Dateline: 7 May 2014
My brother-in-law gave me a book titled, "Rural Wisdom," by Jerry Apps. Jerry Apps? That was a familiar name. I got to looking and found that I had blogged about a book by Jerry Apps back in 2009. You can read it at this link: A Chronicle of The Loss of Agrarian Culture.
Further looking turned up Jerry Apps' Web Page, and the documentary movie above. It's titled "A Farm Story," but it could just as easily have been titled "A Chronicle of The Loss of Agrarian Culture." Here's the official description of the movie…
The portrait of a farm boy's childhood in Waushara County [Wisconsin] is told through his personal memories and photos from the community. Apps evokes memories of a time when almost as many Americans lived on farms as in cities, and examines day-to-day rural life. Fieldwork was done with horses, cows were milked by hand, lanterns were the source of light, and community was essential for survival.
This is a documentary well worth watching if you are an agrarian-minded person. Parts I especially liked were his recollection of the rural rite of passage of forking a wagon-load of grain bundles into the thrasher (with his father's approving look), how they planted (and harvested) acres of potatoes, and the introduction of electricity on the farm (when he was a sophomore in high school). A traditional way of life soon came to a close when electricity came to the farm.
I grew up in the next county over from Washara, so when you first blogged about one of Jerry's books way back, I was naturally intrigued. Since then, I've enjoyed reading a number of his books. My dad still lives up there, and the last time we were up to visit, he had the documentary "A Farm Winter" saved for us on his DVR. If you enjoyed "A Farm Story," I'm sure you'd enjoy that one, too. I particularly like his "homespun" style of story telling. He reminds me listening to stories from my own grandfather, who grew up on a farm in western Iowa.
ReplyDelete