Book Club/ June
‘Little Heathens’: Depression childhood offers lessons for today
When Millie Kalish wrote “Little Heathens,” a homespun, warm-hearted account of growing up on an Iowa farm during the Great Depression, the book turned into a runaway hit—and landed on best-seller lists.
That was the first surprise for Kalish, 87. The second surprise?
Only that the country she loves—the same one she absorbed intimately as a girl, served in the Coast Guard during World War II and bolstered as an educator for many years afterward— would sink into a deep recession that would make her no-frills book of stories, life lessons and country lore more timely and of-the-moment than anyone could have ever anticipated.
Good luck hasn’t always followed Mildred Armstrong Kalish —but it certainly has since 2007, when “Little Heathens” appeared.
The book won excellent reviews, praise from big-name writers such as Ted Kooser and Elizabeth Gilbert, and cultlike devotion from wide circles of fans.
The book, which is now available in paperback, is the June selection of The Buffalo News Book Club.
Kalish, who today lives with her husband, Harry, in Cupertino, Calif.—they recently celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary — told The News that the success of her book continues to surprise and delight her.
“Lo and behold, it’s become a best seller,” Kalish said, by phone from her home in a retirement community in the mountains 30 miles south of San Francisco. “All of a sudden, we get a life that is taking us back to those Depression days. I am getting lots of e-mail from younger readers now, I notice, saying that my book is helping them downsize their life. People are using it as a how-to manual.”
Kalish never imagined that sort of outcome when she began telling her grandchildren stories about her early years, in the 1930s, on a farm in rural Iowa.
After a while, the children would request “farm stories” anytime they saw her. Kalish began writing her material down in odd moments; as she writes, she stuffs her pages into two Ziploc bags that she hangs from the bulletin board inside her home.
“That was the working title of the book at first: ‘Grandma, Tell Me a Farm Story,’ ” said Kalish, who was born in Garrison, Iowa, in 1922.
Her motives in writing the book, she said, were simple.
“I’m not really a very interesting person, I don’t think. If you’ll notice, the book is about the time — it was the Depression — and the people I lived with. Their language, their fetishes, their eccentricities. I wanted very much to save that. It seemed to me it was something that ought to be saved — that it was disappearing.”
The result was a memoir that is big-hearted yet clear-eyed, sort of like “Little House on the Prairie” meets “Running With Scissors.” We see the Armstrong clan doing everything we imagine farm folks do, or at least did, back in the old days: making head cheese, slaughtering animals, haying, raising meat and growing vegetables and doing the—back-breakingly hard— routines of weekly laundry, baking, ironing and cleaning.
All that is there, in “Little Heathens,” but there is an edge to the book, as well; it doesn’t sheer away from the uncomfortable and less positive aspects of farm life in the 1930s. The title comes from the phrase that Kalish’s grandmother, an imposing woman, used to describe the children in the family. From the book’s very first sentences, in fact, the reader realizes that this will be a story that presents the difficult and unflattering moments as well as the happy ones:
“My childhood came to a virtual halt when I was around five years old,” Kalish writes. “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.”
One of the book’s major themes, the value of hard work and thrift, runs against the grain of much of American culture today, Kalish acknowledged. Younger generations today live a much different life than she did as a girl, she said.
“We worked like dogs,” she said. “But we did think it was fun. We did. Partly it’s because our parents and grandparents taught us that there was a great deal of satisfaction in work well done. There is a great deal of satisfaction in being physically tired — there’s something wonderful in that. It’s a physical achievement, and a mental one, as well.”
Kalish said that the way children and teenagers are raised seems to her to miss out on much of this sort of value.
“I see — and now I’m really showing my age! — a terrible waste of misdirected energy and purpose, in the educational system today,” she said. “If I ruled the world, I would put home economics and carpentry back into the schools, and I would not let anyone graduate, male or female, until they knew how to be prepared for life. These kids do not have living experiences. They make them up, for heaven’s sake.
“The country would not be in the shape it’s in,” she said, “if we taught people these things. One of them is the idea of a delayed reward. We worked for things first—and then we got a reward.”
Kalish, who stays active with frequent exercise classes and hikes through the mountains near her home, said that lately readers have been asking her to write a sequel: to tell what happened after she left Garrison for good at age 18, bound for travel, a career in the Coast Guard in the 1940s, marriage to Harry Kalish, a family that grew to include two sons (and now four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren), and a career as a college English professor.
“I have a lot of requests for that,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of questions about what happened next.”
She paused, thought for a moment, and then laughed.
“Maybe someday, I will sneak some of that down...”
As with all of our Book Club selections, we’d like to know what you think about “Little Heathens.” Send your thoughts to: bookclub@buffnews.com, or by mail to: Book Club, The Buffalo News, P. O. Box 100, Buffalo, N. Y., 14240.
Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm during the Great Depression
By Mildred Armstrong Kalish
Bantam paperback
292 pages, $12
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