Dave Wood

Books of both fiction and non-fiction are various and appeal to different readers with different tastes. I, for one, am attracted to books about places and things with which I'm already acquainted. Sounds funny, doesn't it? Years ago Star Tribune writer Peg Meier and I requested that we be permitted to make a collection of stories we had written for the newspaper. “Why, would you want to do that?” replied the editor, fresh from New York. And then he sold us the rights to five years of columns for a hundred bucks.

We never had the heart to tell him a few years later that our book sold five printings and is still selling 30 years later.

Why did our readers line up as never before​​? Because all our stories were about folks from Minnesota, folks who weren't famous or noteworthy but just folks like Peg and me.

So familiarity does not necessarily breed contempt. Some folks just like to cuddle up to familiarity.

For example, the first adult novel I ever read was Sinclair Lewis's “Main Street,” the Nobel prizewinner's evisceration of his hometown. Why was I attracted? Because Lewis's Gopher Prairie reminded me of my own hometown, which was also, in my young brat's view, bigoted, brain-dead and bourgeois!

Recently I've enjoyed a passel of books written about subjects with which I'm acquainted. And although I'm no longer a book reviewer I can't resist mentioning them.

One such was by my neighbor Callie Trautmiller, whose first novel out of the gate won national awards.  Callie's “Becoming American” deals with the Nisei who were sent to concentration camps and later to work in the U.S. World War effort. Now I'm neither a Japanese person nor did I work in the war drive except to bring flattened tin cans to my third-grade teacher Mable Larson. But I was acquainted with the Nisei because they were all over town in spring when chicks were hatched in Blair, Egg Capital of the World, and where chickens ruled the roost. Why were these Japanese in tiny Blair, Wis., driving around in black Cadillacs during the heart of war in the Pacific? Because they were the only folks who could pick up a fluffy little chick and tell whether it was a boy or a girl. Remember it was the egg capital of the world. We kids always prayed for a few roosters in the batch because they ended up on our Sunday dinner tables and they tasted great, unlike the slimy force-fed birds that pass for chickens these days.

The Nisei weren't the only foreigners who crept into our lives. Scores of German prisoners were hauled there for the pea pack. They, however, didn't come in Cadillacs, but in striped uniforms which sagged with sweat as they bucked heavy pea vines at hay loaders all over the county.

And I'm still not finished with books about agriculture. The new book that has most impressed me was a fairly scholarly tome by former Progressive Magazine editor Ruth Conniff called “Milked: How an American Crisis brought together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers.”

Anyone who has ever rested his sweaty head onto the flank of a very warm Holstein and begun pulling teats will wonder why this book gobsmacked me. Part of it was because, in the words of “The Music Man,” you gotta know the territory and I do. Two of Conniff's focuses are Arcadia in Trempealeau County and Waumandee in Buffalo County, places with which I am well acquainted. Conniff wades right into the manure on Rosenow's dairy farm outside Waumandee and talks with its owner who tells about losing his herd in a fire, refusing to quit, buying a 1,000-cow herd, trying to hire local workers, who sometimes didn't show up for milking. Cows aren’t fond of that, so he hired Mexicans. Today he has eight full-time employees, one of whom is his foreman. They play golf together on Men's Night. Rosenow recalled that his neighbors figured he was one of those liberals who hired Mexicans because he was trying to save the world. Not true, he said. “I was trying to save my ass.”

Meanwhile, Conniff stops off in Arcadia and talks to the only Mexican barber in five counties, who came to Arcadia to work at the booming Ashley Furniture factory, found that Mexicans liked to have an occasional haircut and now the newcomer cuts lots of hair for his fellow immigrants and also Polish and Norwegian longtime residents.

That's my idea of a great American success story—and my idea of a really great book.

Dave would like to hear from you. Phone him at 715-426-9554.