Chesapeake Boyhood is an account of growing up on the lower Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake during the years following the Great Depression. Turner's stories include rousing tales of 'coon hunting, crabbing, boat building, duck hunting, oyster tonging, and Saturday jaunts to town. Turner brings the characters, experiences, waterscape, and landscape of rural Virginia to life as no one has done before or is likely ever to do again. His own drawings illustrate the stories, and they, too, win us over with their honesty and charm. "Its chief virtue (besides its highly literate style), it seems to me, is its intimate, sensory knowledge of a vanishing Chesapeake landscape: its sounds and smells, the way things feel to the touch, the lore lodged in the names of the commonest creatures and activities... At one point Turner likens the local farmers and fishermen sitting around the table in the country store to fixed positions on a compass, with `all the cardinal points taken,' and I think of this [book] as a kind of compass too, that describes one man's orientation to the Eastern Shore."--Andrea Hammer, St. Mary's College "Modern outdoor writing has enough anemic adventures by faint-hearted writers reared in the suburbs. What it needs more of is the droll wit of an Ed Zern, the robust foolishness of a Patrick McManus, and the lean prose of an Ernest Hemingway. It gets all three in the tales of Bill Turner."--George Regier, author of Heron Hill Chronicle and Wanderer on My Native Shore "Storms, boat wrecks, childhood pranks and even old dogs are remembered with a sense of humor in Turner's book. He has captured the rhythms of country life in a time before fast cars, credit cards, and air pollution." -- Waterman's Gazette

The Midwest in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s was a special place-a place where parents and children worked side by side to eke out a living from the land, and neighbors stuck by each other through good times and bad. In this affectionate, insightful collection of stories, Jerry Apps takes us to that world. He relives the toughness of farm life-plowing the soil with horses, milking cows by hand, putting in long days with heavy, dangerous machinery. He shows us the lighter side too, as he peddles his father's massive rutabaga harvest and gets to know the neighbor boys-and their personal dictionary of cuss words. We meet Frank, Pinky, and Harry, three farmers whose love of music could transform an entire community; Morty, the odd loner whom only a few wild animals could understand; and Fanny, the extraordinary collie whose role on the farm was as important as that of any human being. Withing each story we see just how warm, loving, and supremely educational growing up on a farm could be, for it is here that a young child learns not only how to take the head off a chicken and drive a tractor like a grown-up, but to deal with illness, disability, and death. Resonating with poingnancy and humor, When Chores Were Done contains stories you'll want to read over and over again. Jerry Apps is a master storyteller who writes through the eyes of a child and with the wisdom of a man. Through the tales are personal, their lessons are universal.