they went everywhere and did everything together. However, there was one event--involving a gun--that must be chronicled, an event that was revived, relived, and recounted repeatedly during the time our family lived with them. It happened when they were young parents and lived on the farm that later came to be occupied by Aunt Hazel and Uncle Ernest. In those days guns were a part of farm life. Women as well as men learned to shoot. Every family owned at least three guns: a .22 rifle, and ten- and twelve-gauge shotguns. From early childhood we were taught to respect and care for guns. "The most dangerous gun," we were cautioned, "is the one that isn't loaded." That expression was drilled into us for reasons you will soon understand. One winter day Grandpa was in the kitchen cleaning his guns and Grandma was upstairs making beds. Grandpa accidentally discharged his "unloaded" gun. Grandma started screaming. Grandpa ran from the kitchen and started running up the steep stairs just as Grandma started to run down. They slammed into each other on the landing at the right-angled turn of the stairs, connecting with such force that they knocked each other to the floor, whereupon, in their panic, they began to shout at each other. No matter how many times they told the story, they still couldn't get over the fact that they had erupted in such outbursts.
"Why did you yell?" Grandpa would ask Grandma at the conclusion of yet another retelling of the event.
"I yelled because I thought you had shot yourself. Why did you yell?"
"I yelled because I thought that I had shot you!"
They rehearsed this frightening event so often and vividly that I sometimes believed I was there to witness the incident. They were never able to get beyond their fright for each other's well-being, nor were they ever able to see the burlesque humor in this event, which so entertained us grandchildren. Though there was a real possibility that the shot could have penetrated the ceiling and entered the bedroom, it turned out that it had lodged itself harmlessly in the doorsill between the kitchen and the living room. Curiously, Grandpa, who was so meticulous about everything, never
repaired that doorsill.
Our move to the farm when school let out meant that the rigidly ordered lives dictated by our grandparents were now governed by an entirely different set of expectations: our mother's. Even though we had many more chores and responsibilities such as taking care of the livestock, preparing meals, and planting and tending gardens, we actually felt freer on the farm than in Garrison. In important ways our lives were more our own, and Mama often addressed and treated us as if we were adults--if only because she needed us to be.
We four children were almost too much for our mother. To a surprising extent, she simply let us go our own ways. She didn't mind when we went to bed or rose in the morning, if it was not a school day. She didn't care what, when, or if we ate. She didn't object if, in my nightgown, I trotted out to the henhouse to gather a couple of eggs and then, still in my nightgown, cooked a fried egg breakfast and ate it sitting outside on the sunny cellar door with my favorite cat. She ignored the niceties of setting places at mealtimes. Instead, she simply placed the food and utensils in the middle of the table and let us serve ourselves.
Mama almost never made an attempt to serve a balanced meal. If she had just taken bread from the oven around the middle of the day, our noon meal would consist of freshly made bread, homemade butter, whole plum jam, and a huge pitcher of milk. If, in the garden, she noticed that the sweet corn was ready, we had nothing but buttered sweet corn for supper. Further, she didn't insist that we all eat at the table or that we all eat at the same time.
Of course, she did insist that we all do our assigned chores. Since it was obvious even to us children that it was necessary to meet our obligations to make the family operate, we seldom failed to do so, but we were allowed to create our own routines for our workdays--as did our mother, who had some very odd ideas about such matters. She marched to a different drummer, so to speak. Her priorities did not match those of most sensible people. One day she might iron or bake, even though the temperature had reached 95 degrees, on the grounds that she could not be made more uncomfortable than she already was. Yet the next day she might rise at dawn to start weeding in the garden because she liked the cool of the morning.
The real surprise is that Mama was an indifferent homemaker. She could make great soup and bake superb cakes and pies, but she could never cook meat nor fry potatoes to anyone's liking. She would either overcook or undercook, oversalt a dish or forget the salt altogether. At my brothers' urging I gradually began taking over the everyday cooking for the family when I was not much more than eight years old. I apparently inherited a natural affinity for cooking from Grandma and, rather than feeling burdened by the responsibility, I felt honored. Throughout my life, my culinary skills have been a significant asset.
With the wisdom of advancing age, I have lately come to believe that Mama acted as she did because she was crushed by the stigma of her broken home and overwhelmed by the never-ending burden of tending to and raising four active children. She coped the best she could, and certainly she had many gifts and talents. She loved being out-of-doors and could work for hours husking corn, shocking oats, and gardening. She had a remarkable rapport with animals, especially Grandpa's favorite, the horse. And she could play the piano and sing.
Product details
- Publisher : Bantam; Reprint edition (April 29, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 292 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0553384244
- ISBN-13 : 978-0553384246
- Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.47 x 0.68 x 8.21 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #360,811 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #64 in Midwest U.S. Biographies
- #1,007 in Women in History
- #5,008 in U.S. State & Local History
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

I was born on a farm near Garrison, Iowa, in Benton County on St. Patrick's Day in 1922.
