SamSam

"I always assumed as a child that the village where I grew up was put there as my personal playground. The river, the town and all the thousand people in it made up such a harmonious setting that if it had not happened the way it did, God would have had to fill a special order and set it down, like Brigadoon, in the rolling green of central Wisconsin. Later I learned, of course, that communities don't just happen. They come into being for very practical and commercial reasons. They can die that way too without proper care. That my family had much to do with this process in Manawa, Wis., is something I did not learn until much later. As a tow-headed kid haunting the blacksmith shop and the feed mill and playing Huck Finn on the river, I took the good life for granted. The adventures we had--Sam and I, and the characters we came to know are the subjects of this book. I hope it can be a window to what it was like growing up in the small-town Midwest during the Depression and before World War II. It was a place where everybody knew all about everybody else, but liked them anyway. It's a community that can never be the same again and, perhaps, never was exactly the way I picture it here, because of the filter of my memory and my desire to tell a good story." --Back cover.