Ira's Farm: Growing up on a self-sustaining farm in the 1930's and 1940's

A WWI veteran with a young family, Ira bought a sixty-acre farm in the rural community of Harlan Michigan just ninety days before the October 1929 stock market crash and its ensuing financial crisis.

He fashioned a living with a team of horses and a never-give-up work ethic on land his wife often called sand banks when a harvest failed. This memoir covers a thirty-year span of farming through the eyes of Ira's daughter who went from a bare-footed carefree girl to a hired hand when her older brother joined the Navy in 1942. She drove horses, hauled hay, picked up stones, bagged milkweed pods and a myriad of other tasks. For senior citizens it may bring back childhood memories. Young readers will perhaps experience a tinge of fantasy or a scene from TV's Walton family. An easy read about rural farm life in the thirties and forties