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From: "Cathy Joynt Labath" <>
Subject: [IAPALOAL] More from "A Prairie Boyhood"
Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2002 18:22:09 -0500

A Prairie Boyhood
By Bruce Bliven

The Palimpsest
Iowa City, Iowa
August, 1968

[Note: Bruce Bliven, the author, was born [1889] and reared in Emmetsburg,
Iowa. He attended Stanford and later [1923] became editor of the New York
Newspaper, The New Republic. His recollections of Iowa boyhood give you the
general idea of what it was probably like for your ancestors growing up in
Iowa. Excerpts from "A Prairie Boyhood" follow.]


...There was practically no juvenile delinquency in Emmetsburg, perhaps
because in our non-affluent society nobody ever had cause to complain that
he "had nothing to do." All chidren did some work from the age of ten or so.
On the farm the boys helped with the outdoor chores, and the girls learned
the details of cooking and sewing,and aided their mothers. On Halloween
high-spirited boys tipped over a few private privies or hoisted a buggy to a
roof. Usually the culprits were quickly identified and compelled to undo
their damage. "Trick or Treat" had not yet reached Iowa. The younger
children stayed at home and went to bed or attended early parties at which
they bobbed for apples and pulled taffy. Jack-o'-lanterns carved from
pumpkins and comic masks were a part of every Halloween.
Palo Alto County had gone dry by local option many years earlier. Until
I left home at eighteen [1907], I had never seen a saloon, a drunken man in
the street, or any kind of alcoholic beverage served on a dinner table- or
for that matter, anywhere else.
Unless there were goings on of which I was ignorant, we were still in
the grip of the Puritan tradition as to sex. When my friends and I were
turning adolescent, Freud's doctrines, which were eventually to crumble the
foundations of so much of our philosophy, were still unheard of. So was
birth control and the whole idea of "planned parenthood." I can remember
only one girl in my generation who "got into trouble" and if there were
shotgun marriages I did not know of them.
Discipline in school was good; rarely did anybody need to be sent to
the principal's office, the only form of punishment employed. The principal
was a mild-mannered man whose small daughter grew up to be editor of The
Ladies' Home Journal. How he handled disciplinary problems I do not know,
for neither I nor any of my close friends was ever sent to him.

...I do not know how my classmates and I compared in scholarship with
children elsewhere. I do know that in the first grade we memorized the
alphabet and went on to pronounce syllables by phonics (a word not yet in
use). I am told nowadays taht the situation could not have been as good as I
remember. My recollection is that every child in town could soon read, with
little or no trouble. Nobody, to my knowledge, dropped out of school, though
the farm boys might be absent for a week or two now and then, to help with
spring plowing or at harvest time.


...to be cont....

Cathy Joynt Labath
The Irish in Iowa
http://www.celticcousins.net/irishiniowa/index.htm
Palo Alto Co, IA USGenWeb Project
http://www.celticcousins.net/paloalto/index.htm

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• [IAPALOAL] More from "A Prairie Boyhood" by "Cathy Joynt Labath" <>