All My Born Days

In All My Born Days — Stories by a Sharecropper’s Son, a historical autobiography, Kenneth R. Shipe looks back on his early life in the poverty-stricken hills of West Virginia, and recalls how his parents struggled during the Depression to scratch a living from the soil for a family of ten. He tells how a New Deal farm loan made it possible for his father to work as a sharecropper in Maryland and describes the primitive processes the Shipe family used for growing and harvesting crops, butchering animals and preserving meat. The Shipes were ruled by the forces of nature: bitter cold winters; a flood that washed over their West Virginia home; and a forest fire that surrounded their house in Maryland and had Ken and his family flat on their bellies, gasping for breath. Ken remembers humorous incidents from his days in a country schoolhouse, and how he almost lost his life when his new bicycle ran off a mountain road. And he writes about World War II, which snatched up his brothers and critical farm helpers, leading to failure of the Shipes’ sharecropping venture and subsequently his own call to duty as a Marine in the Korean War.