Many Hands Make Light Work by Cheryl Stritzel McCarthy

This post is part of Beth Fish Reads' Weekend Cooking.  If you have anything related to food, cookbook reviews, novel or non-fiction book reviews, recipes, movie reviews, etc., head over to Beth Fish Reads and add your post. Or, if you want to read food related posts, head over to read what some interesting people have to say about food.

Many Hands Make Light Work by Cheryl Stritzel
Published by She Writes Press ISBN 9781631526282
Trade paperback, $16.95, 289 pages

After seeing all the news coverage of events from 1969, like Woodstock and the Apollo 11 moon landing, one can't help but be nostalgic for that time, and that makes it the perfect time to read Cheryl Stritzel's family memoir Many Hands Make Light Work.

Stritzel came of age in Iowa in the 1960s and 1970s, one of nine children born to Joe, an agronomy professor at the University of Iowa, and his wife Marcella. Joe saw that as more young people were going to college, more housing was needed. So they bought up several homes in the neighborhood and turned them onto student housing.

Joe and Marcella grew up during the Depression and their mentality was to do for themsleves. Therefore, the children all pitched in and helped rehab the homes. The youngest children, dubbed "the Littles" pulled nails and stacked wood, the older kids tore up carpets and tore down wallpaper. (One old house had 22 layers of wallpaper!) In the winter, they got up early and shoveled all the sidewalks of the homes before heading off to school.

Having nine children meant being thrifty. They had a commercial milk dispenser installed in their kitchen and bought milk in five-gallon metal cans. They grew green beans, green peppers, and varieties of lettuces in the garden of one home, huge plots of tomatoes in another home, and an entire yard was filled with sweet corn.

They had peach, pear, plum and apple trees. One the more memorable scenes was of the children undergoing preparation to pick the cherries from the fifteen foot Montmorence cherry trees that dominated their yard.

First Mom made plates of pancakes, topped with butter and honey (from their own hives of course), and a single slice of bacon. (The children grew up never realizing that you could have more than one slice of bacon for breakfast.) Then the Baseball team, as Dad called them, donned their equipment-  each had an old metal coffee can with a piece of twine at the top that allowed for the can to hang off their waist so they could use two hands to pick more efficiently. Singing "Oh, What A Beautiful Morning" from Oklahoma meant that work could begin.

Many Hands Make Light Work is such a delightful, warm-hearted book. The memories (eating Spudnuts donuts after church, Greg sitting at "the Toast Seat" during breakfast, stopping at the A&W restaurant for 11 root beers to go along with the packed sandwiches during a rare family vacation) will bring to mind your own family memories.

The craziest story involved Cheryl babysitting for a family. It should be an easy job- the only child, a baby, would be asleep, and Cheryl could watch TV and do her homework. But as the parents were leaving, they handed her a flyswatter and told her that if the lion acted up, just tap him on the nose. Yes, they had a lion. Not a baby lion, one that was more like a teenager. He slept in the chair in the living room, where Cheryl was to be. That scene was straight up nerve-wracking, but as I was reading it, I thought to myself, yeah, that kind of stuff happened back then.

I can't recommend Many Hands Make Light Work more highly. It brought me joy, made me laugh ,and and made me feel grateful for growing up in my own big Catholic family. If you grew up watching The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family, this is for you. I loved reading all about the Stritzels, and if you long for a good family story, pick up this book now. It's one of my favorite books of the year.

Thanks to She Writes Press for providing me a copy of this wonderful book for an honest review.