When his father retires early, young Fred is forced to leave the ice cream shops, elevated trains, and bustling streets of suburban Chicago and move to a small farm in southwest Wisconsin. It is the beginning of a new life filled with fun and adventure. There is a snake den under the back porch and the kitchen floor is covered with dead insects. There are snapping turtles to catch and farm animals to play with. But there is also work to be done. The old farmhouse has to be completely rebuilt. Dad's vision of being a gentleman farmer involves having his two sons help with milking the cows, taking care of the chickens, fixing fences, and shoveling snow off the driveway in addition to attending school. And the Wisconsin summers are hot and humid, the winters long and bitterly cold. This is the story of how one family of four manages the transition from Chicago to rural Wisconsin in the late 1950s to 1960s. The story unfolds in a series of vignettes seen through Fred's eyes, which describe how they renovate the old farmhouse, get an inactive dairy farm up and running, learn how to plant and harvest crops, overcome hardships, and adapt to the personalities and customs of a traditional farming community. The experiences will leave a permanent impression on Fred. Listening to the colorful characters in Richland Center and Yuba, exploring the farm on horseback, rounding up stray cows and sheep, cooling off at the swimming hole on the Pine River, catching fireflies, and stargazing on clear summer nights-these are memories that will last a lifetime. Dr. Fred G. Baker is a hydrologist, historian, and author living in Colorado. He is the author of The Life and Times of Con James Baker and The Light from a Thousand Campfires (with Hannah Pavlik).

Growing Up is about the formative years of four children who grew up on a dairy and tobacco farm in southwest Wisconsin in the 1930s and 1940s. They took their first innocent childhood steps in the security of a loving family. As they grew toward adolescence, the world was no longer a storybook land, as they had imagined in grade school, but a whole new world of different people and strange surroundings. It always seemed, though, as they grew from puberty to young adulthood, that what they learned in Sunday school and from their parents came to the surface when they were faced with making hard decisions in an adult world. The difference between right and wrong, instilled in them from earliest childhood, stayed with them all their lives. All parents want their children to have a better life than their own, and their parents did everything they could to convince them to get a more complete education. Tom did not go to college like his sister and brothers, but attended a vocational school in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where he learned auto mechanics and welding. After one year, he was drafted into the Army and served in Korea. The war had just ended, so he did not see battle. Come join this wonderful family on a trip down memory lane.

Six-year-old Anna Pellowski’s older siblings, Jacob, Franciszek, Barney, Mary and Pauline are exposed to English at school, but only Polish is spoken at home. The younger children—Anna, Julian, Anton barely know a word of their new country’s language, but then neither do many of their neighbors. When the family goes to town to celebrate the 100th birthday of the United States, the speaker gives his speech in a mix of German, Polish, Bohemian and Norwegian! Some years before, in the mid 1800’s, Anna’s mother, father and brother Baby Jacob had come from Poland to live in a tiny sod house in Western Wisconsin and establish the very first farm in the entire Latsch Valley. Now the growing family lives in a real house, with neighbors on every side, and the world for quietly curious Anna is filled with fascinating possibilities—as well as lots of hard work. Sometimes she dreams of going back to the Poland she is always hearing about, but increasingly she realizes that life in Latsch Valley, with its rich cultural rhythm of work, play and religious faith, holds everything she could possibly want.

Carol was born to Polish-Americans in a small blue-collar town south of Milwaukee. The book spans three generations: her immigrant grandparents at the turn of the century, her parents who grew up immersed in the Polish culture, and their three daughters who enjoyed the "happy days" of the 1940's and 50's. Nostalgic, funny, insightful, the book is lightly seasoned with Polish words, recipes, and wisdom, but you don't have to be Polish to enjoy this well-written memoir.

A rare first-person narrative of a young Wisconsin Menominee, the son of a medicine woman, who grew up with a wolf as his companion.

From 2001 to 2006, Richard L. Cates Jr. interviewed senior members of more than 30 families living in and around Arena township, a small community in southern Wisconsin. He asked them about growing up in rural America and their connection to a way of life that is vanishing in the twenty-first century. The result, Voices from the Heart of the Land, is a collection of reminiscences, observations, and opinions celebrating the stewardship of the land and the values of the stewards. Of course, as Cates points out, these are nothing less than “our core human values—integrity, commitment, responsibility, citizenship, self-determination, decency, kindness, love, and hope.”

In Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl, Carol Bodensteiner tells the stories of a happy childhood growing up on a family-owned dairy farm in the middle of America in the 1950s, a time when a family could make a good living on 180 acres.