Time's Shadow: Remembering a Family Farm in Kansas

by Arnold J. Bauer

Arnold Bauer grew up on his family's 160-acre farm in Goshen Township in Clay County, Kansas, amidst a land of prairie grass and rich creek-bottom soil. His meditative and moving account of those years depicts a century-long narrative of struggle, survival, and demise. A coming-of-age memoir set in the 1930s to 50s, it blends local history with personal reflection to paint a realistic picture of farm life and families from a now-lost world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Historical

176 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2012

Reviews

[Caren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book after seeing it listed as one of The Atlantic magazine's best five books of 2012:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainm...
It is a modest-seeming book at just 150 pages, but it packs a punch. In clear, unsentimental prose, the author, now elderly himself, recounts his childhood on a Kansas farm during the 1930s. After brief introductory chapters on the geological foundations of Kansas and the earliest inhabitants, it shifts quickly to his pioneer forebears and life on the 160 acre family farms they carved out of the prairie. The meat of the book is his own recollections about aspects of a way of life that lasted a scant one hundred years. His childhood was, unbeknownst to his family, the last hurrah of the family farm in this country. The author, a scholar and an academic, has written skillfully. His words are never maudlin, but are achingly nostalgic. The further I got in the book, the more deeply his story affected me, for he does describe a way of life that is gone, gone, gone. He is of my parents' generation and, while they were "city folks" with luxuries rural people didn't have (like electricity, for example, which only came to his family's farm in 1939 with the Rural Electrification Act of Franklin Roosevelt), there were some aspects of his life that reminded me of their lives. Life was more parochial and centered on the community and family. They were very self-sufficient, only needing to go to town to buy sugar, salt, coffee, shoes, and overalls. His father, who had only gone to school through eighth grade (something not uncommon for that generation---my grandparents, too, were only schooled through eighth grade), was an inventive and mechanically gifted man. The whole family was very hard-working. The author was the youngest and only boy, with two older sisters. As all of the children left the farm and his parents aged, you could watch this way of life dissolve through the experience of one family. His description of his frail, elderly father watching his farm be auctioned off brought me to tears. Because the prose is so direct and uncluttered, it felt as though I were listening to an older friend who was going to tell me how it was in "the old days". These are stories that are slipping away. I am grateful someone with the verbal skills to tell the story well has recorded this chapter of our country's life. Read this book; you won't be disappointed.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This account of life on a northeast Kansas farm begins with the arrival of the German immigrants who homesteaded the land (the author’s great-grandparents), but the main focus is the years of Bauer’s childhood from the pre-electrified 1930s through the early 1950s, when it became clear that Bauer, the last of his parents’ three children, was, like his two sisters before him, not going to be a farmer. In chapters with titles such as “Houses,” “The Seasons,” “Food and Drink,” “Diversions,” “Attitudes,” “Misbehavior,” “Church,” “School,” “Depression and Drought,” and “Having Company,” Bauer thoughtfully and gracefully examines a way of life that has disappeared.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was an 80 year old man's memory of his childhood on a Kansas farm. This was subsistence agriculture and the farm produced almost everything the family needed and so was able to ride out the Great Depression, droughts, and low commodity prices. It seems like a very bleak life, but at least people had a sense of purpose and belonging. I wonder what the memory of an adult would have been during this time. As a child, he would not have much knowledge of social ills such as wife abuse or of the struggles his parents went through. Nevertheless, he does us all a service by giving us a glimpse of farm life at that time.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Time’s Shadow: Remembering a Family Farm in Kansas / Arnold J. Bauer. Read aloud with Lee. A short, excellent memoir of the author’s boyhood on a small farm and as part of a German homesteading/farming family in the Midwest. Lee found much in common with his grandfather and his farm in Illinois. I related to the old-fashioned values and personalities of rural (immigrant) people, even if my relatives lived as adults in towns and cities. Bauer eventually became a professor at Berkeley; his perspective and insight are important to the book’s composition and value.

[Adrian]

Short, moving, even may I say elegiac memoir of Bauer's life on a Kansas farm. He was a child there in the 1930s and 40s but as he points out there was little that was childish about farm life; he was drafted very early into regular farm duties. A hard, unforgiving life but one that produced lasting satisfactions. Bauer and his sisters all left the farm which itself was gone by the 1970s but it marked him and stays with him to this day. Finely written.

[Tom White · Rating 5 out of 5]

A richly detailed memoir of a bygone way of life – the family farm. Bauer’s portrayal of his cohesive, hard-working, yet emotional spare family in the isolated wonder of the Kansas prairie engages the reader through and through. He documents the resourcefulness and self-sufficiency of family and community in the 1930s and 1940s. Well worth a read.

[Sydney]

The Atlantic Monthly recommended this as one of last year's best books. I enjoyed this lovely memoir of small town life in Kansas. Watching the news these days I keep smiling thinking about Bauer's anecdote about the farmer who refused to get electricity on his farm because he loathed FDR's New Deal.

[Vivek]

Read an interesting review of this book in The Atlantic today. Was surprised to find that its kind of obscure - hard to find even on Amazon.

[Charles Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic account of growing up on farm in Kansas. Wonderful read--you won't be sorry.

[Susan Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting memoir of growing up on a farm near Clay Center. Although the author is a little older than I, there re many things I identified with.

[Rachel Laudan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informed by a lifetime as an agricultural historian as well as a childhood growing up on a Kansas farm, this is one of the finest memoirs I have read in a long time.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am really enjoying reading this memoir of a time and style of living I find intriguing. The chapters/topics are organized well.

[Susan Wester]

A wonderful memoir of growing up on a family farm in Kansas in the 1930s and 1940s. The small towns, farms and community are all gone today.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

SCKLS BookClub Selection