Carroll Engelhardt Interview: Part 1

After years of teaching about other people’s histories, what caused you to write your own coming-of-age history?

I can’t pinpoint a definite cause. The seeds were planted early. As a child I frequently studied the histories and readers that my parents used when they attended country school. These textbooks later became sources for my doctoral dissertation about citizenship training in Iowa. During my graduate studies, I read about the agrarian myth and McCarthyism, which gave me a sense of how my family entered into history. Mother and Father still believed that farmers—even though declining in numbers—were the backbone of the American Republic. A neighbor often talked about communists in our small town, and I remember watching the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. After hearing stories about my childhood, my daughters urged me to write them down. By way of encouragement, the younger one gave me This House of Sky by Montana novelist Ivan Doig. His memoir about growing up as a ranch hand’s son revealed how ordinary lives could be made interesting for readers. Retirement finally gave me leisure to write about my rural boyhood.

To set the world of your childhood in northeast Iowa in context, you blend hometown details with national and world history in an intriguing and informative way. How did you achieve this?

By researching several sources. The Clayton County Register and county histories helped me connect family stories and my memories with Elkader and Clayton County events. Histories of Iowa, American agriculture, small towns, the Second World War, popular culture, and American society in the forties and fifties enabled me to tie our lives to national and international trends. Setting lives and events in larger contexts is what historians are trained to do. It is hard to learn; I don’t think I did it successfully until my forties when I published several historical articles. Putting any topic in context is also hard to teach undergraduates, I painfully discovered.  

Yours was a fourth-generation Iowa farm family; your parents grew up in homes without electricity on farms without tractors and began farming in the same way. Then telephones, radios, automobiles, electricity, and tractors came along to revolutionize their lives and those of their children. How did such affluence affect your community?

Tractors, mechanization, and electricity increased productivity and made possible larger farms, fewer farmers, and a reduced number of small-town businessmen. The small-scale diversified farming that my parents practiced eventually disappeared. Automobiles and hard-surfaced roads expanded shopping opportunities for families. Movies, radio, and television tied farm and small-town folk to a national consumer culture. Radio newscasts brought world events into our homes. Television privatized leisure, which diminished large rural neighborhood card parties and socializing during Saturday nights in town. While rural and-small town residents lamented these changes, they also embraced the more comfortable and interesting life styles made possible by modern technologies.

As a boy in 1940s and 1950s Iowa, you rode a horse on the hayfork, hired out to other farmers to load bales in the field, and worked in the haymow. Needless to say, this does not sound easy. Tell us more about the kinds of work you did.

My experiences were typical. I’m sure I worked less than some of my classmates who had more acres and more livestock to care for. For example, neither my brother nor I was kept home from school to help with the corn harvest, fall plowing, or spring planting. The economic success of small farms depended on shared labor. All worked so all could eat. It was an important life lesson that most parents imparted to their offspring from an early age, expecting them to help with whatever needed doing. The care and feeding of livestock dictated morning and evening chores. Planting and harvesting crops had to be completed during optimal weather conditions. Fixing fence, repairing machinery, cleaning barns, hauling manure, sawing wood, and roofing buildings are some other tasks I recall. Writing about Harvard colleagues who said he worked too hard, Professor of Economics John Kenneth Galbraith comments, “Their main problem was they weren’t raised on farms!”

The Farm at Holstein Dip: An Iowa Boyhood by Carroll Engelhardt 

Cary Illian Exhibit

Attention Cedar Rapidians! Be sure to check out Clary Illian’s special exhibition preview reception at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art tonight from 5:00-7:00 p.m. This event is free and open to the public! If you can’t make it to the reception, swing by this exhibition, which will be available for viewing from August 25, 2012, to February 17, 2013. 

