When Grandpa Delivered Babies and Other Ozarks Vignettes

As a scholar and native of the Ozarks, I am thrilled to see the latest collection of tales from the region. Benjamin G. Rader's stories, arranged as a series of vignettes, explore a corner of Southcentral Missouri from the 1930s to 1950s. Born in a log cabin with an auspicious caul over his head, Rader tells the stories of his life and kinfolk through a combination of in-scene narratives as well as present-day thoughts and ruminations. There's the story of the brief (but tumultuous) student uprising in the one-room schoolhouse; tales of equine antics with Old Polly, the far-too-clever mare; and, of course, the midwifery of the titular Grandpa Raz. Some stories run several pages, others only several paragraphs. The bite-sized nature of these vignettes makes it an easy book to pick up and put down at one's leisure. Rader, now Professor Emeritus of History at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, carefully intertwines the personal with the popular—for example, pausing in the midst of a story about his cousin's youthful antics to quote Friedrich Nietzsche to underscore his point.The vignettes progress chronologically, for the most part, but space and place operate as the primary organizing principles for the collection. Rader's attention to place makes sense, given his earlier book Down on Mahans Creek: A History of an Ozarks Neighborhood (University of Arkansas Press, 2017). But where his previous work pins down a locale in focused detail, Rader's vignettes demonstrate the power of movement, migration, and mobility within the region. He tells the story of his father's youth and departure to Prescott, Arizona, for work, before returning to the family home years later. He recounts his own migration to Wichita, Kansas, to work as a jig builder at the Boeing Aircraft Company. Throughout the book, Rader traces his journey, in four sections that explore four different homes and neighborhoods, marking his life in spatial eras: the beloved paradise of the creek; the rowdy goat farm outside of West Plains, “where people drank water from their cisterns” (p. 51); the busy county road near Gunter's Valley; and his departure from the Ozarks for college out of state.Peppered throughout Rader's family stories are bits of Ozarks folklore, from unconventional medical cures to farming lore. Rader ruminates on regional nicknaming habits, classroom traditions, foodways and meal customs, Ozarks bullfighting, and even toilet culture. As a scholar of rural print culture, I am especially intrigued by Rader's description of his family's newsletter, The Passerby, which circulated among his close family during the 1930s and included political back-and-forths among opposing sides of the family.While the vignette plots often focus on kinship networks and narrow family dynamics, Rader's insightful (and sometimes rib-tickling) commentary keeps the stories from feeling too insular. This move was an unexpected strength of the collection and a refreshing one. From the early days of Ozarks literature, writers have too often rendered the region as an isolated and remote cultural survival, a world apart from the rhythms of modernization. Vance Randolph's bleak characterization in The Ozarks: An American Survival of a Primitive Society (University of Arkansas Press, 1931) and Otto Ernest Rayburn's idealization of a secluded Arcadia, Ozark Country (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1941) are monolithic portraits with which later regional writers still contend. But even as Rader tells jocular stories that might fit comfortably within Randolph's own collections, he carefully connects the personal events of his family life to larger events: economic fallout from the Great Depression, rural electrification, the postwar regional diaspora, and agricultural extension programs. As Rader notably observes in one vignette, his “backwoods” grandfather even named one of his hunting hounds after a famous Italian opera singer featured on the radio: “That he named the dog Caruso, I like to point out, suggests that the residents of this isolated spot in the Ozarks were not nearly as out of touch with the outside world or modernity as many observers believed them to have been” (p. 89).Ultimately, Rader's collection makes a strong addition to a growing body of modern Ozarks literature. Regional folklorists will appreciate the author's attention to cultural norms and his historian's eye for context, while lay readers will enjoy his clever and engaging commentary. And Ozarkers like myself, who have their own family stories of loose snakes and barn fires, will find familiarity in not only the content of the tales but also in how they're told: short, pointed, and with a wry humor that's beloved within the region.