The Good Ole' Days: Autobiography of a Farm Boy

This book is about family, about what it was like growing up during the Depression on a rural farm in southern Minnesota. It was assembled by Milt and Marilyn with input from Milt's siblings and their son Tom Hayman and daughter-in-law Martha Turner. The voice is all Milty. He wrote the following history of growing up in the late 1920s, 1930s and 1940s to give our family and others a unique perspective of life in rural Minnesota.

It was a time before automobiles and farm tractors; before electricity and cell phones; before running water and indoor plumbing; before central heat or air conditioning.

Young people today wouldn't dream of standing in a fresh cow pie to warm cold bare feet or going to school in a room with no lights other than the windows. Some people call those the good ole' days. If they call those days good, they have forgotten the hardship. If they call those days good they remember the tight family bonds that living and working close together forged.

The great changes that affected both farming and transportation came from electricity and the mobile combustion engine. This unique period of farming history could be lost if not recorded. When you read these stories, certainly think of the hard work that was required, but also think of the pride and sense of accomplishment we felt in having both a full pantry and potato bin at the end of the growing season and a neatly mowed hay field or a corn field planted so accurately it could be cultivated in two directions.

Milt organized his thoughts of the early years by describing what activities occurred in each month of the year-a real eye opener for us today. He referred to it as the "Good Ole' Days" but now that will be judged by the reader.