From Piglets to Prep School Crossing a Chasm

On the universal quest for personal independence and for fulfillment of growing-up dreams, a small-town Minnesota boy turns to raising runt piglets as a way to earn spending money of his own. Then a series of mysterious and unexpected postcards from a school called Phillips Exeter Academy begins to arrive, flooding his plans with uncertainty and confusing his inexperienced parents as to what is best for their son.

From Piglets To Prep School: Crossing A Chasm describes the unanticipated and fundamentally unwanted struggle that this young boy faces as the postcards, eventually inviting him to attend the school on scholarship, continue to interrupt a comfortably familiar existence in his home town . a life of growing up in a virtual clone of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon of Prairie Home Companion.

Though satisfied at home, an inner voice seduces him to abandon his youthful dreams and join the cadre of elite preppies in New England. Overnight, names of his schoolmates change from Gary Gardner and Duane Labs to David Rockefeller and Peter Benchley. The social, economic, cultural, and academic shocks of such change are immediate and stunning . yet mostly manageable.

This entertainingly illustrated book is a poignant and humorous memoir that will resonate with anyone who remembers his or her growing-up years. Share the fun, sadness, discoveries, disappointments, and pranks of a young hayseed kid uprooted from bucolic rural life and transplanted into the rocky New England garden of stuffy and highly competitive preppies. You'll be challenged to read the book without alternately laughing and crying as memories of your own early years are rekindled!

Wendell Arthur Duffield was born in Sisseton, South Dakota, because his neighboring hometown of Browns Valley, Minnesota, had neither doctor nor hospital in 1941 and his mother was not interested in home birthing. Following his three years at Phillips Exeter Academy, he went on for a BA degree (1963) from Carleton College at Northfield, Minnesota, and MS (1965) and PhD (1967) degrees in geology from Stanford University at Stanford, California. Much later, after studying volcanoes for thirty-two years as a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, Duffield (in ?retirement?) has taken up writing tales for a general readership. He and his wife Anne spend summers in the beautiful lake country of northwestern Wisconsin and winters in Flagstaff, Arizona, where Duffield is an Adjunct Professor of Geology at Northern Arizona University. The author?s namesake village (see photos above and below) is a small farming community that lies between Browns Valley and Garrison Keillor?s imaginary town of Lake Wobegon. The village of Wendell and the author have grown in physical stature with age. However, this village has never been called Wendy, a nickname still heard in Browns Valley when the author visits his hometown.