Publisher's Synopsis
As one of few who in 2011 can remember the crash of 1929, Harold Walker tells first-hand of a culture which shaped the twentieth century. Drawing on an amazing store of memories, Walker recounts his Kansas childhood and youth: from escaping from his home -- as a toddler -- to traveling alone hundreds of miles to Idaho at age twelve. His story is marked by details of physical setting, personalities, commentary, and exploits boys now only dream of.
In fact, Harold Walker found adventure at every stage of his youth. Growing up during the Depression, he learned to make do with very little: sling shot squirrel hunting, ice house construction, turning in coyotes and crows for bounties. Along with his buddies and family, Walker undertook entrepreneurial projects which supplemented his father's income as a preacher and brought him to self-sufficiency at a young age. By seventeen, he had raised hogs, set up makeshift movie theaters, hunted game ranging from rabbits to bears, worked on a logging crew, helped man a fire tower, worked a wheat harvest, and gone hunting and dating simultaneously!
"The Preacher's Kid" belongs to that autobiographical pioneer genre which Laura Ingalls Wilder perfected and which we might imagine to have disappeared with the twentieth century. While Walker provides astonishingly vivid detail of Depression era Kansas and Idaho, his story will inspire pride, confidence, a sense of adventure, and awe.
