What was it like growing up as a rural Baby Boomer?
A memoir about a Baby Boomer growing up in the country
The book consists of a series of entertaining vignettes on a wide range of subject matter. The vignettes provide a window into a bygone era when unsupervised youngsters used their imaginations to create their own entertainment. The vignettes also highlight some of the dramatic societal and technological changes that have taken place since then. Mr. Dietle’s portrayal of rural 20th century life is sure to trigger the dormant memories of other Boomers, and will also help to bring the Boomer era to life for subsequent generations of Americans.
Childhood recollections of growing up
Teenage coming-of-age memories
The book is available via Amazon and from the Mercer County Historical Society (119 S. Pitt St., Mercer, PA 16137), which publishes the book. Order your copy today!
“In the Land of Used to Be...” is a coming-of-age memoir that uses personal experiences to illustrate what it was like to grow up as a rural Baby Boomer in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. The author, Lannie Dietle, was raised in a home his parents built along a dirt road in northwestern Pennsylvania, midway between Pittsburgh and Erie. The scenes of his boyhood adventures were the surrounding roads, fields, and forests, along with the isolated mountain farms of his grandparents in the Laurel Highlands region of southwestern Pennsylvania.
Pre-teen childhood memories of growing up out in the country include things like crank telephones, tire swings, playing in the dirt, toy guns, Brethren church services, a streamliner trainset, pets including a possum, rural Halloween, snowmen and sled riding, transistor radios, farming with horses, rural colloquialisms, business advancements, the beginning of the space age, chores, favorite babysitters, childhood infectious diseases, raising and growing food, climbing trees, trapping, collecting fossils, chasing rabbits back to his father’s shotgun, watching Beaver colonies, pulling taffy, neighborhood yard parties, building wooden coaster cars, the Kennedy assassination and the Kennedy connection to his neighbors, watching his grandmother prepare chicken dinner from scratch – starting with a hatchet and a chopping block, riflery, archery, cabins, treehouses, fishing, roasting ears, evolving automobile styles, Hula-Hoops, Frisbees, church camps, rural sex education or the lack thereof, dynamiting trees, flying kites, riding ponies, making sling shots, catching insects, bottle hunting, ice skating, camping out, model rockets, roaming on foot or bicycle, boiling sugar water, foraging, holiday traditions, etc.
Teenage recollections include things like working on farms, on a sawmill, and at a busy gas station, hunting, Boy Scouts, surreptitiously racing an old car around on strip-mine roads, youthful clothing styles and fads, tearing down a house, building a barn, getting addicted to smoking, drinking moonshine and other alcoholic beverages, road racing, chasing the fairer sex, parking in the moonlight, dehorning cattle, important educational influences, tobogganing, novel (to him) food trends such as pizza, swimming and skinny-dipping, collecting pop bottles for refunds, school shenanigans, horse apple fighting, fist fights, the terror of a local murder, becoming a history buff, teenage rebellion, watershed cultural moments, car mishaps, important adult influences, overnight alcohol-fueled field parties, near-death experiences, a successful school boycott, police encounters, the selective service lottery, etc.
