A Simpler Time: Stories From A Vanishing Era

A Simpler Time is about life during the 1930s and 1940s in the Midwest as remembered by a curious and impressionable youngster. The author grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, when school classes were well-sprinkled with children whose parents - like his - were immigrants, attracted by job opportunities in a community that was home to Henry Ford and his powerful Ford Motor Company. Here are stories about an era when children had glorious free time, without constant supervision by adults, and when that time was generally spent outdoors. They tell of games that exist today only in distant memories, like rubber-gun wars, marbles, flipping baseball cards, and rushing to the back of the Iceman's truck to grope under his canvas cover for pieces of ice while he made his delivery. The author takes you back to that past era so you live it together with him, whether he is making silk thread from dried cocoons at Greenfield Village, hitching a ride on a freight train in Montana, standing lookout on the periscope shears of a submarine underway in the Pacific, or learning to milk a cow on a small farm near Milan, Michigan. It is also a coming-of-age story about a sometimes rebellious youngster who survives detours through trade school and the Navy and finally, at the University of Michigan, finds a direction for his life.

The author was born in Dearborn, Michigan, of immigrant Swedish parents. He was educated at the University of Michigan AB), University of Wisconsin (MA), University of Oslo (Fulbright fellowship), Cornell University (PhD candidate in English), Princeton University (on assignment from the State Department) and George Washington University School of Law (JD 1967). He spent 12 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, with overseas assignments in Thailand and Finland. He left the Service to pracice law, and spent the next 26 years as a corporate attorney. Retired since his wife died in 1993, the author travels and writes.