Marcella Grenga

Willow Run Farm: an Ohio Memoir 1924-1935 Marcella Grenga

WILLOW RUN FARM, the initial book in a trilogy, records the author's experience of growing up on a working farm in the rural Midwest during the Great Depression. In her Pulitzer Prize-winner, "The Shipping News," E. Annie Proulx states: "What don't happen is also news." Marcella Grenga candidly lays down vignettes from rural life and scenes from a one-room schoolhouse. The tone spans from the undercurrent of love in the Woolf family to the quiet but often brutal realities of farm life. The toil on the farm and antics in the one-room school serve as backdrops for this warm, wise-cracking, poignant memoir of a time lost to chronology but not to memory. By grit and wit, the Woolf family survived the 1930s largely through their own down-home ingenuity. In the 1930s, 4,000,000 Americans were forced into despair and from their homes, including 250,000 children. That the Woolf family stayed intact by growing their own food is: "the news that didn't happen." W/illustrations by the authors.