FLYING CATS AND OTHER TAILS

Babb recounts his upbringing in rural Missouri and his fateful decision to become a lawyer rather than a farmer.

Babb’s ancestors were farmers—in fact, the family business dates back to the late 17th century. The author grew up on a farm in northwest Missouri during the 1930s and ’40s through the Great Depression and World War II. Nonetheless, “determined not to follow the multi-generation family tradition,” he attended Harvard Law School and became a lawyer in Chicago. The author nostalgically recollects his happy childhood on the family farm, milking several cows and feeding the dozens of hogs and steers. The war overseas “excited and terrified” him simultaneously, and he followed its unfolding ardently with the aid of National Geographic maps. The grim reality of the war, though, touched his small-town life when neighbor Bobby, only 19 and a fighter pilot, died in combat. While the author chose not to make a life of agriculture his own, he remembers those youthful days with heartwarming fondness as well as the character it helped him develop: “Farm life was good training for me. It provided valuable lessons on work and responsibility. Farming requires focus and discipline….Farmers have to help each other perform certain tasks such as haying and threshing grains reinforcing a deep sense of responsibility and trust.” The author’s remembrance is lucidly if plainly written—it has a breezy, informal style. Further, Babb supplies a thoughtful glimpse into another, more traditional world in America, one vanishing if not already gone. However, this brief memoir—well under 100 pages—is likely too idiosyncratically personal to attract a readership that stretches beyond the author’s circle of family and friends.

A charming remembrance best appreciated by the author’s loved ones.