Bücher der Reihe Midwest Reflections

In 1955, inspired by a televised automobile advertisement, twelve-year-old Sara Hellerud and her twin sister Susie took up dancing. Like the pair of huckstering ballerinas who sailed over the Buick, they vaulted over milk cans and barbed wire. The TV dancers had provided an irresistible contrast to the workaday world of their family's dairy farm in Polk County, Wisconsin. This and other fantasies shared by the twins enabled them to dance through a tense childhood and adolescence. From the vantage of middle-age, Sara recalls her early years with pride and humor. She also explores the process through which the twins unraveled their symbiotic, almost merged, identity to become independent young women eager to investigate the wider world.

In this sometimes startlingly candid account, Kathleen Ridder explores the passions that have motivated her in constructing and pursuing a life of community service and personal accomplishment.

The world turned upside down for city-bred Marjorie Douglas when, in 1943, her young husband moved her and their baby, Anne, from suburban St. Paul to a western Minnesota stock ranch to help his parents stave off financial disaster. With wit and wisdom Douglas's memoir describes a Midwestern way of life of 50 years ago.

Packinghouse Daughter merges personal memoir and public history to tell a compelling story about family loyalty, small-town life, and working-class values in the face of a violent labor strike in 1959. The daughter of a Wilson & Company packinghouse worker, Cheri Register recalls the meatpackers' strike that devastated and divided her hometown of Albert Lea, Minnesota.

A humane and humorous collection of stories chronicling the work of a country doctor practicing in the remote north woods.

"My grandmother, Mae Kirwin, scared me." With that disturbing, distant memory, mystery novelist Mary Logue begins her exploration of the life of her mother's mother, who died more than thirty years ago.Mae McNally Kirwin was born in 1894 in Chokio, a small prairie community in western Minnesota. In 1926, the sudden death of her husband left Mae to support herself and her five children. These facts were well known, but for Logue, they were not enough. Determined to get to know her grandmother better, Logue sets out to assemble the bits and pieces of her grandmother's life. Along the way, Logue takes the reader-and herself-on a journey of discovery. Digging through forgotten bank records, old newspapers, handwritten census forms, family documents, and faded recipes, she pieces together the past. In the process, she tells a much larger story-that of a community, a way of life, a family, and a single woman's struggle to survive in a world that is both harsh and richly rewarding.

In twenty-one interwoven stories, author Robert Amerson re-creates life on his family's 160-acre farm in the remote Hidewood Hills of eastern South Dakota from 1934 to 1942. Each story, told from the perspective of a family member or farmer neighbor, captures the moods, sounds, sights, and relationships of these rural Americans at a time of tremendous change.Nine-year-old Robert Amerson is a dreamer fascinated by books, airplanes, and cars. As he grows older, he becomes impatient with old-fashioned horse farming, and he struggles to balance his responsibilities to the farm with the attractions of high school and life in town. His father Clarence, a master at making do, labors unceasingly but never seems to get ahead. His mother Bernice, who fights off dark emotions along with frustration at not "having it nice," concentrates her energy on getting her children an education.In this time of Depression-related hardships, edging toward the eve of World War II, co-operation and hard work are key to the survival of small farms. Neighbors join together to butcher hogs, run the one-room school, build roads, thresh grain, and celebrate the landmarks of their lives. They turn out, without fail, to help a family suffering a disaster-filled summer. And they work hard for the means to better their lives with new tractors, gas-powered washing machines, indoor bathrooms, wells that produce good drinking water - and, eventually, rural electrification and milking machines. In From the Hidewood, Amerson has written far more than an "I remember when" account. In exquisite detail, he portrays a particular moment in time with a power that could help many readers better understand their own pasts.

Writer Marjorie Douglas recalls her idyllic, fun-filled summer days on Crane Island in Lake Minnetonka in the 1920s when she and her two brothers spent long hours swimming, diving off the dock and from the ten-foot-high tower, slipping out of the house after dark for excursions with their friends, and exploring the island from end to end.

In 1974, lured by good wages, a 22-year-old African American college student from suburban Minneapolis started work as a pipefitter trainee for Minnegasco, a Minnesota natural-gas utility. Peggie Samples was one of the first four women hired by the company into non-secretarial jobs after the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. On the job, she and her beautiful blond friend Sonny met men who were hostile, men who were helpful, and men who were simply flummoxed to find "girls" in their midst. "S'long as a guy does his job," one told her, "it don't matter ta me if he's a gal."This memoir is the sometimes hilarious story of how they learned to work together-and what they all learned about stereotypes.