Clary Illian is the author of A Potter's Workbook (University of Iowa Press, 1999). Clary says of her pottery, “What is the heart of the matter in pottery making? To call into being an object and to ask the object to have qualities that evoke in the viewer a sense of rightness, beauty, or vitality is to tinker with the divine. Making pots offers a constant challenge to search for the mysterious underpinnings of the physical world itself.” We hope to see you at the exhibit!

http://www.crma.org/Exhibition/Detail/Upcoming/Clary-Illian-A-Potters-Potter.aspx

Interview with Evelyn Birkby: Part 5

After sixty-plus years of writing a weekly column, you must be running out of ideas. What keeps your writing so fresh and energizing?

Life continues to be exciting. I get up in the morning and follow the pattern of my father and say out the door or window or out on the porch, “Good morning world, it is going to be a good day.” Then I get my coffee and toast and head for the computer and start writing.

I try and get ideas for columns ahead of time. I carry a notebook around with me all the time to write down ideas. Sometimes a thought will come in the middle of the night and I write in my notebook beside the bed so I won’t forget it by morning. Ideas can come from anywhere. I also have three sons who are vitally interested in my writing and give me ideas. I tell them I don’t want to write old, so they help me stay fresh. Lately they tell me to write about what it is like to get old. “Not many people write about how they feel and think and act after 90. You can do that and you should,” they say.
I would like to have lived in a university town. I would have liked the energy and opportunities to learn more. I had samples when I studied at the University of Colorado and later the University of Chicago—so I had a little exposure to this kind of town.

Writer, journalist, KMA radio homemaker, Iowa master farm homemaker: you’ve had a long and successful career. Is there any other path you dreamed of taking? Park ranger, bookstore owner, Amazon explorer?

That really takes some thought. My path has gone one step at a time, sometimes from necessity, sometimes accidentally, certainly when love entered the picture and then children. But what would I have chosen or dreamed of choosing any different? When I was young I talked of being a nurse, until I realized I did not have the natural qualities needed for such work. I took teachers’ training in college because I could get a certificate in two years and money was desperately tight and my parents did well to send me for two years.

I would like to have lived in a university town. I would have liked the energy and opportunities to learn more. I had samples when I studied at the University of Colorado and later the University of Chicago—so I had a little exposure to this kind of town.

So many exciting paths have opened up to me along the way: my time in Chicago, my exciting romance and coming back to Iowa, then the doors that opened with my writing and radio—television, public appearances, working with Fannie Flagg, knowing Jane and Michael Stern, and, lately, the great experience of making a documentary with Iowa Public Television and then writing my books. The fun with the University of Iowa Press and their great staff and the Iowa Women’s Archives wanting my memorabilia and all my writing. Mercy, I would never have imagined so much. And the joy of having three wonderful sons and two perfect grandchildren and a great daughter-in-law.

My cup runneth over. I don’t need any other dreams.

Evelyn Birkby is the author of Always Put in a Recipe and Other Tips for Living from Iowa's Best-Known Homemaker, as well as Up a Country Lane Cookbook and Neighboring on the Air.

Interview with Evelyn Birkby: Part 4

What was the best part about representing Iowa at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival?

Oh that was a wonderful experience. Being interviewed by newsman Paul Hendrickson and a subsequent two-page spread  in the Washington Post. The time High Sidey (raised in Greenfield, Iowa) of Time magazine walked onto our broadcast set and joined in a discussion I was moderating that went out over the air. The television interviews I did with the Washington Monument in the background. And being a presenter in the food tent of some of Iowa’s most interesting cooks. That was great fun.

The final night with Lee Kline when we helped present a magical evening. Lee and I were the co-masters of ceremony, and we decided to make it like a real live old-fashioned radio broadcast. Somewhere the Smithsonian has a tape of that evening. It deserves to be preserved. And I made lifelong friends--Lee Kline, Lorene Horton, Riki Saltzman, etc.
The hotel where we stayed also had the people from the South who were part of that event, and I learned to love every one of them, especially the Native Americans. The day we said good-bye, one of them told me, ”We may not meet again in this world but hopefully we will meet again in the spirit world.” I told him, “I hope so, too.”

If your friends from the University of Iowa Press were coming to your house for lunch, what would you serve us?