My growing up was influenced by The Great Depression, by the self-reliance and work ethic of my mother's parents- themselves descendants of pioneers- who never quite made it into the 20th Century and by the remarkable challenges and the inestimable rewards of living a rural life where we children were expected to accept responsibilities beyond the ordinary.
From early on, I was eager to be self-supporting and independent.The summer I became thirteen I became the companion , cook and caretaker of a retired missionary; I served as a hired girl on two local farms; I earned an Elementary Teacher's Certificate from Iowa Stte Teacher's College at Cedar Falls.
I accepted the position as Governess in Yonkers, N.Y.
Joining the The United States Coast Guard Women's Reserve, I was sent for Radio Training to Miami University at Oxford, Ohio and on graduation I served at the Headquarters of the 5th Naval District in Norfolk, Virginia where I met and married fellow radio operator Harry Kalish.
Thanks to the G.I. Bill, we both furthered our education at the State University of Iowa.
We have 2 sons, 2 daughters-in-law (par excellence) amd 4 grandchildren.
I am an Emeritus Professor of English retired from Suffolk County Community College on Long Island. I have taught at the State University of Iowa at Iowa City, The State University of Missouri at Columbia, and at Adelphi in Garden City, NY.
My husband and I are residents of a retirement community in Cupertino, California.
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In Little Heathens, Mildred Armstrong Kalish shares what life was like for herself and her extended family. It is somewhat difficult to distinguish between the normal trials of endless farm work and the efforts needed to reuse and repurpose items because of deprivation of money and resources. “Thrown away” was a foreign concept during this time and thrift was the champion of the day. Kalish shares the many saving and “make-do” tricks that were common during the Depression and some that were uncommon. Many of those have fallen out of use, but are still handy to know and good examples of the resourcefulness of our predecessors.
Kalish lays her memories out forthrightly, not concealing or varnishing the stories. Many are humorous and several are gasp-worth. Children worked alongside adults learning by example and experience. Farm life required the whole family to pitch in. Chores were divided by age and gender, but not strictly. For example, Monday Wash Day was a very physical, all-day task for which preparations began on Sunday night. Children and adults wore the same set of clothes all week, and everyone participated in wash day. The need for everyone to work together is apparent in the book over and over again.
Kalish addresses the many aspects of life at that time as seen through the eyes of a child who was an active participant. She has an incredible memory for detail right down to how to catch, kill, and prepare a snapping turtle for consumption. She also discusses the social aspects of community inside and outside the family unit. Her life was unique in that she lived in town during the winter and on a farm during the growing season because of her family situation. Her life was very different in each place, but the expectations of a good work ethic and attitude never changed.
The author viewed the hardships of her childhood as instrumental in her many achievements later in life. From success as a “hired girl” to working her way through college to her happy marriage and career as a professor, Kalish gives credit to her family, especially her mother: “Mama’s ability to meet challenges head-on and with a positive attitude created in us kids a sense of confidence that there was a way to solve every problem—just find it.” Although her life was hard, it was not unhappy and she prizes the memories of her past. I enjoyed her writing style, learned from the information she shared, and relived some of my past as I have memories of my Depression-era parents handing down wise sayings and thrifty values. Well done, Mildred Armstrong Kalish!
But truth be told, LITTLE HEATHENS is not a great book. In saying that I don't believe I demean the book. For one thing, I don't believe the author intended it to be "great". Kalish comes across as a smart, industrious, and very decent woman, and her book is a detailed, readable, and relatively well-written (although at times somewhat cliched and over-written) account of what was a rather commonplace farm-based childhood in the 1930s. But that's not the stuff of greatness.
What is interesting to me is all the acclaim the book has received, as evidenced by preceding Amazon reviews and the fact that the New York Times saw fit to name it one of its notable non-fiction books of 2007. I can't help but think that for many readers the book strikes a chord of nostalgia and evokes a yearning (perhaps unconscious) for a simple and self-sufficient life. But the Iowa farmlife of Kalish's childhood entailed hard work and cooperation, and I doubt that many contemporary American families, except perhaps the few remaining farming/ranching families, are willing or able to work as hard as the families -- both adults and children -- did then. It also required a faith in the moral rectitude of one's lifestyle, and that that lifestyle secured one a favored place in God's universe, that is much less prevalent today than it was 75 years ago. Further, it was not very accommodating of those who did not share the same race, northern European heritage, or Protestant religion, or those who did not conform to a certain standard of behavior (witness the author's father who was permanently expelled from the family and cut off from his wife and children by the author's grandfather for reasons the author never learned). The brute fact of the matter is that the independent and insular world that Kalish describes was swept away by fascism, militarism, and World War II, and the following tides of history and technology and the sheer numbers of humans populating the planet. And, as was the title of another product of the Thirties, "You Can't Go Home Again."
I sense that Kalish is well aware of that point. But I also sense that many of her readers are not.







