A character-building time

Mildred Armstrong Kalish’s memoir is not about the author. It’s about a way of life that is long gone.

“If you’ll look at this book, you’ll notice that I very deliberately kept myself as much out of it as possible,” the 85-year-old said about her first book.

“Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression” chronicles Kalish’s family’s life during the 1930s in tiny Garrison, Iowa. In her evocative but not overly sentimental book, she describes her role in the collective rural life of her childhood.

She briefly describes her family -- an absent father, strict grandparents, spirited aunts, mischievous siblings and a complicated mother. Yet it’s their chores, recipes, old sayings, pranks and virtues that dominate the book.

“I wanted to capture that as a place, as a people -- the farm, responsibilities, our relationships to the land and to the animals, and that adventure of a small town and rural life,” Kalish said.

It was a time when kids expertly beheaded a chicken for supper and started Thanksgiving dessert in May with the planting of pumpkin seeds. There were stinky outhouses and wise observations from grandmother: “If you’re looking for a helping hand, look at the end of your arm.”

Kalish wouldn’t want to return to those times, but she wants to pass down lessons she learned as a child.

“I wanted especially, you know, that the kids understood the old virtues, which I think need to be reinstated. And those virtues are self-reliance and self-discipline and thrift. I think we have an unbelievably wasteful generation now,” she says. “Along with this practice of self-discipline and self-reliance came a feeling of confidence. I never felt that anything could lick me.”

She left Iowa for good around 1952, then spent decades teaching literature and writing at Suffolk County Community College on Long Island in New York; the University of Missouri in Columbia; and Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y.

Kalish first thought of writing about her childhood in the early 1990s, when her young granddaughter repeatedly asked for “a farm story.”

“I began to think I should collect these stories and write them down,” says Kalish, who spent about five years writing the book off and on, completing her manuscript in 2005.

Her intention wasn’t to get a book deal but to document her story for family members. Kalish said she gave her completed work to her cousin Joan K. Peters for a look. Peters, an author and professor, passed it on to editors she knew in New York. The book was released last May, and there are nearly 75,000 copies in print, according to publisher Bantam Dell.

“Almost every day I have somebody come up to me or send me an e-mail saying, ‘You wrote my story,’ ” Kalish says. “It’s mind-boggling; it’s overwhelming. I had one woman [who] wrote and said that she’s only read two books twice in her whole lifetime and the other one was the Bible. Can you believe that?”

Kalish says her success shows it’s never too late to record one’s narrative.

“I’d say do it, write it down. Join an expository writing group if that helps you. But do it, write these things down,” she says.