When I Grew Up Long Ago: Family Living, Going to School, Games and Parties, Cures and Deaths, a Comet, a War, Falling in Love, and Other Things I Remember

by Alvin Schwartz

Brief statements from people whose childhoods were in the period 1890-1914 on such areas of their past lives as food, social life, music, holidays, and health present glimpses of life in the United States at that time.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1978

About the author

Alvin^Schwartz
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Alvin Schwartz was the author of more than fifty books dedicated to and dealing with topics such as folklore and word play, many of which were intended for young readers. He is often confused with another Alvin_Schwartz, who wrote Superman and Batman daily comics strips and a novel titled The Blowtop.

For Batman - See: Alvin^^Schwartz https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

Reviews

[Joan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this book up at a library book sale as a coffee table book. Memories from the late 1800's and early 1900's-every person that has sat on my couch has picked this book up and browsed through it-with new information each time

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It's so simple. It’s an edited collection of excerpts from oral interviews in the 1970s with people in their 80s and 90s who were children around the turn of the 20th century. Schwartz (who is best known as the author/collector of "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”) stays entirely out of the way, only gathering the anecdotes and bite-sized memories into helpful categories like "what we ate" and “how we got around.”

We get a child’s-eye view of the first 'talkies’ in the movie house, the stark banality of death among those living in poverty, and the magic of invention. One narrator who was a child in Independence, Missouri, in 1905 recalls how on the first night they had electricity, "Mother turned on all the lights in every room. Then we ... walked up the street to the corner and walked slowly back, and she said, 'I never thought that this house would look like that.’ It was just a blaze of light."

Schwartz made what was an unusual and deliberate choice for 1978 by including interview subjects who reflected the ethnic and cultural diversity of the US around 1900; while there are mostly sweet and fascinating stories of farm chores and riding on horse-drawn streetcars, you also get a sense of cultural history around race and social power in the Jim Crow South and on American Indian reservations.

What never fails to impress me about first-hand accounts of history ("primary sources") is how I always come away with a greater conviction that people are more alike than different, even across time and circumstance. We like parties, we get bored sometimes, we love our kids and our dogs. We can learn and we can change. There's hope in that.

[Casi Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book full of first person accounts of what it was like to grow up in the time around 1895-1910.