Weeds in the Wilderness: Growing Up in Rural Oklahoma

A family of five moves from the big city to a small Oklahoma farming community in 1947. With no running water, no indoor plumbing, and only a crank telephone, the move of only thirty miles takes them back in time one hundred years. Tom, the youngest of the three children, tells it like it was. He and his two siblings are left to fend for themselves while their parents scrape to bring the little town of Owasso into the twentieth century. Like many families in this postwar generation, the parents had grown up during the Great Depression. When World War II began, lots of young women like Tom's mother left their jobs as housewives and full-time mothers and never went back. Family life after the war was never the same again. Those changes began with kids like Tom. The freedom and thrill-seeking he experiences growing up in the 1950s will ring true to others who grew up in this era. His post-war American story of how he and his brother and sister were left to grow "like weeds in the wilderness" is told with humor, candor, and warmth. Readers will discover an engaging piece of American history.