Looking Homeward
My Years On The Farm
by
Book Details
About the Book
Knowing a grandfather and knowing about a grandfather are distinctly different epistemologies. While the latter contributes richly to understanding and appreciation, it is secondary to an actual relationship. Knowing about an historic figure narrows the distance between two lives but it never coalesces into a personal experience. As the apostle Paul stated in 1 Corinthians 2:11, a relationship requires a willingness to reveal thoughts and feelings. This book is an attempt to share with the reader, not only the people, places and events that shaped my life, but the thoughts and feelings that gave substance to my soul.
About the Author
Dennis Morgan was born on September 22, 1942 in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, ten months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the nearly simultaneous US declaration of war against Japan and Germany. During his earliest years, he saw uncles in uniform, wondered at his grandmother’s tears as she read letters from the front, and heard table talk about faraway places. His consciousness, however, was that of a little boy growing up on a decidedly rural dairy farm in a remote sector of Decatur Township secluded from the reality of battlefields. His awareness of international events was limited to the staccato CBS news reports he heard on the radio each morning in Joe McKinley’s General Store as he and his brother Keith awaited their school bus. In the ensuing years there were occasional suppertime comments about a relative or neighbor’s war experiences in the Philippines or France, but his parents’ and grandparents’ greater interests remained parochial throughout his boyhood, and his personal concerns seldom extended beyond baseball. The young boy in the pages that follow was innocent, much like John Greenleaf Whittier’s “barefoot boy with cheeks of tan.” Unlike that boy, however, he was introverted and introspective, characteristics that became more pronounced in his adolescent years as evidenced within the recollections on these pages.