The Growing Seasons: An American Boyhood Before the War

I was hooked from line one of this book. Hynes' simple and direct style of writing quickly whisks you back 70-plus years and tells you -shows you - how it was. And it wasn't easy for Sam Hynes either, orphaned at an early age and moving from place to place, being farmed out and coping with a step-mother. But in spite of all this, you also get a sense of the fun of being a boy in the midwest during the depression. Kids don't always know when they're poor; they're too busy learning and experiencing things and trying to get the most out of every day. The sequel to The Growing Seasons is equally good: Flights of Passage. I wish Sam would continue his personal story and tell us what happened after he came home from the war. I do know from talking with him that he was back in the Marines during Korea. There's gotta be another great story in there somewhere. If you're from the midwest and love good storytelling, read this book. Hell, you don't have to be midwestern. It's just darn good writing. - Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy: At Play in the ASA

The now storied "Greatest Generation" did not come full-blown into glory. It evolved from childhood, and Samuel Hynes' gentle, understated and illuminating memoir, "The Growing Seasons," assists in our understanding of how the generation that fought and won World War II came to be. Fiercely independent, perpetually inquisitive and unabashedly self-conscious, Samuel Hynes comes of age in America's heartland during the Great Depression. His story, crafted with gentle humor and exquisite detail, gains transcendence and slowly emerges as a representation of millions of youngsters grappling with the age-old obligation of developing an identity, but doing so in an era of frayed innocence and material dispossession.Loss and impermanence permeate Hynes' childhood. His father stoically accepts the death of his wife, unemployment as a result of a contracting economy and his own inability to serve the nation he so deeply loves. This unspoken patriotism and sense of place nurture the young Hynes, who never overcomes the gaping wound of losing his mother to a premature death. Motherloss uproots the Hynes' family; the father swallows prejudice and remarries a Catholic and Samuel begins the process of healing and carrying on with life.While his father settles into his second family, Hynes spends a summer on a farm. The city boy discovers new cadences to life, a different pattern to work. Most importantly, Samuel gains a sense of his own past. "For one season I had been one, like my father...and all those other country people in our family." With solemn pride, Hynes announces, "I had been my ancestors." With this knowledge of self, Hynes is better able to comprehend the modernizing influences besetting his altered family in Minneapolis during the 1930s. There, he observes his father's deep ambivalence over labor violence. A Shell oil salesman, the father is a rock-ribbed Republican who extols the virtue of independence and responsibility. Yet, the father "despised the upper-class ways" of the elite. Samuel watches his father's despair increase. "Whoever won this war, something he believed in would lose. It was sad, losing like that, and I felt his sadness." Tempering Samuel's growing awareness of the world is his evolving relationship with his step-mother. Hynes respects, admires and even likes her -- her purposeful energy, her zeal for order, her enthusiasm for life and work -- but never loves her. Even his thirteen-year-old autobiography excludes mention of her, and when his father coerces Samuel to include her, Samuel does so with a "chilled heart." Frugal and despeate to keep her family afloat, his step-mother sells a forgotten but cherished model train set. Awash in the economic misery of the Great Depression, where even wanting something unneeded is considered unworthy, the sale reminds the still-growing Samuel of the transitory nature of life, that "anything could be taken."Yet, "The Growing Seasons" is far from grim. Warmth aboun

One of the keys to this charming book is how many BAD things Sam and his friends do, that prove to be so interesting to read about! His style is understated, self-effacing. Flat, almost, but in a good way, all the cards on the table. I spent four years in Iowa and at the time someone told me that the adjective for Midwesterners wasn't "innocent" or anything like that, but "uncomplicated." You're used to seeing everything around you, all the way to the horizon. So maybe you lack a layer of artifice.I'll illustrate. His mother dies when Sam is a young boy, and his father (a stern but wonderfully forgiving fellow) remarries. Sam never figures out what to call his stepmother, so he avoids the issue completely. Permanently! This is remarkable. My wife had the same problem vis-à-vis my parents. It was kind of comical and kind of embarrassing on all fronts, but she figured it out a few days into our first extended visit with them. Sam never manages, yet seems to think nothing of it. Apart from remarking on the fact, he just goes on with things. Some readers may find this lack of navel-gazing a flaw, but I kind of liked it. It's more neutral, one might say scientific, and draws you in to the story. You can interpret things for yourself. He may answer that question of mine in his other books, or he may not, but with his winning style I know it will be fine reading right through it and around it.Another example comes near the end, pages 241-242, springtime of Sam's senior year in high school, World War Two looming, when he ponders the nature of women, and convertible automobiles, and describes how a guy a year or two older reveals to him and his friends an important secret about women, and sex. I read this long passage to my wife, and Hynes's wonderful deadpan style had us convulsing in laughter.Hynes is my parents' generation (and J.D. Salinger's), so I read it through that prism. My father and I grew up in suburban New York, my mother in El Paso (but I think maybe this is a guys' book), whereas Hynes is from Minneapolis (with a memorable summer on a farm). But it all connects. The eternal summertime of youth.

This is a prequel to the author's great war memoir, Flights of Passage, which I read with much appreciation 23 May 2001. If you have not read that book, by all means read this one first, then read it. This book is an account of a not extraordinary boyhood, but it is told in a poignant, if a bit mocking, way. When I finished it, I found myself much impressed by the way he told the story. It maybe helped that Hynes is only a few years older than I am, and that his account of a single summer doing farm work in Minnesota was filled with things I remember from my youth on an Iowa farm. It was another world and a time now irretrievably past, and I think this is an elegantly told growing up story I enjoyed as much as I did Russell Baker's memorable classic (Growing Up, read 11 Apr 1986) and Jimmy Carter's An Hour Before Daylight (read 11 Mar 2001).

If you're feeling nostalgic for your carefree youth, you may want to give THE GROWING SEASONS a read. Samuel Hynes takes us to Depression-era Minneapolis, where he covers all the bases of coming of age, but the real star of the book is Sam's father, who struggles through hard times, moving from city to city in search of stable employment, finally finding it as an oil salesman in Minneapolis. He loses that job, too, only to open a City Service gas station, always seeming to bounce back. The man is a rock. What's memorable about the man is his values. When his first wife dies, he remarries, not so much for love, but to find a mother for his two sons. At Thanksgiving, he asks for the neck from the turkey, claiming he prefers it to a leg or a breast. When his son dents the running board on his new car, he's grateful his boy is all right. He seems to understand that boys have to try things out, to take a risk here and there, even if it's buying a phony driver's license and carousing with his pals at roadside beer joints. There's a scene where Sam's father is on his death bed where finally he asks for a little understanding. Just before he dies, he says, "I gave up a lot." Sam is also an endearing character. His first sexual experience is as clumsy as most everybody's is. He's not even sure he got the job done. The book ends with Sam leaving for Navy flight school a couple of years into WWII. By that time you've made friends with Sam and you won't want the book to end. But take heart, Hynes has written several other memoirs about his war experence: FLIGHTS OF PASSAGE being the most memorable.