In No Time At All

By Carl Hamilton

Book Overview

Originally written as a family history for his children and grandchildren, the author of this book recreates the sights, sounds and even the smells of an Iowan farm between the two world wars. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813808251
• ISBN13: 9780813808253
• Release Date: January 1974
• Publisher: The Iowa State University Press
• Length: 185 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The good ol' days, flies and all

Carl Hamilton, who was there, says Iowa before the big change was not like a Grant Wood painting. Life was a round of back-breaking work, small or no returns and sudden, deadly disease. Nevertheless, he looks back on it fondly. The big change was electricity. Actually, that was the second big change. The first was labor-saving machinery. The pioneers lived primitively. The saying he heard as a boy was that the plow that broke the Plains broke many women. By the time he came along, about World War I, consumption had improved greatly, although still very low by our standards. And not only consumption of things. Schooling was meager, but at least at the Hamilton farm there were many newspapers and magazines to read. For farmers, the Great Depression started in 1922, and the Hamiltons, like many another family, lost their land. From then, they were tenants but at least better off than the hired men, the rootless rural proletarians who had been part of the Iowa scene from the very beginning. Untilled land could be patented for little or nothing, but it took lots of capital to farm, and many, many people never got it together. Among the interesting facets of "In No Time at All" are the computations of Hamilton's father for investing in feeder calves, pigs and farm equipment. Despite poverty, they bought a new Chevrolet in 1926. However, Hamilton's father still farmed with horses. The beauty of this book -- besides its simplicity -- is its detail. If you haven't ever tried keeping a dozen horses during an Iowa winter, you cannot imagine how much trouble they are, until you read this book. Almost everything is here, from little details like changing the needles on the Victrola to spreading manure in a windstrom. Rural people could be fastidious or not but they could not afford to be squeamish, and Hamilton isn't. But he is sometimes censorious. One way to get protein into the hogs' ration was to lead a played-out horse into the hogyard and shoot him. Hogs will eat anything, and in southern Italy men who crossed the Camorra sometimes ended up as bacon. Iowa was slightly more civilized than that, but the Hamiltons considered shooting a horse for the hogs to be shiftless farming. The one area of life that Hamilton barely mentions is religion, and that was wise. To the rural American, religion was and is blood sport, and his spiritual beliefs are bathetic. Other than that, "In No Time at All" rings true. It was published in 1974 and my copy, dated 1982, was a sixteenth printing. People who knew bought the book. The title refers to the revolution in rural America that came with the New Deal, rural electrification and indoor plumbing. For thousands of years, farm life was based on long and hard labor. Within the span of Carl Hamilton's youth, that way of life -- at least in advanced countries -- vanished forever. The same point was made, more lyrically but less definitively, by Laurie Lee in "Cider with Rosie" for village life in the Cotswolds. It was, it se

So Farming before WWII was easy, huh?

The book tells us about life in the Midwestern/Iowa area before WWII. The major industry was farming. Leisure time was prized and largely a social affair up until movie houses and radio came along in the 1920's. I read about early school buses, taking a bath in the den, and families having to move to another farm. Life prior to the New Deal involved fireplaces and kerosene; Hamilton mentions the "electric taste" of cakes made in electric ovens. Part of you will say thank goodness we have this and that (even in 1974 younger generations surely said that) and part of you will wish you could take a step back into that era. Read it; I was lucky to find that the book is still available. My uncle (he graduated Iowa State) got this book for my dad and I thought it was as rare as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thankfully it isn't. I hope more books like this are out there.