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first interview   3

became the woman people sought out in the small country town (about 200 people - 15 miles from Des Moines) when they needed help. She delivered babies, gave simple medical care when it was needed. She raised eight children, my mother Emma the youngest. I remember harvest dinners in the summers in Iowa. When the corn was ready all the relatives (female) gathered at the ranch where the corn was being harvested, bringing dozens of pies, cakes, cooking gallons of mashed potatoes, making gallons of coleslaw with a sweet milk dressing. Huge platters of fresh corn, ears a foot long in my memory, everyone eating six to twelve of them; piles of fried chicken, home-made ice cream for dessert after the pie and cake. The dinner was at noon, of course. The harvest hands worked from dawn to dark, only stopping an hour for lunch. On Sunday most everyone went to the Waukee Christian Church. My Grandmother Sophia was intensely religious and would not allow dancing on Sunday. The uncles argued politics and religion all Sunday afternoon. But at four everybody went home to milk the cows. My mother's oldest sister got up every morning at four to start the day's work - washing work clothes by hand, drying on a clothes line, ironing smooth; saving milk in big yellow crocks in the cellar, skimming off the think cream for butter, making cottage cheese out of the milk that soured. It was a life of continual hard work for the whole family. Grandpa Leonard died of a heart attack when he was 50. But Sophia lived to be one hundred and five, still reading the bible without glasses and singing Washed in the Blood of the Lamb at the top of her quavering voice.

My mother Emma Leonard determined to leave the farm, and attended college at Ames. She majored in domestic science and worked in the library. After graduation she and my father were married in a simple home ceremony in Sophia and Henry Lee Leonard's farm house in Waukee. This is what I know of my mother's background. Hard working middleclass Protestant farmers. Yet Grandpa Leonard was a member of the Populist Party, a radical party of its time. He established a bank in Waukee to get better credit terms for the local farmers, was President of the bank until he died. Sophia I forgot to say, attended Knox College, Illinois, and wanted all her children to have an education.