Batting Rocks Over the Barn: An Iowa Farm Boy's Odyssey

By Lawn Griffiths

Book Overview

The rhythm of rural life during the 1950s and 1960s comes alive through the eyes of a Grundy County, Iowa, boy who grew up to become a newspaper journalist and farm editor. An idle pastime of batting rocks over the barn or his experiences in a one-room country school or a third-grade debate over whose fathers had the best brand of farm tractors are told in this eclectic collection of some of Lawn Griffiths' most popular "Rural at Random" weekly farm columns in the Waterloo Courier during the 1970s. The award-winning writer tells about driving calves to spring pasture, the mayhem of scattering rats after hog houses were moved, transferring pullets into hen houses in the fall and the death of a beloved blacksmith who was always ready to weld broken machinery parts. He tells of the drudgery of baling hay, the job of cutting corn for silage, and cows tormented by flies in the summertime. Griffiths captures the seasons on the farm from oat seeding in the spring to pulling cockleburs from corn fields in the summer to making the long first day of summer a chore-free "Kids Day." He tells how his father taught teens from town how to properly rake hay and how some came back at night to raid his watermelon patch. There's the account how Griffiths' twin brother earned his pilot's license, then took farmers to the skies to see their farms from above. That and more in a collection of stories of another time on Midwest farms.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1503572838
• ISBN13: 9781503572836
• Release Date: May 2015
• Publisher: Xlibris
• Length: 150 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"