My favorite menu for company lunch now is chicken in a sour cream sauce over rice, orange sherbet salad, probably a green vegetable, pie made with fruit in season—and if I have time and energy, fresh Hay Hand Rolls coming out of the oven when we are ready to eat, served with my homemade strawberry jam.

Evelyn Birkby is the author of Always Put in a Recipe and Other Tips for Living from Iowa's Best-Known Homemaker, as well as Up a Country Lane Cookbook and Neighboring on the Air.

Plant of the Week

Common evening primrose

Oenothera biennis (L.) 

other common names: night willow-herb, large rampion, tree-primrose, king's cure-all, scurvish, evening primrose

Oenothera: a name used by Theophrastus for a species of Epilobium, another genus in this family. It also is Greek for "wine scented," referring to the scent of the flowers or to the fact that the roots were once used for wine.

Biennis: meaning "biennial," for its characteristic of living two years

Evening primrose family: Onagraceae

Photograph by Thomas Rosburg, Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie: The Upper Midwest, Second Edition

Interview with Evelyn Birkby: Part 3

You started writing your “Up a Country Lane” columns in 1949. How have your readers’ interests changed over the years? What hasn’t changed?

I still see people needing a smile. I see people hurting and worried and sorrowing. And I see people who find joy in everything around them. The lives of women have changed drastically with the coming of more labor-saving devices—being a wife and mother is far easier now than in those earlier days. Fewer people live in the country, and the familiar neighborhoods have changed; country school neighborhoods are gone and many of the old farmsteads have been torn down.

I always said that women were interested in everything, and I’ve tried to write and talk about a broad range of subjects. We are not just limited to “homemaking topics”; I never did figure out why people used that term to limit what women do.

The radio homemakers were career women. There have always been career women.


Your first column, about the Christmas box, the hard work of farming, and an encounter with an elderly stranger over a yard of red gingham, is one of my favorites. Do you have one favorite column?

I can think of many: “The Snake Trap,” “The Night the Bed Fell on Our Honeymoon,” “Two Mothers,” “Too Old to Be Elderly.”




Evelyn Birkby is the author of Always Put in a Recipe and Other Tips for Living from Iowa's Best-Known Homemaker, as well as Up a Country Lane Cookbook and Neighboring on the Air.

Interview with Evelyn Birkby: Part 2

I’ve always thought that one main strength of your writing is your ability to demonstrate connectivity—the enduring connections among your rural and small-town neighbors. Can you tell us what these connections mean to you?

Little did I realize that living in a small-town minister’s home would prepare me for what finally became the path of my life. Day after day my father and mother showed by their loving care for the people in their congregation and in their community that people matter, that caring for them in a loving way is one of the important ways to have a fulfilled life no matter what else you do.

Both my parents were educated and spoke well, which gave me a good foundation for knowing how language should be put together. I never was very good in English, but rather I sensed its correctness, which made it possible for me to speak well. And my parents insisted that I do everything I was asked to do that got me up in front of an audience. (I thought they were being cruel—little did I know that they were preparing me for my future.)

Our family did a lot of what we might call community service, and as a child I went along handing out food, taking clothes to those in need (it was the depth of the Great Depression), and visiting hospital patients, usually children, with my father because, he said, I was cheerful and helped bring a little comfort to someone hurt or ill.  

Everything I did after I grew up involved people. Teaching school, going into religious education, and working with children and youth—the great loves of my life—in many different ways. Then when I married and moved back into small-town and country Iowa, here were all the same kinds of people I had grown up with, so we were instant friends. When I began my writing and radio work, I realized how true it was, as my first publisher told me, “Always write friendly, there are many lonely people out there.“ I had a positive father who always lifted people’s spirits. Once he was gone, I took it on myself to be a positive, up-beat, “sunshiny” person. So many sad  people, so much trouble. So I deliberately let in the light and smiled and was (and am) positive.

In the process I made close friends with those around me, and that circle expanded to include my

readers and listeners. It was like being a part of a family. 

Evelyn Birkby is the author of Always Put in a Recipe and Other Tips for Living from Iowa's Best-Known Homemaker, as well as Up a Country Lane Cookbook and Neighboring on the Air.