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Preface

When Jimmy Fox asked me to read The Legacy of a Country Boy, his memoirs of growing up in a tenant farming family in Maryland in the 40s and 50s, I was dubious. I’ve read dozens of farming and homesteading memoirs.

Read one and you’ve read most of them. They blend into a blur of sameness: the grueling work, the long hours, numbing cold in the winter, suffocating heat in the summer, crops destroyed by weather or locusts, accidents and sickness, and above all, never enough money. All recalled with that peculiar cheerfulness with which so many of us remember the not-so-cheerful events of many years ago. And too often tinged with an annoying “holier-than-thou-ness,” as if all that suffering, struggle, and poverty made one a better person. So much for “the good old days.”



 
 
 

And I was busy with a new career far removed from the days of studying frontier and homesteading families. Now I was teaching Brain GymŪ. But a little voice said, “Well, probably won’t amount to much but oh, why not.” And with that inauspicious beginning, I began my association with Jimmy Fox. I found The Legacy of a Country Boy enchanting, and he was equally intrigued with Brain GymŪ (www.braingym.org).

A few chapters into Jimmy’s book and I was hooked. I kept reading. What would happen next to Jimmy, his family and friends? Not to mention all those wonderful, quirky animals: Harley, the horse, and Madeline, the goose, and the ever-patient mules, Kit and Kate.

Along with the details of straw tick mattresses, hog butchering, and baking pies, we sympathize when his father shuts down Jimmy-the-entrepreneur’s popsicle business, agonize with him at his first (and last) prom, and grieve when his dear friend Watty is killed in the Korean War. We laugh as he and his friends skip school to ride about in an old Buick, making themselves sick smoking their first cigarettes. Didn’t help that they neglected to roll down the windows in the Buick.

How lucky Jimmy’s grandchildren are that they have The Legacy of a Country Boy through which to know their Grandfather. And how lucky we are that he has shared his life with all of us. Experiencing Jimmy Fox’s life on the farm in Maryland is a special treat.

MaryJo Wagner, Ph. D.
Marble, Colorado