An autobiography of a country kid
I guess you could call "In the Land of Used to Be" a country kid autobiography because it tells the stories I treasure about growing up along dirt roads in long-ago Mercer County, Pennsylvania. I felt the stories were worth writing down because life seems so different now, and some day folks might be curious about what rural childhood was like in the Baby Boomer era.
An advantage of growing up during the Baby Boomer era?
The main difference between growing up then and now is how unsupervised our lives were — how much freedom we had in nearly all aspects of our lives, and especially in terms of employment and entertainment. For example, my first paying job was driving a 1944 Allis Chalmers model WC tractor to bale hay on a neighbor's farm when I was six years old. That same year Dad gave me my own hatchet and sheath knife, and I proceeded to find entertainment whacking and building things out in the woods with my friends. For another example, at 12 years old I mail-ordered my first rifle from the Sears & Roebuck catalog, and was free to use it for hunting and plinking whenever I wanted to. In our neighborhood, that seemed to be the norm, rather than an exception. A rite of passage.
Naturally, we didn’t always use our expansive freedom to make wise choices — especially as teenagers. In retrospect, that seems like a good thing because it allowed us to learn from the sometimes-unpleasant consequences of our mistakes — things like plunging a friend's car into a lake at the age of 14 or 15, or spinning into a hayfield at 80-some miles per hour while road racing at the age of 16. Things like that help to mature you, assuming of course that they don’t kill you first. Unlike so many young individuals today who have been carefully protected from making mistakes, by the age of 21 typical members of my generation had enough experience under their belts to be reasonably mature and living on their own. How that came about seems worth remembering, which was my principal motivation for creating an autobiography about life "in the land of used to be!"
You can purchase "In the Land of Used to Be" at the Mercer County Historical Society, or on Amazon. All sales proceeds benefit the historical society. Happy reading!
Lannie Dietle, July 14, 2024
About Mercer County, Pennsylvania
Mercer County is in the northwest part of Pennsylvania, and shares a border with Ohio. It also borders the Pennsylvania counties of Crawford, Venango, Butler, and Lawrence. Back in 1960, when I was growing up, Mercer County had a population of 127,519 that was primarily of European descent.