Mildred Kalish's "Little Heathens"

I like social history. That was actually my major field of study during my college years. While I was growing up everyone thought I would have been best suited to have lived during the wagon train era in the 1840s, or as a member of the "Little House" family.

Mildred Kalish has documented her childhood during the depression years on a farm and in a small town in northeast Iowa. That's an era in American social history that has not been over-explored, and I think it is a pivotal era. The depression shaped the values of those who grew up in that period. I could see so many traits familiar from my mother and her Iowa family roots in so many of the stories that Kalish tells.

Kalish recounts family stories about thrift, using everything without any waste, family closeness, discipline, modesty, the farm work ethic, social life and entertainment, pets that very probably will end up on the dining room table some day, one room school house education, and the list of interesting topics goes on and on.

This is a well written memoir that is devoid of sentimentality and is highly descriptive. When you are done reading you'll hold the Urmy family in admiration and have a much better understanding of the Iowa farm experience in the 1930s.

Liz Nichols