Little Heathens

Perhaps no one was more surprised than Mildred Armstrong Kalish when her memoir of Iowa farm life became a bestseller, and then appeared among the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2007. Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression began as stories Kalish spun from her past to amuse her granddaughter. She wrote them down, imagining they would go no further than her own family. But then they did, and at age eighty-five, Kalish landed in the literary limelight. Her book transports readers to 1930s rural Iowa; much that occurs is unsurprising: haying, milking, planting, and a good-deal of church-going. What is surprising is the amount of joy and gratitude Kalish expresses about a childhood defined largely by hard work and austerity.

Kalish begins her narrative when her life takes a decisive turn at age five. Her father is banished from the family “forever for some transgression that was not to be disclosed to us children.” Her grandparents, rather severe folk, step in. They’ve retired from a successful farming career to the small town of Garrison but still own four farms. Mildred Armstrong, her younger sister, two brothers, and mother are settled into the smallest of these. The house has no electricity or plumbing, and the barn is ramshackle. Nevertheless, the Armstrongs keep livestock, grow crops, can produce, and generally enjoy a large variety of wholesome foods. In fact, Depression-era scarcity hardly impacts the family due to their self-sufficiency, which they achieve cooperatively with Mildred’s aunt and uncle, who farm across the road.

Mildred’s elementary years are divided between town and country living. During the harsh winter, her family migrates to the large home of her grandparents, where they all suffer the situation with forbearance. The grandparents (who “never quite made it into the twentieth century”) consider their daughter’s “little heathens,” as Grandma calls them, lacking in proper dress, speech, and overall behavior. The day’s events, from waking to bedtime, adhere to a rigid time schedule. Frugality factors into the household’s many rules, including no between meal snacks and no food remaining on plates. Thrifty to an extreme, the grandparents spend money only on “tea, sugar, salt, white flour, cloth, and kerosene.”



There are some redeeming features about town life. Three blocks from the grandparent’s house lives Aunt Belle, an energetic, affable “spinster” who delights Mildred with her homemade candies, word games, and four-foot high Victrola. Thanksgiving dinner also briefly transforms the grandparent’s austere home. Cultivating and gathering the holiday foodstuffs begins months ahead in the country, and culminates in a lavish meal served on Grandma’s best china.

In mid-May, when town school ends, Mildred and her siblings are set free on the farm again. Their mother’s loose supervision allows them to dress as they like, eat whenever they’re hungry, and generally create their own daily structure. The young children have many chores, like gardening, caring for the livestock, and preparing meals, but they tend to them as they see fit, which is usually timely enough. In September, the country school year begins. Indifferent as she is about an orderly household, Mildred’s mother demands that her children do all their homework and study music. Mildred enjoys school and thrives there.

In the second part of the book, Kalish’s narrative surveys the many aspects of 1930s rural culture that contributed to “building character.” In the days before Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification initiative, Mildred’s family washes their laundry by hand. With only a wood-burning stove, they devote much of their energies to gathering wood. Milk-separating is one of the children’s more onerous daily chores. It involves cranking fresh milk into a large contraption, which then must be disassembled to clean its forty-some parts. Harvesting hay is, in the author’s words, “sheer hell for everyone,” and as such, strengthens character a great deal.



But character is not built by hard labor alone. The family’s older generation spouts countless homespun aphorisms, such as “waste not, want not,” to reinforce the values of thrift and industry. In Grandpa’s library, Mildred relishes books by the likes of Ben Franklin, which endorse the virtues of honesty and responsibility. Of course, the Bible and religion figure prominently in the family’s moral edification. Like most of Garrison’s upstanding citizens, Mildred’s family is Methodist. Their church favors humility and sacrifice, frowning on emotional displays, including embraces—thus the phrase, “hearty-handshake” Methodists.

Another cornerstone of a solid character is stoicism. In Mildred’s farming community, succumbing to illness or injury, unless life threatening, suggests moral weakness. Families only reluctantly seek professional medical aid, preferring to rely on traditional home remedies, many of which come from a thick book entitled People’s Home Library. Kalish recalls using spiderwebs as bandages, a self-reliant but also penny-wise trick. Indeed, her book includes a full chapter on her family’s thrifty ways and means, underscoring the cultural reverence for “making do.”

The book’s final two parts recount the simple, but often exhilarating pleasures of country life. Kalish’s recollections of organized pastimes include community box socials (involving “auctioning off homemade meals”), exchanging May baskets with friends, and harvesting the garden. Left to their own devices, Mildred and her peers invent amusements: tipping outhouses; digging a hole to China; clandestinely riding unbroken colts; taming raccoons; and sliding down the frozen creek during a blizzard. For Mildred, just walking barefoot in the grass thrills her senses. As both the subject of blissful memories and the object of farm labor, food looms large in the book, and Kalish includes many family recipes.



Kalish eventually left Iowa. At age twenty-one, she joined the US Coast Guard Women’s Reserve, married Harry Kalish, and then became an English professor. In a 2008 interview, Kalish remarked, “One thing I learned in teaching exposition is that you never give a generality without supporting it with detail.” Her book abounds with details supporting its themes of thrift, hard work, and self-reliance. But they also corroborate her introductory observation, “It was quite a romp.”