Life Was Simpler Then

In this charming book of personal recollections, the author, Loula Grace Erdman, returns to her childhood in western Missouri and recreates the way of life as she then knew it. There is, for instance, and amusing section on the series of hired men who helped on the farm, followed by chapters on spring house cleaning, on family reunions, on church attendance, on the Chautauqua. It was a time where there was a second table for the children at dinner parties, when a helpful, omniscient Central was at the other end of the telephone wire, when harvesting ice or making apple butter was a neighborhood affair. It is only yesterday in a small American town.

These lively reminiscences are touched here and there with humor and pathos and everywhere with that nostalgia which springs from the near resemblance of the author’s recollections to our own. Of Ms. Erdman’s many successful books, Life Was Simpler Then is likely to be remembered most fondly—and longest.