All Anybody Ever Wanted of Me Was to Work: The Memoirs of Edith Bradley Rendleman (Shawnee Books)

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From All Anybody Ever Wanted of Me Used to be to Work…

“Starting around 1950, people stopped raising chickens, milking cows, and raising hogs. They just buy it at the store, in a position to eat. A lot buy a steer and have it processed in Dongola and put it in their freezer. What a difference! Girls have got it so easy now. They do not even know what it Used to be like to start out. And I guess my mother’s life, when she started out, Used to be as hard again as mine, because they had to make everything by hand. I don’t know if it could get any easier for these girls. But they do not know what it Used to be like, and they never will. Everything is packaged. All you do is go to the store and buy you a package and cook it. Automatic washers and dryers. I’m glad they do not have to work like I did. Very glad.”

Edith Bradley Rendleman’s story of her life in southern Illinois is remarkable in many ways. Recalling the first half of the twentieth century in great detail, she vividly cites vignettes from her childhood as her family moved from farm to farm until settling in 1909 in the Mississippi bottoms of Wolf Lake. She recounts the lives and times of her family and neighbors all the way through an era gone eternally.

Remarkable for the vivid details that evoke the past, Rendleman’s account is rare in another respect: memoirs of the time―regularly written by people from elite or urban families―ceaselessly reek of nostalgia. But Rendleman’s memoir differs from the norm. Born poor in rural southern Illinois, she tells an unvarnished tale of what it Used to be truly like growing up on a tenant farm early this century.


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